What is Agile Methodology?

It refers to the software development methodologies that are based on iterative development
procedure i.e. breaking down of the development procedure of a large application into smaller parts
or segments and the software is designed, developed and tested in each iteration also referred to as
a software development life cycle. In agile development methodology these iterations or sprints are
time boxed i.e. a specific time period such as two or three weeks is assigned to compete each
sprint/iteration.
In agile process we breakdown the project into smaller chunks consisting of user functionality and
requirements which are known as user stories. These user stories after evaluation are prioritized and
then delivered in a two or three-week short duration cycles i.e. iterations or sprints.

Agile Project Management using SCRUM

SCRUM is the framework for agile development in which a software product is
developed in short fixed-length iterations i.e. sprints. These sprints provide a
layered structure or framework to the team for delivering software in a rhythmic
and smooth flow.

User-Stories:
SCRUM procedure starts with the user stories that are basically the users
requirements written in plain and simple client or customers language including
only the basic information excluding any deep technical details.
The user stories could be more than a single statement and huge which are known
as Epic or Feature. Such stories are then divided into smaller easy to
comprehend user stories.
After story development, an estimate of how much time is going to be required for
the completion of each story is made and this is done by development team
members and the product owner. The development team helps in providing
feedback regarding design of the product, how it is going to be developed and what
testing activities are going to be performed. And the product owner provides the
basic knowledge of business activities that are required to complete these stories.
Sometimes hours are used in this estimation which however are not considered a
preferred technique for this purpose. Except the team uses story points or
planning poker method for the estimation of user stories.

Story Points are used to estimate the difficulty of implementing the user story.
Along with implementation, the complexity and the total number of unknown
factors in the story are taken under consideration while assigning story points.
The team uses specific numerical range (such as Fibonacci sequence i.e. 1, 2, 4,
8, 16, 32, 64, 128) or a size range of extra-small (X-S) to extra-large (X-L) to
express story points.
In Planning Poker, each participant involved in estimation holds a card with
values of 0, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 20, 40 and 100. These values represent the number
of story points, ideal working days, or other factors in which the team decides to

estimate the stories. The user story is read to the participants after which each
one of them shows their estimated effort to complete it. If all of them show the
same value, then that number is selected to be the estimate. Else, the
participants discuss to understand why their estimates are different from each
other and the process is repeated until the consensus is achieved. After that the
team continues to the next user story and the same procedure is repeated again
until all the user stories are estimated.

Product Backlog:
The product backlog is a prioritized feature list that contains short description of
functionalities that are desired in the product. To select the stories in iteration, the
team prioritizes them according to their importance and needs. Usually the user
stories that have high risk value are given higher priority and managed first by the
development team.

Planning Releases:
After ranking user-stories according to their priorities, the releases are planned
which is a time-boxed activity in which the team decides to complete user-stories
with highest priorities. For this purpose, a release planning meeting is arranged in
which the team is given guidance how and what the product owners and
stakeholder want to achieve in a specific time frame. In this meeting, the product
owner presents his vision, strategies and goals or expectations to the team. In this
discussion, the team helps in refining the concepts about the project via questioning
about different cases and providing answers to some of unclear ideas in product
owners given goals.
To predict how fast the development team can complete the given ranked userstories and how long will it take to complete the project, we use velocity metric
which is a very useful estimation tool in this case. This velocity is counted in the
story points units and is calculated by reviewing the development teams total
number of story completion rate per each sprint. Consider an example that a team
completes 20 user-stories in a two-week sprint and each story is worth of 2 story
points, then the teams velocity is calculated to be 40 story points per sprint or
iteration.

Sprint Planning & Iteration:

After performing all the above steps, the sprint planning meeting is arranged and it
is attended by the product owner, development team or SCRUM team and the
SCRUM master. In this meeting, the highest priority stories are discussed and these
stories are divided into one or many tasks. These tasks are then assigned to the
team members. After reaching the maximum capacity to add any more user stories
and assigning them to the team members and deciding the time interval for
completion of each sprint, the team then start working on the design, development
and related testing activities required in each sprint.

At the end of each sprint, a sprint review is performed by the team and the sprint
product is then demonstrated to the customer in a review meeting and the whole
scrum process is again re-evaluated and reviewed by the team members.

Yodiz An Agile Project Management Tool:

Yodiz is the agile project management platform that provides an easy to use and
manageable environment to the users. Features of Yodiz are briefly described below:

1. Backlog Management:

Yodiz backlog board provides users the environment to manage all project
requirements and user-stories all in one location and gives easy methods
to rank and prioritize the stories. Yodiz backlog board also provides the ability
to select, move, backup and delete multiple projects at
the same time and
gives a search feature in which user can easily search across different userstories and find out the member responsible.

The Priority rating scale used in Yodiz is as follows:

5
4
3
2
1
0

- Business Critical
- High Priority
- Important
- Low Priority
- Nice to Have
- No priority

2. Dashboard & Reports

The Yodiz dashboard helps users in keeping them updated with project progress
and the teams performance by providing different types of basic and advanced
graphs. The Yodiz dashboard also provides aggregated reports that help in
understanding the overall performance of the company.
Yodiz provides detailed reports for both user and project level and a flexible
interface to customize the data according to which we want to generate reports.

3. Sprint Board

The Yodiz sprint board is the main working area for the SCRUM team to manage
their work and keep track of the sprints and log their work. The sprint board
consists of user-stories that can be organized as per user requirement and
provides the status, issues, total time required for each user-story.

4. Planning Board

The planning board in Yodiz provides a complete control over all the user-stories,
issues, sprints, releases and epics in the project. It provides the feature to move
data between different projects from same window and gives the ability to create
new issues, user-stories and tasks without switching to separate windows.

5. Issue Tacker

In case of any issues, there is an issue tracker feature that is used to

manage all kinds of bugs or issues in the project. The issues reported in
sprints or releases will always appear on this board. Here, the user can
report bugs in two ways i.e. Inline & Full Details. If the user wants to
quickly report an issue with only basic details, then he/she can choose
inline option and will use full details option in case the user wants to
add all the information regarding the issue.
Yodiz provides different issue status i.e. New, start, In Progress,
Resolved and Closed so that users can response to the issues and report
accordingly.

6. Epics Management

In Epics Management board, the users can view, edit or add Epics to the project.
On deleting the Epic, all of its related user-stories will also be deleted. Users can
manage Epics globally of all projects or they can select specific projects stories
according to their requirement. In global view, all the user stories associated to
Epic will be shown with project name to which it belongs to. And in order to view
user story details, the user must be part of that project otherwise they will be
shown Access Denied page on clicking the details.

7. Release Management

In Yodiz, the release management board helps in managing, planning release

contents and keeping track of release progress and issues. Yodiz also provides
users the ability to have a custom layout of the release board according to their
needs. The release board gives the information about all the open, completed
and ready to release items. Users can set priority order of contents in release.