One Friday night at 7 p.m., the soldier strolled up to my station and, after applausing each other, Yi got to the point and asked me a few questions directly. After answering his questions, I wanted to write an article to share my experience and feelings.

His first question was: Am I agile after five sessions of the iteration?

This is a very representative question, and I intend to use it as the title of my article.

Is it agile to have five meetings of an iteration?

Indeed, of all the Agile practices, the five sessions of the iteration are the easiest and the first to be imported, because these five sessions are the foundation of team collaboration.

At the requirements review meeting, PO (product manager) explains and clarifies the user stories to be completed in the next iteration plan, and makes the team reach a consensus on user stories by estimating points. For complex user stories, the product manager needs to explain to the team.

At the iteration planning meeting, the DM (delivery manager) and team members define the goals and plans for the iteration, which is the starting point for an iteration.

During the daily station meeting, team members synchronize information and progress, and feedback questions.

At the iteration review meeting, invite relevant stakeholders to participate in demonstrations of completed features and provide feedback. After the iteration, DM will lead the whole team to review the iteration, identify problems and improvement points, make improvement plans, and lead the team to make continuous progress and maintain excellence.

The entire process, from requirements review to iteration review, plus the five agile recommended values, is Scrum’s 3-3-5-10 framework. So the five key activities of the iteration (meetings) are the foundation of the overall team collaboration and are very important practices for the team and for Agile.

But is agile development really more than just having five meetings?

The answer is obviously not, the nature of r&d requires us to solve customer problems by delivering high-quality code formation systems or products (solutions) as quickly as possible.

This sentence requires us to ensure product planning, program design, quality assurance, rapid iteration, and effectiveness feedback. Scrum, on the other hand, addresses the fast iterative delivery level. There are several other layers that need to be addressed, but here’s a big picture of lean requirements delivery.

Product planning

During the product planning phase, we answer the following questions:

What is the strategic goal of the product?

What is the positioning of our product?

Who is the target audience? What are the relevant stakeholders?

What business strategy will you adopt?

What are the differences with other competing products on the market?

What are the key performance indicators of the product?

What is the operation strategy of the product?

Only by solving these product strategy problems, can we make products that truly meet the needs of users and adapt to market competition, provide basis for our product design and decision-making, ensure the correctness of the product direction, and make the product truly successful.

The product design

Lean product design emphasizes innovation, rapid trial and error, and constant tweaking, reducing design waste through “just right” solutions.

So in lean agile system, promoting design thinking model of product innovation, product managers need to fully understand the user and from the perspective of the real use, identify the core scenarios, and map the user journey, “minimum viable product (MVP)” and “the highest priority of the minimum requirements (MMF)” for product design.

Less is more, and we need to get products to market early and dynamically adjust them based on actual results (performance data).

Note: It’s important to get your product to market early, but only if you get it right.

Version control

After the PRODUCT manager identifies the MVP version, the product manager needs to constantly identify and prioritize the requirements, and ensure that at least three versions of the product are planned so that the service (customer) and IT team have a global concept of the overall product requirements and know the evolution direction and path of the product.

At the same time, version planning also provides an important basis for subsequent teams to make iteration plans.

We recommend using the user Story map tool, which will be covered in a follow-up article.

Agile delivery

With solution design and release planning, IT teams have a lot of clarity when planning iterations, and can work with product managers to select high-priority stories from release planning, based on the priorities of team capacity and requirements, and due consideration of risk dependencies.

Of course, stories that go into iterative delivery are fully analyzed and evaluated by product managers, delivery managers, and technical leaders, with clear acceptance criteria and detailed design plans.

Agile Delivery can refer to Scrum’s 3-3-5-5 framework and delivery process above, which includes the five sessions of the iteration.

Quality assurance

Agile advocates fast delivery, but also quality fast delivery, not at the expense of quality.

In addition to the oft-mentioned test forward, testing needs to engage requirements early. Agile delivery has always emphasized the quality built-in process, the quality assurance activities are built into every link of r&d activities, through a large number of automated means to ensure the quality of product delivery.

You can look at the quality built in process below to see what your team has accomplished.

Effective feedback

After the rapid release of a product or function, whether it can meet the needs of users or the market, and whether it can achieve our goals in the product planning period, in the digital era, we must take the actual effectiveness data to speak, and use the real data to drive the subsequent decisions and the improvement direction of the product.

This requests us in a different level, consider the user and the life cycle of innovation, and at the same time, from the perspective of the customer and business multiple identify key indicators, convenience and be able to collect and display the index data, at the same time we will continue to track and analyze the indicators data, for the product evolution, the optimized operation strategy to provide adequate decision basis.

To sum up, the iteration will open five, is the most basic in agile, can also be regarded as the basic action, but around the delivery of the entire product lifecycle, we combined with the actual situation of their own team, there are a lot of practice and activities need to be performed, only in this way, we can fast and efficient for our business, the customer, And the people who use our products bring real value.

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