Developing the Payne Search website – An Agile approach!

Working Agile has really given me (as a stakeholder/client) better transparency, and I could easily follow the progress throughout the development project. There is such a ‘night and day’ difference between working old school Waterfall, and Agile.

I want to summarise this, and I will also use my Scrum terminology! For my digital network, how many words can you spot from ‘The Scrum Guide?!

So we had a really small team of 3 of us. I filled the role of ‘stakeholder’, we had a lead developer (who was also Product Owner, and was Scrum certified), and a UX/UI Designer. These 2 guys were ‘The Development Team’. No need for a dedicated Scrum Master in this small setup.

We followed the Scrum Theory, founded on empiricism. We employed an iterative, incremental approach. There was always full transparency (use Jira and Slack to track and follow), with constant inspection and adaptation. We followed the Scrum Values, certainly being open and respectful.

We started with Product Backlog creation and prioritisation, and a form of Release Planning, where we split the Backlog up into Sprints. Each Sprint ultimately had a Sprint Backlog, and an agreed target Increment. Daily Scrums took place, and I involved myself in these for the first 2 weeks as I closely collaborated with the UX Designer on website design. We had our Sprint Review at the end of the Sprint, which made it easier to understand the output (Increment), and this in turn made it easy to undertake a Retrospective of how we got what we got to in the Sprint. We learnt how to better work together each time.

Slack was our communication tool of choice. A great way to collaborate. Jira was our product management tool. Prior to this website project I had never used either of these. Where have I been all my life without them?!Really easy to see the stages, dependencies, and who owns what. 

I also learnt about how my developer works out a value for each increment, a weighting. We agreed on short Sprints of 1 week duration, and the increment value limit was 20. This enabled me to pick which features I want to prioritise, and order the Sprints accordingly. See below:

Our Payne Search website went live with our website on 1st July, it was ‘good enough’ and “Done”. It had releasable functionality. Now, had I worked to the Waterfall method (and also not changed my way of thinking), then I can tell you for sure that my website would still not be live right now!! Better ‘live’ and good enough, than wait for ‘perfect’.

3 more sprints are planned, product increments will be released over the next 3 weeks in September. There are some exciting things to come, and I look forward to sharing them with you.

Recruitment is about to get a lot more digitalised!