MeetU Agile Development

At MeetU engineering, we implement Agile Software Development Life Cycle. What is agile workflow ? Why we do it ? How we do it ? Let’s jump in to learn more details about Agile.

Agile Workflow

“Agile — able to move quickly and easily”

Agile workflow is a software development life cycle which embrace changes. Agile recognize that humans are bad at planning and estimating stuffs, as we can see in Agile Manifesto :

1. Individuals and interactions over processes and tools
2. Working software over comprehensive documentation
3. Customer collaboration over contract negotiation
4. Responding to change over following a plan

With those points in mind, agile brings more flexibility to the development and sometimes the best ideas come until we’re doing it, rather than throwing it away because it didn’t come up in the original plan.

12 Principles of Agile

Based on the Agile Manifesto above, It can be derived some fundamental principles about Agile Development :

• Customer satisfaction through early and continuous software delivery — Customers are happier when they receive working software at regular intervals, rather than waiting extended periods of time between releases.
• Accommodate changing requirements throughout the development process — The ability to avoid delays when a requirement or feature request changes.
• Frequent delivery of working software — Scrum accommodates this principle since the team operates in software sprints or iterations that ensure regular delivery of working software.
• Collaboration between the business stakeholders and developers throughout the project — Better decisions are made when the business and technical team are aligned.
• Support, trust, and motivate the people involved — Motivated teams are more likely to deliver their best work than unhappy teams.
• Enable face-to-face interactions — Communication is more successful when development teams are co-located.
• Working software is the primary measure of progress — Delivering functional software to the customer is the ultimate factor that measures progress.
• Agile processes to support a consistent development pace — Teams establish a repeatable and maintainable speed at which they can deliver working software, and they repeat it with each release.
• Attention to technical detail and design enhances agility — The right skills and good design ensures the team can maintain the pace, constantly improve the product, and sustain change.
• Simplicity — Develop just enough to get the job done for right now.
• Self-organizing teams encourage great architectures, requirements, and designs — Skilled and motivated team members who have decision-making power, take ownership, communicate regularly with other team members, and share ideas that deliver quality products.
• Regular reflections on how to become more effective — Self-improvement, process improvement, advancing skills, and techniques help team members work more efficiently.

How MeetU do it ?

At MeetU, we follows these activities provided by PPL Fasilkom UI :

1. Getting Requirements
2. Planning what to develop
3. Sprint !
4. Review / Sprint Retrospective
5. Repeat no. 2

MeetU does the sprint in 2–3 weeks time, and then review it. These is the Agile part, we regularly review the development process about what’s not working, what’s needs to be improved, and if it possible and it is a great improvement, we’ll put it in the backlog.

Conclusion

Agile brings speed and flexibility into the development, therefore providing the best improvement we can find and have while getting all of the things done. It was not a static or strict way of doing things (Looking at you, waterfall), it is open to changes and improvement along the way. This is what MeetU Engineering needs for delivering good products.