Requirements Of Agile Software Development

 

“You can’t jump from little things to big things It just takes time and patience.”- Nadia Comaneci

Implementing agile principles, requirements, and practices is an important step. Agile language and working are different from the traditional way of working. The organisations have to eliminate many requirements, specifications, designs, sign-off, and stage gated governance model etcetera, which consists of lots of challenges in the process. As no big things come instantly, implementing agile and all these processes also take some time. The fully committed will even take at least six months to complete the basic steps and practices of implementation. Further, it will take some time to show its benefits and advantages but even more, time to have ultimate results to acquire it requires to change various things and mainly including our virtual formal requirement management practices. The main issue in doing so is that our safety nets of artefacts and milestones for issues occurring in software development often are part of the issues.

Luckily as we are already at the stage where many organizations have done the transition making visible some agile lean patterns for successful software processes. After discussing various managers and executives we come to a point that to know what an organization will look like and work as after transformation it is necessary to have a bigger picture showing software development, delivery mechanism process, team and organizational units, and some of the roles played by the key individual in agile paradigm. This big picture of transformation is categorized into three main areas in a well-known and highly recommended book for agile transformation ‘Agile Software requirement’ by Dean Leffingwell.

•         Team Level
•         Program Level
•        Portfolio Level

Team Level

In agile teams are at the front line as they implement, test codes, and collaboration to develop a larger system delivering the value to users. As we know agile teams consist of seven to nine team members consisting of roles that define, build, and test code. Agile teams are generally supported by various other teams like architecture, database specialists, source code management, documentation specialists etcetera. Even though other teams are there for their support but the quality of work is a total responsibility of the agile team. The main focus of the agile team is creating and updating software features and components. In larger enterprises, there are additional groups along with agile teams for larger features, subsystems, or systems. The major roles in agile teams are product owners, scrum or agile masters, and developers and testers. The agile teams work with a fixed time box called iterations. The main fundamental terms in agile teams are user stories, product backlog, and releases which we have already studied in our previous articles.

Program Level

The program level of the bigger picture consists of roles, processes, and requirements artifacts for a large-scale system. Even though after every iteration shipment of software increment is needed but it is not possible as there are some minor changes for more quality is needed so hardening iteration is included in the program level of a bigger picture. The primary function of program management is to maintain a product vision that includes setting features, and carry non-functional requirements, fill the program backlog with undelivered features. Program level responsibilities also include release planning and roadmap updating. The product manager is the main role at the program level that is responsible for owning the vision and program backlog, managing release content, and maintaining the product roadmap along with building an effective product owner team.

Portfolio Level

At top of the big picture of the organization is the team of portfolio management. They are responsible for all the management of investment of the organization in agreement with the organization's business strategy. They consist of the themes that drive all the vision for programs and epics. Derivation of epic and program themes decisions is the responsibility of portfolio-level individuals or teams. The portfolio level individuals and teams need to have a constant focus on epics and portfolio backlogs as they are the highest level of expression of customer needs. The portfolio level also includes an architectural runway. As this article consists of requirements of software it is necessary to include the architecture, because architectural runways are built by teams, which gives the ability to build new features without extreme refactoring that will arise as a winner in the marketplace making architectural runway a routine investment for agile organizations.

As Alvin Toffler said “You got to think about big things while you’re doing small things so that all the small things can go in the right direction.” 

During transforming to agile it is necessary to have the bigger picture and agile software requirements beforehand to head in the right direction.

We, at Advance Agility, are the new-age Agile Coaching, Consulting and IT services company. We enable end-to-end Digital Transformation. Agile execution is integral to our being. We are doing SAFe implementation with small, medium and large organization across the globe. Our vision is to be the leading Agile execution player globally. To keep adding value at every process stage. We are on a mission to empower our clients, move from concept to cash in the shortest sustainable lead time by adopting human centric approach to business agility. Embracing the change is in our DNA. Things that keep us apart are Quicker and Seamless execution with End-to-end gamut of services. Our Global presence and Stellar Track Record give us an edge over our competitor.

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