How my team uses Agile(scrum) in development
By: Ajea Smith
Tags: Software Development, Web Development, Coding, Startup, Agile Development

How my team uses Agile(scrum) in development

My experiences using Scrum and Jira for the first time

Photo by Daria Nepriakhina on Unsplash

In my previous article, I talked about who is all on my dev team, their roles, and my daily workflow. As our project continues to get bigger, we decided we needed a better way to manage tasks, other than just using Trello. A team member, who has previous experience in agile development, suggests we include scrum and Jira within our workflow.

Before getting into our typical workflow when using these tools, I want to give you an overview of what they’re.

What is Agile and Scrum?

In short, Agile development is an approach you can take when managing projects with complexity. It describes best practices and techniques for managing a project. Scrum, known as a framework, that describes the exact tools needed to help the team manage their projects and work.

What are Sprints?

In short, A sprint is a timed interval the team will go through to get a certain amount of work done. Sprints have cycles, and here is an image to show it.

Key points in a Sprint

Sprint planning (discuss with your team what tasks need to be completed, and how will it get done)

Product backlog (list of all the tasks the team created that needs to be worked on. Most of the time, these are just user stories)

Sprint backlog (list of tasks the team chosen from the backlog to do during the sprint)

Daily scrum/standups (a meeting to check-in to see how the team is doing with their task and if they have any blockers)

Sprint review (your team will discuss what tasks they completed during the sprint)

Sprint Retrospective (another meeting discussing things about the sprint that could be improved for next time if any)

What is Jira?

In short, Jira is a project managing software that is used to manage Scrum projects easier.

My workflow with Scrum

*sidenote: product backlog(User stories) items are already completed by the product owner.

In Jira, our main groups are categorized . Our structure looks similar to this → [Product backlog] [Sprint backlog] [Doing] [Blockers] [Done]

Our structure looks similar to this → [Product backlog] [Sprint backlog] [Doing] [Blockers] [Done] Our sprint meetings are set to a specific day, my PM is the one who decided this (Wednesdays).

We have our sprint meeting on Wednesday, and during that meeting, we all decided(frontend team, backend team, designer) which tasks(user stories from product backlog ) we prefer to work on during the sprint. Since I’m on the frontend, I choose tasks that are related to the UI. Backend developers and Designers choose theirs.

) we prefer to work on during the sprint. Since I’m on the frontend, I choose tasks that are related to the UI. Backend developers and Designers choose theirs. Each developer/designer chose 2–3 tasks to do. Once we all have the tasks to work on, our PM put these tasks in the sprint backlog category . These are the tasks we work on for the next 2 weeks.

category These are the tasks we work on for the next 2 weeks. Somewhere in the middle, we had a meeting update to check and see how everyone is doing on their tasks.

When our two weeks were up, we had another meeting(Wednesday) to say what we all completed, what we learned, explain our blockers if any, and discuss what we can improve for next time.

This cycle gets repeated starting with picking tasks.

These were my experiences working in an Agile development environment, and I got to say its much smoother and easier than I expected it to be. I learn someone new every day, which is always great. I hope this was helpful to someone out there. Stay safe, and keep learning.

Enjoy! 👍

~ Love to live, live to code