Having worked on a couple of projects on agile, and a distributed agile between the client’s team and our team, I have started liking this approach and really appreciate the fact that it can provide really great bsuiness value to the customer especially in terms of being able to tackle changing requirements.
The following are some of the reasons how agile made life really easy for our team and why I think it changed the way we worked and looked at the process of building a product using the agile methodology.
- Continuous integration using CruiseControl which avoided last minute integration issues.
- Doing daily status calls and stand up meetings, which ensured that everyone in the team knows what’s going on and enabling a PM/PL to know the current status of the project at any point of time.
- Creating sprint backlogs and burndown charts - which enabled the team to focus on the tasks ahead for the week
- Iteration planning which enables to prioritize the features that are needed in every iteration.
- Using a collaborative platform like wikis/portals where all the relevant information is present at a one glance and any one joining the team newly had very less ramp up time.
- We also found that having some people from our team to work out from the client’s loaction in order to make communication easier and for us to understand the client’s working environment better.
- Having builds on a daily basis enabled us to get quick and frequent feedback from the client and this enabled us to deliver the best possible product to matc h the client’s requirements.
Overall, I think it was a reallly good experience working on agile, and the best part was doing it distributed between the client and our team, as this increases complexity and brings in more challenges.
