The Agile with Scrum process may sound technical, but it simply involves the the process of user stories being created and tracking them throughout a development process.
This process is used to develop sites with significant custom work. That is where standard processes supported by modules such as 'like on facebook' aren't applicable and we need to make something such as 'support our meeting process'.
Scoping
The scoping phase is important. We may want to produce a context document, sketches and other user interface or process documents. This may require scoping resources and a mini-project in itself. The outcomes from this part of the project may be the most valuable deliverable on the project including, how to we meet unique customer needs and what is the best technical solution.
Development Process
If we are using this process, Mountainriver will provide a tool - icescrum - to support the process. There are a number of roles in this process: product owner, scrum master and developers. Mountainriver will guide the process, with acceptance of building functionality and prioritisation important activities for people who own the site.
To illustrate the process, we have an idea to capture a meeting agenda.
Add Idea to Sandbox
A story is added to the 'sandbox' such as 'Allow Angela attendee to submit agenda items to the meeting'.
We add this to a sandbox as follows:
The sandbox is a collection of ideas that do not necessarily need to be acted on but can be refined and prioritised in order to finally have them turned into a product.
Accept Story
The story is accepted and moves to the product backlog.
Estimate Story
The story effort is estimated. Usually in terms of this will take twice the effort of something else. The main aim is to allow people to say that this is going to take 4 times the effort of something else, should we still make it a priority and if it does take 4 times the effort is it manageable or do we need to break it down into smaller parts?
We assume that the agenda story is a '5'.
Add to Sprint
A sprint it is a focused work period during which we create specific functionality to be delivered.
We have some idea as to how long this story is going to take as we typically get through a certain number of points in 3 weeks work - say 100 - and need to work out if we can fit it into the 'sprint'.
Development Support with Git
Git is a source code versioning system, it allows features to be put into branches and tested and once this is successful release it onto the sprint branch. This allows the organisation to choose whether specific features are ready for release without holding up the whole release.
Release
At the end of the sprint we will release the new developed code onto a working version of the site. Ideally this is the live site so that the incremental functionality is benefiting people and we can analyse its effectiveness.