“Coming together is a beginning. Keeping together is progress.Working together is success.” – Henry Ford
The Team Level is fundamental for organizing the Agile Teams in the Agile Release Train. It helps in defining the roles necessary in the Agile Teams that power the Agile Release Train. The teams develop, test and deliver the working software at the end of an iteration.
Each team has their own team backlog and performs SCRUM XP and KANBAN in order to self-organize and self-manage themselves.
The participants at this level are listed below:
- Product Owner – Key stakeholder
- Scrum Master (Facilitates an agile development team)
- Dev Team (Team of developers)
- System Architect
The artifacts produced at the end of the iteration include:
- Iteration goals
- Team Backlog
- Team PI Objectives
The Dev Team, Product Owner and the Scrum Master of an agile team work together supported by the Release Train Engineer, Product Management, System Architect and the System Team.
Each team has their own team backlog and builds test stories from it. The team uses SCRUM XP and Kanban. SCRUM helps in self-organizing and managing cross functional teams. XP enhances software engineering practices. Kanban however maintains the flow of work and sets the Work in Process. The teams develop on cadence in iterations which have been set to a specific time period with goals to attain.
At the end of the an iteration, System demo is presented which is evaluated by the stakeholders who give their feedback. According to the feedback received, the Team backlog is adjusted to add or remove any items. Lastly, an iteration retrospective is held which the events are assessed qualitatively and quantitatively for improvement to learn from previous mistakes.
Benefits
- Program Increments help to align multiple Agile Teams in the Agile Release Team to stay in synchronization with one another.
- Ensures coordination with multiple Agile Teams to create an integrated system.
- SCRUM, XP and Kanban keep the quality of the product in check to maintain high standards.
Tools that can be used at the Team Level
Some of the software industry’s verified tools that teams use to support their project planning and monitoring are:
Continuous Integration: Github, Jenkins, Bamboo
Test Management: Test Rail, Zephyr, HP ALM
Automation: Robot Framework, Ruby, Selenium, Watir
Agile Lifecycle Management: Jira, Yodiz, BaseCamp, Trello
For better understanding of feature dependency among teams and visibility of overall project progress, Kendis is the ultimate tool that allows you to monitor work of multiple teams, all in one place. Learn more about Kendis progress [email protected]