Scrum for Software Development Tips
Often times you will work even harder when you are in Scrum teams, but that does not necessarily mean that you are working smarter as well. What this means is that the way you are working is going to need to change. Here are some of the top tips to help make you much more effective agile work.
Knowing What is Effective in Agile
Many of the teams are going to work in what is known as a mini-waterfall mode, meaning that they are going to have a Scrum Sprint that they will work in four to five different phases. While this will get the job done, the main problem with this strategy is that it is going to make you work much harder, but not much smarter.
This means that you will not have changed anything in regard to the way that you are working, except for that you may be bringing in some smaller pieces to production (which is going to be a good thing for progress). However, it is going to take a whole lot more than that in order to realize all of the advantages of agile software. Essentially, it is going to need a different approach.
Getting from Waterfall to 1-Week Sprints
While the waterfall system does work, it also requires more work and does not allow you to work smarter. This means that all you are doing is more work. If you are looking to get away from that particular model, there is another sequence that will work much better which comes from a scrum certificate.
- Focus on a 1-piece flow: What this means is that before you are able to move onto the next job, the previous job must be completely finished. So, finish a small job and once that is complete, then get the next job finished.
- Build quality from the start: Only the highest of quality is going to allow you to become faster over a period of time, so be sure that you are only delivering the highest of quality for every job. From the long-term approach, this is only going to make you much more efficient.
- Automate many tests: Whenever you can automate any type of test, be sure that you do so. This will allow you to have much more time to do the manual exploratory tests. This is going to be key as humans are by nature not very good automatons. Machines can and will do a much better job at handling all of the boring automated things that you probably don’t want to be doing anyways.
- Always work test-driven: If you get a red test coming in from the outside perspective, it is essentially telling you that you are going to need to either rebuild or add a feature. This is exactly what tests should be used as an indicator for. It essentially means that you have some work to get done.
- Build the best system: Once you have this system in place, you will have much more time to communicate with the rest of the team in order to come up with and validate more ideas and requirements.