Agile Development Practices
Portfolio companies should adopt an agile way of working. Agile is a mindset rather than a predefined template—it involves a recurring cycle of events where teams learn from both successes and failures in each iteration. This approach is founded on the principles of the Agile Manifesto from the early 2000s. https://agilemanifesto.org/
SCRUM is a well understood and common implementation of Agile - further background reading is available here.
Each portfolio company is required to adopt SCRUM for their development process. They will be required to:
- Maintain an up-to-date Product Backlog of prioritized tasks, features, or requirements for the product. In larger companies this should be managed by the product owner.
- Hold daily stand up meetings to ensure the sprint is on track and remove blockers
- Hold retrospective meetings after a sprint to review the work produced and highlight successes and failures - provide continuous feedback to people involved to improve quality.
- The agile process is not just for developers - include multi-discipline team members such as testers and cloud/infrastructure engineers, they all form part of the success of the project.
- In sprint planning meetings, use story points for estimating time and complexity.
- Regularly review the allocation of story points and the actual effort involved to optimise productivity (sprint cadence)
A suitable tool is used to hold the product backlog and organise sprints - JIRA or Azure DevOps Boards are the recommended tools.