Agile Design Practices — Quick guide
If you are here, then I assume you know what agile is. I’m writing this article to put some more light on agile design practices to help deliver value faster and shorten the feedback loop. Especially for the leaders who are finding ways to build an agile mindset in their team.
This is something that cannot be mastered in just few days. It certainly needs practice and learning from the mistakes as you strive for valuable delivery chunks.
I hope to write some more specific articles in future but for this quick starter, I have complied a set of videos and articles which are just the ones that I have referred personally in past for myself and have helped me to understand the only primary goal of agile — Delivering Better value, Sooner, Safer and Happier.
But where should we really start from? Generally, when the projects begin and they are at early stage, it becomes quite difficult to create smaller stories and that is where we need to take a look through the 3-lens approach to agile design : the far, the near, and the immediate. As the piece of work moves from a fuzzy idea in the distant future to a pixel-perfect story awaiting kick-off, it travels through each lens’ field of view.
Moving further, it becomes even more crucial to understand that, one of the important keys of being agile is learning the art of decomposing big features or problems into smaller ones so that (agile) teams can start to tackle them. One of the biggest challenges is to slice these features vertically. Normally, teams aren’t used to think about problem decomposition this way as they tend to incline towards Horizontal slicing naturally/traditionally where the focus is working on architectural layers one by one. This may work, but it actually fails at independent and valuable factors if we follow INVEST Model. Watch this video to understand Vertical Slicing in 5 minutes and If you want to spend more time reading about it in detail then read this one.
The above one will still not tell you ways on how to achieve vertical slicing so read thru these 6 practical ways to slice your projects vertically. Remember that each project could be one of these 6 or combination of them. More info if interested.
I hope this will help you to gain pretty good knowledge to get started with slicing but there is still one more aspect that defines agile from different perspective when it comes to progressing effectively and consistently i.e. whether agile is iterative or incremental? (mainly applies when you look thru far lens). Actually, it is combination of both. Take a look at this video that gives an abstract idea with the metaphor of famous Monalisa painting and another video with real life example about it. In general, I liked all the videos in TheAgileBroadcast channel and it should be good for you to take quick bites of knowledge.
Being an agile advocate, I can go on and on…. 😊 but I hope this should be a good playlist for you to reference if you are really looking for better ways to execute agile projects to deliver value and create some impact.
