Let's learn about some agile tools that help drive team metrics and project progress:
- Planning poker: Planning poker is one of the most popular estimation techniques in Agile methodology, where the Scrum Master plays poker games to estimate user stories when a sprint starts. During this activity, each user story will be evaluated based on its complexity. Team members use comparative analysis to give story points for each user story, which helps the team understand how much effort is required to complete the user stories.
- Burndown chart: A burndown chart is used to monitor sprint progress and help the team understand how much work is pending. The Scrum Master and the team always follow the burndown chart to make sure there is no risk in the sprint and reuse that information to improve the estimation next time.
- Product backlog: The product backlog contains a collection of requirements in the form of user stories and epics. The product owner continuously updates the backlog and prioritizes requirements during sprint grooming. An epic is a high-level requirement, and product owners write a user story to refine them. The development team breaks down these user stories into a task, which is an executable action item.
- Sprint board: The sprint board contains a collection of user stories listed for the active sprint. The sprint board provides transparency as anyone can look at the project's progress for that particular sprint cycle. The team refers to the board on a daily standup to determine overall work progress and remove any obstructions.
- Definition of Done: This means all user stories should pass the Done criteria that have been set up by the solution architect and product owner in collaboration with stakeholders. Some of these criteria are as follows:
- The code must be peer reviewed
- The code should be unit tested
- Enough documentation
- Code quality
- Code writing standard