A word that I hear every day at office………..'AGILE'. I never knew what it's all about till I get to review projects, which practice this methodology. Knowing the concept is quite easy but practicing and monitoring is the challenge.
Depicted below is a burn down chart that I came across, which was very impressive. So just thought of sharing what I understood while reviewing a project today.
One of the challenges that we face is monitoring agile process, where most of us think, analysis should be based on numbers. But in agile, the burn down chart, where it shows the remaining hours of work is a good indicator to analyze projects.
As an example if we are reviewing the burn down chart of a four week sprint (is a set period of time during which specific work has to be completed and made ready for review), as shown in the image, The green line which shows the burn down, should touch the redline at the end of the sprint.
Both the burn down chart and the guideline being able to meet at the end of the sprint means, that the sprint backlog items (deliverables of the given sprint) had been delivered on scheduled time frame.
The yellow line, which is the estimation accuracy, shows the changes in scope. So according to the scope change the burn down will also change. This is not the only reason for the burn down to have a high deviation. It could also be due to team members not updating the remaining time.
And the interesting indicator is the required daily burn down rate, which is shown in orange. This shows the number of hours needs to be completed by the team per day to bring the burn down to zero by the end of the sprint. This is a very good indicator to see whether we could deliver the items for the sprint at the end of it.
Having these types of indicators would help to analyze the project in a different perspective, than what we used to do earlier. So we need to adapt to the new trend to keep us moving.
So the important thing that we should understand is that process is an element that keeps evolving. That is why most of the quality management systems focus on continuous improvement. Continuous improvement does not mean having a standard and making changes to it, but to re-establish new processes that are needed for the business.
