If in your organization, still following the traditional project management methods, it should be better to upgrade to agile development methodology. Because nowadays, every organization wants to implement a methodology that can fill the contemporary business needs.
So for this is is one of the perfect examples. So in this article, we are going to Discover or discuss the best agile development best practices.
What is the use of agile development practices?
Most of the organizations are adopting this is an agile methodology by keeping aside the traditional project management method because companies are now able to take timely measures and things under control without changing their original plans.
Objectives of Agile Development
- By following an agile scrum, we can improve the quality of the deliverables.
- We can better lead deal with the frequent changes
- Provide accurate estimates and also need less time to create them
- Exercise better control over the project
the result provides following benefits to a team
- Learn the lesson from the problem faced in the last sprint.
- The team can experiment with problem-solving techniques and also find out what works best for them. as per the requirement, they can change their strategy accordingly and walk towards their implementation
5 Best Agile Development Practices
- In Agile methodology, the entity is working as closely integrated units, yeah the team consists of project management, quality assurance, developer, and the customer.
- In Agile development methodology, daily meetings happen where it is decided on the current day work and the respective dependencies because it is considered that constant communication between the team is an essential factor for the team integration.
- As we are following the Agile development methodology, the delivery cycle is 2 to 4 weeks. Which is the short time of delivery, and also it is called a sprint? This sprint is one of the scrum terminologies of the agile framework.
- At the end of every sprint, the team inspects all its practices and decides what needs to be changed and how to adapt it.
- By following the Agile development methodology in the project, the reason open communication established between team and customer. Because of this open communication, the customer can give the suggestion and feedback openly and quickly. They are based on the feedback the team can consider those and Incorporated when they are developing the application.
Because of the above reasons result in agile best practices, the customer can also evaluate the progress and the project from start to finish. All this can be done by the sprints and end of every sprint the team presents the shippable product to the customer.
In every sprint, the developers create and test the functional part of the application, and the testers are testing on the developed application. When one of the sprints is completed, the next sprint starts and the scrum team delivers the product features.
As we are following the Agile Scrum framework, which mainly focuses on short work cycles and the final product. That’s why the Agile methodology is also called age “iterative and incremental” in nature.
But in the Waterfall model or methodology, the development team delivers the product in a single cycle. But in Agile methodology, the development is going on in an iterative and repeatedly throughout the life cycle.
Benefits of Agile Development Practices
Agile development methodology gives the possibility to change the course of the project if required. By following this approach, the development can be achieved by lower cost and released to the market within less time.
In agile development methodology, the teams follow a life cycle of two or four weeks, which allows the stakeholders to standardize their product for success and ensure that the company builds the right product.
Agile Scrum Methodology Or Process
We have listed below a few other works also which are the part of QA role in agile methodology, that are:
- Attend sprint-planning sessions
- Attend daily stand-ups.
- Don’t save all the testing for the end; test throughout the sprint.
- Meet with developers for short hand-off demonstrations.
- Attend sprint retrospectives
- Document Test cases
Tester’s Role in Agile model/The Role of QA in Agile
The role of a tester in Agile testing is testing the product from a customer point of view and performed as early as possible. During the agile methodology Agile Scrum is one of the commonly used terms in the agile method and the role of a software tester in an agile scrum process is testing the application and find out the defects and many more. Because for making a valuable product the testers are work with the product owner, development, and every other member of the team.
What is Scrum?
Scrum is a development method where it mainly concentrates on how to manage the tasks with the team in the development environment. The word scrum basically derived from the rugby match and it believes in empowering the development team and advocates working in small teams (say- 7 to 9 members).
Different Agile (Scrum) Practices and Role of Testers in Details
During software development, we are following some approach or lifecycle like the traditional waterfall model, spiral model, the lifecycle of all Agile methods (including Scrum) is somewhat iterative than consecutive. In this article, we are going to discuss:
- Scrum Software Development Life Cycle
- Scrum Lifecycle
Sprint planning in Agile Process
- Attendees Required: All team members working on sprint tasks
- When: At the beginning of a sprint.
- Duration: Usually an hour to a two-hour planning meeting. Sometimes a follow-up planning meeting is planned if the first one is not sufficient to discuss/estimate all the stories.
- Purpose: Sprint planning is for the team to review, understand, agree, and estimate User Stories to work during the current sprint. The team picks the stories from the product backlog into the sprint backlog based on the priority of the stories and team velocity. The product owner takes responsibility to walkthrough sprint objective and respective user stories to meet the objective. As a process of user stories review, the team should ask necessary questions to the product owner and ensure that they understand the business value of the sprint objective. Once the user stories are clear to the team, a poker planning session will follow to estimate the effort for the User Stories.
- Role of Tester: During Sprint Planning testers participated in team discussion to analyze and understand the User Stories asking open-end questions and examples to the product owner to clarify the User Stories. They also verify that the acceptance criteria of the story are testable and all the functional and non-functional attributes are included in the user story, which is required for testing later. Testers also actively participate in the estimation of user stories.
Daily stand-up Meeting During Agile Methodologies
- Attendees Required: All team members
- Optional: Team Stakeholders
- When: Once per day
- Duration: 10- 15 minutes.
- Purpose: This is a quick status meeting. The agenda for each member is:
What did I complete yesterday?
What will I work on today?
What is getting in your way? (Any blockers or impediments)
- Role of Tester: During the Sprint, testers will write the test cases for testing, work closely with the developers to provide them support in developing and reviewing the automation tests, test the User Story. They update other team members about their status of testing tasks and any blocker if they are facing during the daily stand-up meeting. They also help the team in removing the impediments for other team members.
Sprint Review/Showcase In Agile
- Attendees Required: All team members, a representative from different customer groups (Product owners)
- Optional: Project Stakeholders
- When: At the end of a sprint
- Duration: 30-60 minutes.
- Purpose: Sprint review/showcase is to demonstrate work completed within the Iteration or sprint, and capture the feedback from the Product Owner and other business representatives. Sprint team should drive the showcase, but the product owner can ask for different scenarios to be demonstrated to get confidence in the functionality/feature developed.
- Role of Tester: Testers actively participate in the showcase with other team members can help the team in running different scenarios for the business representatives and collect feedback from them. Additional tasks that the testers can take include verifying the environment and preparing test data used for the showcase.
Retrospective/Lessons Learnt
- Attendees Required: All team members
- When: At the end of an iteration.
- Duration: 30-60 minutes.
- Purpose: Retrospectives help the team understand what went well–and what didn’t during the current sprint. All team members contribute to finding out what’s working so the team can continue to focus on those areas. Also, find out what’s not working and use the time to find solutions and work on an action plan.
- Role of Tester: Testers as part of the team, play an important role in retrospectives. They bring their unique perspective and provide input on both testing and non-testing activities. Testers highlight bottlenecks and all their impediments faced in the sprint and suggest improvements to overcome these for the future sprints.
Final Words
Developing a product does not require only people who have the right skill, but it is also required in methodology that needs to be followed. That’s why it is essential you need to choose such a methodology that can deliver the right product.
Nowadays, agile has proven that it is one such methodology that can answer about quality in project specification and also in good governance. As in Agile methodology, the application is developed by sprint wise, which is repeatedly in nature; that’s why the errors can be detected in an earlier stage. By this, we can save our time and resources.
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