Agile Software Development: Sprint Planning Best Practices

Were you aware that India's software and services exports totaled earnings of $111 billion in 2016-17? America and the United Kingdom remain the top two destinations of India's export of software and services. These facts come courtesy data revealed by Electronics and Computer Software Export Promotion Council (ESC), an Electronics and IT trade marketing company of Government of India.

Most of the software development jobs are currently becoming bigger and complex than ever before. For software development businesses, delivering large-scale IT jobs on time, on budget and on value has become more challenging than previously. Actually, on average big IT projects deliver 56% less value than forecast and operate 45 percent over budget, as revealed by a McKinsey report.

Performance of various Kinds of IT projects:

What is Agile Software Development?

Agile is a favorite iterative and incremental program development methodology in which collaborative effort between cross-functional teams is encouraged to supply the desirable outcomes for customers.

12 Principles of the Agile Manifesto

Agile methodology is a disciplined approach to software development, the majority of which stems from the principles that form the Agile Manifesto. The 12 guiding principles of the Agile Manifesto include:

1. Early and continuous delivery of software is the trick to get the best answer delivered to the client.
2. Agile helps in adopting modifications, however late they may arrive at the product development stage to guarantee the enterprise receives the much-needed competitive advantage and delivers the ideal expertise to its clients.
3. Utilizing agile software development, groups may adhere to a shorter timescale to maintain improving previous variants of their working software.
4. Maintaining an agile mindset helps to ensure that business teams and operational teams operate in conjunction and that is something which the practice of DevOps tends to foster also.
5. Promotes the idea of building projects around motivated individuals. Helps produce an environment around that the team can find the task finished.
6. The agile manifesto advocates that face-to-face communication is the ideal method to communicate information to the team.
7. Measuring progress throughout the notion of working software i.e. software built using incremental improvement approach.
8. Sustainable development with consistent pace to guarantee timely delivery of outcomes.
9. A constant focus on achieving technological superiority.
10. Ensuring simplicity with a concentration on getting the most work done.
11. Self-organizing teams in an agile setting tend to deliver the best project outcomes.
12. At regular intervals (aka sprints) the group meets to map progress to predefined goals and course correct if needed.

What is a Sprint in Agile Software Development?

A Sprint is a predefined period during which specific activity in the program development process has to be done and made ready for inspection. It needs to be mentioned that while each Sprint is an iteration but not all of the iterations are Sprints.

What is Sprint Planning?

Sprint Planning is typically timeboxed to a maximum of 8-hours in a one-month sprint. It entails incremental development, rapid iterations, incorporating user opinions, frequently improving and discharging the working software.

Sprint Planning Best Practices

The Sprint Planning procedure is critical to the success of applications developed using the Agile methodology. Following are a few sprint preparation best practices which ought to be kept in mind by an Agile group:

1. Sprint planning meetings should always be initiated by the product owner.
2. Among the most important activities during Sprint inspection meetings is that of reviewing the project roadmap.
3. Each sprint planning meeting has to be approached with clearly defined sprint goals and endorsed by information to track progress.
4. Transparency is another important tenet of sprint preparation. It's thus important that the job roadmap should be observable to all and recorded by utilizing an interface like JIRA for simpler bug tracking, issue tracking, and project management.
5. Backlog Grooming is also an important process to make sure that the project development procedure is on course. It's therefore important to set priorities on each of the impending task and the better time to do this than through the rush reviews.
6. Keeping a consistent level of quality, release after launch is the trick to a successful agile software development process. Technical debt is referred to as the gap between what was promised and that which was eventually delivered in the long run. One of the principal goals of an agile group during sprint meeting would be to collectively explore approaches to eliminate this specialized debt.
7. Last, the core goal during every sprint assembly is to perform a quick walkthrough of the planned stories and outline a clear communication to the team on what has to be accomplished.

Here's a must watch video about what preparations need to be until a sprint planning meeting:

Conclusion

The key to product development success rides a great deal on how companies manage to streamline the execution process of the product development lifecycle. To help firms achieve that, the adoption of agile application development procedure is the key as it helps reduce IT project failures to a wonderful level.