Scrum : Artifacts

The artifacts play a vital role for the team to reflect themselves on how they are doing with the agreed goal. Artifacts defined by Agile are specifically designed to maximize transparency of key information so that everybody has the same understanding of the artifact.

Product Backlog

The Product backlog is a set of all baseline requirements prioritized in order which is made available by the Product Owner to the Agile Team. The product backlog emerges and evolves over time and the Product Owner is responsible for its content and validity.

The product owner has to ensure backlog items are recorded in Agile tool (VSTS) with prioritization number and business value for all the members distributed located.

Refer my posts related to Discovery track, to understand how backlog is created.

Sprint Backlog

The Iteration Backlog is a subset of the Product Backlog that the team pulls into the sprint to work on. It is essentially the list of “To Do’s” a development team might be working during the current Iteration.

The work items in the Iteration Backlog are broken down further into tasks by the team. All items on the Iteration Backlog should be developed, tested, documented and integrated to fulfill the commitment.

The Agile team and lead pull product backlog items to create iteration backlog based on prioritization and team velocity. This Iteration Backlog to be made available in VSTS for all the members distributed located.

Product Increment

The most important artifact is the Product Increment. Each iteration the development team produces potentially shippable product increment.  This product increment must align to the development team’s “Definition of Done” and this increment must be acceptable by the Product Owner. The working solution/build for every iteration should be stored at central repository tools such as GIT repository. Which has capability to keep the version control and helps team’s such as test and operations teams.

Monitoring charts

The team tracks total work remaining at least for every Daily Meetings. This is visibly projected in burn-down chart. Similarly, team maintains / updates Release Burn-up, Velocity graph, etc.

Agile Lead ensures basic metrics such as burndown charts & velocity are captured by Agile management tool (VSTS); this enables all distributed members can have transparent view of progress & Metrics.

Example: The Iteration burndown chart showing remaining work in the Iteration backlog. Updated every day, it gives a simple view of the Iteration progress in graphical, helps all distributed members understand the progress.

Impediment tracker

An impediment is anything that prevents the team from being productive. Agile Lead maintains tracker with actions and action responsible name to resolve impediment. Agile lead should store this Impediment tracker in tools such as project wiki or GIT repository; so that all team members including remote member can view the tracker.

Retrospective action tracker

The Agile Lead will maintain this tracker; Each action in tracker must be agree by the entire team. A valid action is one that will improve the team’s productivity without incurring undue cost. Reviewing the actions reinforces their importance and gets everyone in the team in agreement that they are worth implementing.

Agile lead should store this Retrospective action tracker in tools such as project wiki or GIT repository; so that all team members including remote member can view the tracker.

CategoriesAgile

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