Hi, again! I am back to finish the article about the development process and tell you how O-Pitblast adapted to the use of agile practices. Firstly, I would like to present some statistics about agile methodology around the world.
Agile methodology around the world
A report carried out by digital presents current information on the adoption of agile methodologies in companies. From the annual review in 2021, we can highlight some interesting data:
O-Pitblast
You probably have already heard some history about companies that emerged from a couple of friends in a garage, like Microsoft, Apple, Google, Amazon, and so many others.
At O-Pitblast it was no different. In two years, the development team grew from one to five developers (including the UX/UI professional). The rapid growth can lead to many directions: the team organization seems to be easy and natural, but if not accompanied carefully by a suitable professional, the team will have problems. According to 15th State of Agile Report 2021, the most significative challenges for agile practices are: the inconsistent processes and practices across the team, lack of skills/experience with agile methodologies, insufficient training and education.
Therefore, when the development team got bigger, the following organizational issues started to happen: long-term and unfinished tasks, prioritized worthless features, no time estimated, no development iterations, the project did not seem to move forward, unmapped bugs and more...
What was done? Was chaos installed? Was it too late?
The first action was called: STOP!
Yes, a stop in all development progress was needed. It was not an easy decision, it was necessary to convince the Product Owner that this break would make the project at the end have a smaller delay than continuing with the current state of development, with no defined process.
From there, we started using Scrum + Kanban methodology and agile practices in our daily basis:
·
Scrum ceremonies (backlog review, planning, sprint, review, retrospective);
Standup meetings;
Planning poker to estimate tasks time;
Bug report process;
Define backlog structure;
Sprints based on team capacity;
Shorter sprints (ten work days)
Kanban board;
Monitoring through dashboard accessible to all team;
Closest customer;
Constant deliveries with the application running for the users can test;
And more.
I.e., we changed the company’s culture, breaking a huge barrel to adopt agile practices, according to the 15th State of Agile Report 2021. It is continuous work, day by day and it takes time, we did not implement all those practices at once, it was a construction. In the way, the changes are necessary, adapt the process when it is necessary.
Now, after more than one year in that construction process, there are positive results:
Planning in short and long-term;
Project progress monitoring;
Sprint progress monitoring;
On-time deliveries;
Customer testing the application after every sprint making the product more robust, with no big unexpected surprises;
Scalable team;
New team members process training.
The process is long, it is not allowed to accommodate. The excellence is continuous and the search for growth must be constant.
SÉRGIO FERNANDES
Development Manager
+351 927 596 550