Agile Software Development

In this tutorial I demonstrate how you can manage your Scrum Product Backlog in a very simple Excel sheet based on a popular free template. Watch this screencast if you want to get started with Scrum. You will see how to get started, how to detail, inject and remove requirements, how to build burndown and velocity charts.

You can download the somewhat lower quality version of the tutorial from Google Video.

Update: Link to XLS fixed. Kudos to Jukka Laurila

This is part 3 of a series of posts about using agile methodologies in distributed development scenarios.

One of our readers (Deven) posted a comment emphasizing the importance of a well organized collaboration system when doing distributed agile development. In his list of essentials, he mentions the need for a "Central Globally Available Source Control System". He is correct and so in this post I will talk about the various tools and techniques that can be used to manage a central source control repository.

In four days after the desires for the agile-aware C++ IDE were posted on AgileSoftwareDevelopment.com, Michael Feathers, the author of "Working Effectively with Legacy Code" posted his own set of the refactoring-related requirements for the IDE.

Have a look

A colleague of mine lately asked me what would be the most important C++ IDE features for supporting the agile software development. While agile processes are more about people and interaction, than about the tools, a decent tool support certainly makes things easier. Here is a list of things I would value in the agile-aware C++ IDE in the order of decreasing priority.

1. Command-line repeatability
Agile methods see the high levels of automation of a ‘mechanical’ and repetitive tasks as a relief for the developers and help to reduce errors.

Different potential user groups and even users within the same group can have different opinions on the product features. The only way to see the high-level picture is to question many users and to gather some statistics on the user preferences. If the user opinions are gathered with the help of Kano questionnaires, the answers can be analyzed in a simple table.

Update on 09 Oct 2007: "See Also" section added

Bas Vodde collected and published examples and templates of the Scrum product and Sprint backlogs. Most of them are in MS Excel format. Some (XLS) include a lot of comments, some (XLS) are very colourful. Check them out, Excel can really cover most of the needs of the archived backlog tracking.

See Also

• Simple Product Backlog Example
• Simple Sprint Backlog Example