Sprinting with Agile

Navin Bansal a young IT professional bitten by the entrepreneurial bug, submits his idea in an ideation contest conducted by NASCOM. Being misinformed of his idea being selected as a contender in the final round of the contest. He takes a leap of faith and quits his job to start his start up. He realizes for him to be successful he needs to roll out his product at the earliest. He decides to adopt Agile methodology to develop a customer centric product in the shortest amount time. Agile methodology prescribes products development in an iterative manner. With each iteration or sprint a potentially shippable product is developed.

Navin hires Yogi to execute his project. Yogi as a Product Owner of an Agile team discusses requirements with Navin and documents them as user stories in a product backlog. Requirements in Agile are called User stories because they are focused on what the customer wants. A product backlog is a repository for all the requirements to be worked upon in Agile. They outline the project timelines and priorities for the project this is called as backlog grooming.

Yogi brings in a Scrum Master Jitu and his team for developers to develop the product. Yogi and Jitu conduct a sprint planning meeting with the development team. Yogi, Jitu along with the development team together form the scrum team. Yogi explains the sprints goal or objective to the team. The team reviews and prioritizes the product backlog. Jitu decides which user story fit the ask of the current sprint and moves the selected user stories from product backlog into a sprint backlog. A sprint backlog defines the scope of the sprint. The scrum team is a heterogeneous group. It consists of both developers, quality analyst, business analyst and anyone else that would help the team achieve the sprint goal. With everything in place the team gets working.

Everyday during the sprint cycle Jitu conducts a daily standup meeting with the scrum team to monitor their progress. They discuss three key points. What the team did yesterday? What they will be doing today? And what hindered their work the day before? Jitu sees to it that all the impediments are resolved so that the team can function smoothly. Jitu tracks the team’s progress using a sprint burn-down graph. He shares it with the team during the daily standup meeting so that the team knows where they are and what they need to do to meet the sprints goal in the given timeline. With each day’s work the teams efforts increase, while as the user stories are completed the sprint backlog decreases. When all the work for the sprint is complete it is presented to Navin in an end of sprint review.

Navin was happy with the work and signs it off. The partly completed yet usable product is launched in the market. Navin and Yogi meet with Navin’s customers and seek feedback. They approach Saurabh Mandal a marketing expert to review their product and give them inputs on user experience. The suggestions of the customer and Mandal are documented as new requirements or user stories for the upcoming sprint in the product backlog.

Yogi conducts a retrospective meeting with Jitu and his team. In this meeting Yogi shares the customer feedback with the team. The scrum team also discusses what went well during the sprint and possible improvements for the next sprint. This completes the first sprint and Yogi and Jitu start working with on the next sprint. With completion of each new sprint Navin is one step closer to his finished product.

Using Agile methodology Navin drastically reduces the time to market for his product. Since Navin can take only a part of his product and go to his customers, it gives him a confidence that what he envisioned is what his customer wants. Even with only a small part of the product Navin can start generating revenue for his start up. For a young startup revenue is a desperately needed lifeline.

Navin, Yogi, Jitu and Mandal are characters from one of my favorite web series “Pitchers.” The show is about four guys who quit their jobs, to set out on path of entrepreneurship. Pitchers is an amazing story, with ample humors and a dash of drama which I enjoyed thoroughly. Don't just go by my word, IMDB gives it 9.1 of 10.