What is Agile? Flashcards
What is the Agile Manifesto?
The Agile Manifesto is a collection of principles to help teams approach their work, specifically in uncertain environments.
The manifesto focuses on customer feedback, continuous improvements, avoiding waste, and collaboration, without going into the details of how these should be achieved. Teams are free to decide how they would like to implement agile in their work. While tools such as Kanban Boards and processes such as Scrum are often used by agile teams, they were not part of the Agile Manifesto. It is important to note that just because teams use these tools does not make them agile.
Which of the following is a guiding principle in agile?
a. Business people and developers must not interfere in each others’ work.
b. A team’s highest priority is to ship software on regular two-week schedules.
c. Face-to-face conversation is the most efficient way to convey information in a team.
c. Face-to-face conversation is the most efficient way to convey information in a team.
An agile team’s highest priority is to satisfy the customer through early and continuous delivery of valuable software. In the process, business people and developers must work together closely. According to the guiding principles of agile, face-to-face conversations are the most efficient and effective way to convey information to and within the development team.
Who usually comes up with an idea for what needs to be built and presents some requirements?
Product Manager
What is a PRD?
Product Requirements Document
What is an MRD?
Marketing Requirements Document
What are PRD and MRDs usually drawn from?
Was drawn from research and understanding of the needs of both the user and the business but in reality not so much
What was the original intention of agile?
To help teams build products in an environment where requirements kept evolving.
It wasn’t that engineers didn’t want to work with designers—they just didn’t want to waste time going back and forth between different stages. Agile was born out of frustration. In the waterfall method, engineers worked with detailed requirements and specifications. When requirements changed (which was often), it was hard to implement changes without messing up other aspects of the project. The agile methodology freed engineers from the shackles of the rigid requirements document, so that they could deliver, seek feedback and iterate to build better products.
Where does design fit in an agile team?
Throughout the software development process as an active participant in the agile team working alongside engineers.
Agile teams are collaborative and cross-functional, and so, designers must play an active role, working alongside engineers and business stakeholders throughout the product development process, and not just at the beginning or on an ad-hoc basis.
What is a Scrum process?
Teams split their time up into short, fixed chunks, generally called “sprints.”
The most common sprint length seems to be two weeks, although it can be anywhere from one to four.
The team commits to a specific set of tasks that they expect to get done in that sprint, and at the end of the sprint, they have a retrospective meeting where they examine how things went.
Teams in Scrum work in a sprint and meet daily in “standup” meetings to keep track of the progress.
Teams in Scrum are cross-functional and autonomous, which means that, in theory, the team should get to decide together what they’re going to work on in each sprint. In reality, that varies a lot.
What is Kanban?
The rule in Kanban is that you can’t be working on too many things at once, because it’s easier to get a thing all the way done if the team doesn’t have a million different things competing for their attention. Instead of committing to get a set number of things done in a specific amount of time, in Kanban, work is continuous and the tasks are simply all available in the order of priority. When somebody finishes a task, they can pick the next one up and get to work.
In Kanban, the important thing to do is to visualize the work and to limit the amount of work in progress. This is where kanban boards come from, and they’re a great tool for seeing how much is going on at any given moment on the team.
What is Srumban?
What you’ll often see on agile teams is some combination of Scrum and Kanban. The most common mix is for teams to plan sprints that are tracked on a kanban board. Some teams are more disciplined about limiting works in progress. Some teams are very committed to finishing all tasks within a sprint.
The nice thing about agile methodologies is that they’re really meant to be adapted to the needs of your particular team, so if any tool in the box works for you, you use it. Scrum is no more or less “agile” than Kanban, and vice versa and Scrumban can be quite a useful tool for managing your team’s progress. They can all also be absolute nightmares and far too much process, depending on what you’re trying to get done and how you’re implementing them.
What is the most agile approach?
to use whatever helps you make the best products in the most effective, efficient way.
