Agile in MeetU Engineering

I actually feel terrible for writing half-assed blog about Agile before since I was rather tired =( I’ll try to atone that by writing this blog.

Agile is one of several models in SDLC. Unlike other models, Agile doesn’t have a fixed structure. Instead, any method can be called Agile as long it follows Agile Manifesto and Agile Principles. There are 4 Agile Manifesto, those are:

1. Individuals and interactions over processes and tools. This manifesto highlights the importants of the individuals in the SDLC and their interactions, while how they do the jobs and what tools they used are not as important as that.
2. Working software over comprehensive documentation. Instead of writing a documentation that is long, probably only few will read, and rather tiring to maintain, Agile emphasize on the software instead. Making a working software is more important than the documentation itself.
3. Customer collaboration over contract negotiation. In other methods, usually the requirements are stated at the start of the project as a contract, and after that, the stakeholders can just leave until the demo. Meanwhile, in Agile customer collaboration is more important. This means that the stakeholders need to participate even in the middle of the development, maybe giving feedback, updating requirements, etc.
4. Responding to change over following a plan. Like stated above, the requirements, plan, and many others may change during the development itself. This gave a lot of flexibility in Agile.

Agile in MeetU Engineering

We used one of the framework in Agile that is called Scrum. In scrum, the team consists of three parts:

• Scrum team, or the developer team. In this case, I am one of the member of the scrum team along with 5 of my friends.
• Scrum master, the one who is in charge to maintain the daily scrum activities in MeetU Engineering. Our scrum master is Kak Irma
• Product owner, the one who is in charge in maintaining the vision and the requirements of the product itself. In this case, product owner of MeetU is Kak Ferdinand

P.S: Kak is a honorific in Indonesian to address someone older than us, usually with a not-really-huge age difference.

In scrum, we usually define one iteration as a sprint. Because of PPL course rules, one sprint is defined as 1 month. In my opinion, it’s rather too long, but oh well. In sprint, there are sprint planning, daily scrum, sprint review, and sprint retrospective.

Scrum Board

We used a physical board to maintain our current state in the sprint. The board itself consists of stuffs like backlog, task, definition of done, etc. Backlog is commonly known as “feature”, while task is usually a component of a backlog. The task itself is usually splitted into three kinds, those are Todo, In Progress, and Done. Definition of done, well.. definition of done. Below is our scrum board last week:

Daily Scrum

We do daily scrum, that somehow not done everyday. Usually we have a meeting during monday and thursday during lunch time. The usual daily scrum is done quite fast, with the main part being telling what we’ve done, what we’re doing, and what is blocking our job right now. However, during MeetU Engineering meeting, usually we talked about something else too, like solving problems that one of our members encountered, or talking about something for improving our team.

Gitlab Integration

For this project, we used Gitlab to work. Gitlab itself has Issue, Merge Request, and label, so we can easily track the task progress.

Issue

Merge Request

Have I told you how I really, really hate the physical scrum board? It used Post-It, and sometimes they fall off. It is very, very annoying.

And so..

Behold, the non-physical board of MeetU Engineering!

Though, only I maintained it (sigh). Since I found the physical scrum board rather annoying, I decided to maintain the gitlab version of the board. Here, by utilizing the labels, I can easily check which tasks are not taken, in progress, or simply needs review. So yeah, actually I prefer this board rather than the physical board.

Conclusion

Agile is currently one of the most popular method, mostly because its flexibility and output. MeetU Engineering also use this method for MeetU development. Hope that the implementation in Agile in MeetU Engineering can be helpful to you who read this.