Key terminologies and roles in Agile

Building your dream house is an incredible experience. A typical process starts with the budget and the concept or the kind of house (single storey or double storey) that you want to build. Once you have decided that, you start with the rough design of the house followed by the wish list of number of rooms, type of flooring, doors, balconies, kitchen, furniture, machineries etc. The process of building a house is gradual, piece and piece, requires continuous feedback and involves removing the items from your wish list if it doesn't fit your budget.

Agile also works in a similar way. In layman terms, it is a process of breaking a project into smaller chunks and adding each chunk to finally ship the customer-facing product.

Agile is a set of management principles or the philosophy used primarily in companies building tech products. The first Agile Manifesto and its principles were introduced in 2001 and have been covered multiple times by Harvard Business Review. And over the last 2 decades, Agile has been globally and rapidly adopted by all types of organisation for a variety of reasons - to quickly respond to changing demands of the customer, improve delivery cycles, encourage innovation, keep the team motivated and reduce the risk of failure.

In this article, I have tried to give a glimpse of the common terminologies and roles which are commonly used in an Agile project.

Firstly, let us look at the terminologies which are used regularly during any agile implementation.

Squad

A squad is a group of team members that consists of a Product Owner (PO), Scrum Master, Designers, Developers and the QAs working on a particular chunk or functionality of a product.

For example: ‘Search’ can be functionality on which one squad might be working. Similarly, there can be other ‘squads’ that focus on other functionalities of the product. All the squads integrate different functionalities that they work on into a single package and delivers a usable product to the end-user.

Product Backlog

The Product Backlog is a long list of tasks and describes what needs to be built into a product. These tasks consist of the requirements which are the outcome of discovery workshops with the business teams, subject matter experts (SMEs) or from the customer surveys. These requirements are generally called 'user stories' and defines how the end-user will interact with the product.

The tasks or the user stories in the backlog are organised based on various parameters such as customer requirements, business needs, revenue impact etc. and are pulled either continually (kanban) or in sprints (scrum). 

Sprints

Sprints are the short iterations or phases in which the agile project is broken. The number of sprints is determined at the start of the project. Sprint is typically 2 or 3 weeks long and consists of a limited number of user stories picked up from the product backlog. The ultimate goal of each sprint is that it should result in a valuable increment of completed work that is fit and ready for the next release. 

Agile Ceremonies

Agile ceremonies are the key components of any agile project. To make it easier to understand, Agile ceremonies are like meetings, each with a different purpose and is geared towards providing structure to the delivery process, collaborating effectively, and driving results.

There are 4 Agile ceremonies which are mentioned below:

1. Sprint Planning (1-2 hour meeting): occurs at the start of the sprint to finalise what user stories from the backlog are going to be picked in the sprint.
2. Daily Stand-Up (15 minutes meeting): occurs daily amongst the squad team members during which each member team shares the following update viz. what they worked on yesterday, any bottlenecks, and what are they going to work on today.
3. Sprint Review (1- 2 hour meeting): occurs at the end of the sprint during which the scrum team demonstrates what they worked on which is the potentially shapable increment. This gives a chance for business stakeholders to share their inputs on whether the increment meets the requirement of needs more changes.
4. Sprint Retrospective (1-hour meeting): occurs at the end of the sprint during which the team discusses what went well, what went wrong, identify potential improvements, and create actionable to implement them in the upcoming sprint.

Now that we know the key terms that are used in Agile, let's discuss who are the team members involved in the Agile framework and their responsibilities.

Product Owner

A Product Owner is like the captain of a ship who knows how to manoeuvre the ship and ensures that it reaches the destination safely.

The product owner is the key stakeholder and is the go-to person for understanding anything about the customer and the expected product behaviour. The key role of a product owner is to create and manage the product backlog and ensures that requirements are captured clearly in the user stories. An effective product owner is always looking to get input and feedback from customers, designers, and the development team to optimize everyone's workload and product delivery. 

Some of the key responsibilities of a product owner are:

1. being empathetic towards the customer and understand customers’ challenges
2. lead the product discovery process and challenge the status quo
3. write user stories along with the acceptance criteria
4. share requirements, features, and timelines with the team
5. track metrics to evaluate the success and failure of the feature/product
6. share good and bad learnings regularly with the product team
7. build and nurture strong collaborative relationships with all the stakeholders

Scrum Master

Scrum Master works as a coach, motivator, facilitator, and leader of an Agile team and ensures that the squad is provided with what they need to deliver the product successfully.

Scrum Master works closely with both the Product Owner (PO) who focuses on building the right product and the development team that focuses on building the product right. 

Some of the key responsibilities of a scrum master are:

1. manage the scrum board on a daily level
2. reduce impediments faced by the team members
3. ask regular updates from team members on the task they are working on
4. identify people who are good performers and ensure that they are appreciated
5. encourage continuous feedback from all the stakeholders

Designers

Designers work closely with the Product Owner in designing the overall customer flow and the user interfacing screens. The product owner shares the business knowledge and the designer translates it to high-level designs (or concepts) which are often termed as User Experience (UX). After the high-level designs have been approved by the business, the detailed level User Interface (UI) screens are created by the designer. These are the customer-facing screens that are then developed by the developers.

Some of the key responsibilities of a designer are:

1. spend a considerable amount of time on expected customer journey
2. brainstorm ideas or concepts with the product owner
3. create high-level designs explaining the customer journey from start to end
4. create the final user interfacing (UI) screens
5. communicate overall design and approach to the developers

Developers

Developers focus on shipping the sustainable chunks at the end of each sprint. They work with the freedom to introduce techniques for a smoother customer experience while communicating regularly with the Product Owners, Designers and the QAs. During the sprint, if the developers find that additional feature can provide a great customer experience, then those features are added to the backlog after discussing with the PO and can be picked up in future sprints.

Some of the key responsibilities of a developer are:

1. estimate the effort required to build a feature
2. write a defect-free code
3. test the code at their end before releasing it to the QA team
4. resolve bugs when reported by the QA team
5. make the code LIVE

Quality Assurance (QA)

Quality Assurance (QA) team members play a critical role in delivering an exceptional customer experience. They should be involved in the project right from the start so that they can understand the big picture and end goal of each sprint.

QAs not only focus on the 'happy path' but also looks at the features realistically and captures complex as well as 'negative test' scenarios. They are free to ask any question to the product owner thus bringing more clarity to the business requirements.

Some of the key responsibilities of a QA Analyst are:

1. write test cases aligned with the acceptance criteria
2. share effort estimation in testing the features
3. share defect with the developers
4. categorise defects into blockers, critical, major, minor
5. identify possible risk and call out if there is any scenario missed out during the requirement gathering process

Conclusion

February 2021 marked 20 years of the agile manifesto and the companies are still adopting and tweaking agile as per their own needs. The advantage of Agile is that it is flexible, engages all the stakeholders, creates a collaborative environment, brings transparency to the process and delivers the product faster to the market.

I hope the above article brought clarity on the terms used regularly in Agile and I hope you and your organisation will benefit from it.

Sources:

1. https://www.atlassian.com
2. https://hbr.org/2016/05/embracing-agile
3. https://hbr.org/2021/03/for-an-agile-transformation-choose-the-right-people
4. https://www.forbes.com/sites/stevedenning/2016/08/13/what-is-agile/?sh=45ad304126e3
5. https://blog.trello.com/beginners-guide-scrum-and-agile-project-management