What are standups?
Standup meetings are often held either every day or on days without other major meetings. They are meant to be very quick, and they are held while standing up to reinforce that. Often they’re at the beginning of the day, but that’s up to the team.
What is a very common form of standup?
A common form of the standup includes every member of the team very briefly stating the following three things:
- What I did since the last standup
- What I’m doing until the next standup
- Blockers
What are Blockers?
Blockers are defined as anything keeping team members from doing their work. For example, if you were a front-end engineer and were waiting for a back-end engineer to finish updating a database so that you could write the code for your task, you could say that that was a blocker.
What is a backlog?
The backlog is the list of features you are actively planning to build. You shouldn’t confuse it with a roadmap, although some folks absolutely do.
What does a backlog contain?
In an ideal world, your backlog contains task-level items that you have committed to building in the fairly near future. In the real world, your backlog may, in fact, contain years’ worth of work, most of which is simply a bunch of “great” ideas somebody once had about a cool new feature we might want. Again, there seems to be a fairly wide gulf between the theory and reality.
Who is usually the person on your team that needs to make the decision about which bits of the backlog are important enough to go into the next sprint? and also decide if things should be removed from the backlog or deprioritized for some reason.
The people making these decisions tend to be some combination of scrum master, product owner, product manager, lead designer, and lead developer, but again, this varies quite a bit, since many teams don’t even have some of those roles.
Backlog grooming should happen when?
Backlog grooming should happen before the planning meeting for the sprint. You can think of it this way. First, a small subset of folks on the team go through the things the team has committed to building and decides, based on a number of factors, what the most important things to build next are.
What are Retrospectives?
Retrospectives are done at the end of the sprint for teams that are practicing scrum. It’s a time for the entire team to talk about what went well, what didn’t, and how to improve the process.
For example, if somebody got blocked on a task and couldn’t get unblocked, the team might acknowledge that and talk about what they wanted to do to make sure it didn’t happen again in the future. Or if the team wildly overcommitted to what they could accomplish during the sprint, they should definitely discuss that to see where the estimation went wrong and avoid it in the future.
What are Demos?
Demos—short for “demonstrations”—are held at the end of every sprint, and they are intended to be a bit of a celebration. They’re where everybody gets to show off things they actually made.
Who gets to demo varies from team to team, just like everything else. On most teams we spoke with, only working software is allowed, which means that generally, it’s only engineers doing the demonstrations, and designers are merely spectators.
Demos can be your best chance to make sure that what engineering built matches what you, as a designer, expected. Hopefully, you will have been working closely with engineers as they build the product, but it’s always good to see a fully working walkthrough of a feature before it escapes into the wild.
Why shouldn’t the scrum of scrums or team of teams meeting involve everybody on all the teams?
It can turn very quickly into complete chaos. Instead, teams tend to send a high-level representative or two to meet with their counterparts on other teams.
In practice, this meeting is generally made up of the product managers or product owners, sometimes joined by higher-level folks in the product department, getting together to set high-level strategy goals and make decisions that will have ripple effects across the whole product.
This is how, even in larger organizations, semi-autonomous teams keep track of what everybody else is doing, so nobody is surprised.
Scrum is a project management methodology that…
a. Requires teams to be cross-functional and autonomous.
b. Focuses on breaking work down into small manageable chunks.
c. All of the above.
c. All of the above.
A Scrum team functions as an independent unit, with people from different functions. This helps the team take decisions without depending on people outside the team. The team breaks work into small chunks. At the end of the sprint, the team reviews the work done, and how they can improve the process.
Why do teams use kanban boards?
a. To visualize work and limit work in progress.
b. To track how long people take to complete their work.
c. None of the above.
a. To visualize work and limit work in progress.
The idea behind Kanban is that team members should focus on a small set of tasks at any point in time. When people have fewer items on their plate, they can focus better and complete their tasks, as opposed to juggling between multiple tasks.
