in Agile, proper planning of the Sprint, and getting the development team to agree to a Definition of Done, are key factors in the success of the Sprint.
Being ‘Agile’ is the buzzword in IT these days. I will not be overstating it if I say that all industries are leveraging the benefits of Agile.
In complex projects, it is not possible to gather all the requirements upfront at once, due to extreme uncertainties. Therefore, we use Agile methodologies to divide user requirements into short independent requirements, each of which is called a ‘user story.’ These user stories are given to the team for implementation.
It is important that requirements in a user story are well understood and well documented. Moreover, you need to ensure that the team is complying with the delivery standards. To ensure that all the above aspects are fulfilled, the following standards processes have been devised:
It means that a user story should be written correctly and explained to the team in detail. In a Sprint which lasts for 2-4 weeks, the requirements can’ t be discussed for days/weeks. Hence, it is important to consider following points while a user story gets accepted by the team to be worked upon in the Sprint:
a. It should be well worded and explained to the team.
b. All open queries which the team has raised during grooming sessions must be closed/resolved.
c. All dependencies must be resolved.
d. It should follow INVEST criteria, i.e. Independent, Negotiable, Valuable, Estimable, Small, and Testable.
e. Each user story should be small enough to be completed within the Sprint.
It means that once the team has agreed to work on a user story, the following things should be considered as completion factors for each user story:
a. Code review is done and review comments have been incorporated.
b. Testing done in the specified environment and not on a development machine.
c. Automation test scripts in place.
d. All raised defects have been resolved and closed.
e. Tool (JIRA/Rally/RTC) being used by the team has been updated with the actual hours and correct status of the story and all the tasks.
f. Sign-off from PO.
