Dr. Dobb's is part of the Informa Tech Division of Informa PLC

This site is operated by a business or businesses owned by Informa PLC and all copyright resides with them. Informa PLC's registered office is 5 Howick Place, London SW1P 1WG. Registered in England and Wales. Number 8860726.


Channels ▼
RSS

Design

Online Collaboration and Agile Software Development


Doug is Director of Development for GroupSystems. He can be contacted at [email protected].


Iteration is at the core of all Agile methodologies. However, individual iterations are challenging to plan and execute properly—requirements can be unclear, small tasks can fall through the cracks, and problems can be difficult to solve without input from remote team members. Clearly, careful iteration planning is critical, although the planning process itself can be one of the greatest challenges to Agile software development.

Iteration planning meetings identify what teams will accomplish in the next one- to four-week-long iteration cycle. Prior to iteration planning meetings, the product owner prioritizes requested stories, then reviews those requests with the project manager and development team to ensure they understand the requirements well enough to estimate effort and plan tasks. During the iteration planning meeting, team members determine what tasks need to be accomplished, then estimate how much they can accomplish. However, good planning meetings must also include customer collaboration to understand requirements, and whole-team input to create task lists with accurate estimates. But due to the distributed (often global) nature of stakeholders in today's software development projects, just convening a planning meeting itself can be difficult.

In one project I was involved in, iteration-planning meetings were initially a very painful eight hours long, and resulted in incomplete task lists. Unfortunately, the project manager was also doing development, so he and the development team didn't have time to analyze tasks completely. Consequently, we uncovered additional tasks during iteration, and had to continually add those unplanned tasks and move planned tasks out. This caused confusion for management and support because they didn't know what features were going to be completed by the end of an iteration.

The emergence of online collaboration tools provide the communication and input needed for successful iteration planning, resulting in iterations that run smoothly and efficiently. And as we've become more experienced with using online collaboration, our iterations have become more accurate and iteration planning meetings have shortened to three hours.


Related Reading


More Insights






Currently we allow the following HTML tags in comments:

Single tags

These tags can be used alone and don't need an ending tag.

<br> Defines a single line break

<hr> Defines a horizontal line

Matching tags

These require an ending tag - e.g. <i>italic text</i>

<a> Defines an anchor

<b> Defines bold text

<big> Defines big text

<blockquote> Defines a long quotation

<caption> Defines a table caption

<cite> Defines a citation

<code> Defines computer code text

<em> Defines emphasized text

<fieldset> Defines a border around elements in a form

<h1> This is heading 1

<h2> This is heading 2

<h3> This is heading 3

<h4> This is heading 4

<h5> This is heading 5

<h6> This is heading 6

<i> Defines italic text

<p> Defines a paragraph

<pre> Defines preformatted text

<q> Defines a short quotation

<samp> Defines sample computer code text

<small> Defines small text

<span> Defines a section in a document

<s> Defines strikethrough text

<strike> Defines strikethrough text

<strong> Defines strong text

<sub> Defines subscripted text

<sup> Defines superscripted text

<u> Defines underlined text

Dr. Dobb's encourages readers to engage in spirited, healthy debate, including taking us to task. However, Dr. Dobb's moderates all comments posted to our site, and reserves the right to modify or remove any content that it determines to be derogatory, offensive, inflammatory, vulgar, irrelevant/off-topic, racist or obvious marketing or spam. Dr. Dobb's further reserves the right to disable the profile of any commenter participating in said activities.

 
Disqus Tips To upload an avatar photo, first complete your Disqus profile. | View the list of supported HTML tags you can use to style comments. | Please read our commenting policy.