7 Agile Tools You Need Right Now

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May 26, 2024

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Agile Tools and Mechanisms

The major Agile tools and mechanisms used today are as follows:

• Velocity
• Burndown and Burnup charts
• Informative Workspace
• Big Visible Charts
• Hand-Drawn Charts
• Process Improvement Charts
• Task Boards
  
  

1. Velocity:

Velocity is measured by the quantity of work that the team members together can accomplish in one iteration. Velocity is used to measure the time taken for a team to deliver upcoming outcomes based on its prior performance. It also measures tasks in hours or an equivalent unit. This is ideal for an Agile team where work is comprehensively completed after each iteration. During the first iteration, the team has no velocity, so an approximate assumption is made as to how much work is likely to be accomplished. With the velocity calculated in the previous iteration, the amount of work that can be accomplished in further iterations is estimated.

Some of the most common units used for estimating work and determining velocity are Story points used in Scrum and craft units used in eXtreme Programming (XP). The team determines its velocity by calculating the average amount of work completed to date and the number of iterations completed. If a team size changes, such as new members being added to a team or members being removed from a team, the velocity must be recalculated.

Consider a few simple examples to understand velocity.

• Example A: A team has completed 20 stories during a two-week sprint and each story is worth three story points, then the velocity of the team can be calculated as 60 story points per sprint.
  
  
• Example B: A team regularly completes an average of 60 units of effort in a two-week sprint and has a velocity of 60 units of effort per sprint, or is simply considered as just 60.
  
  
• Example C: The product backlog of an Agile team has 400 story points. The team is averaging 40 story points per sprint. In this case, the team will require 10 more sprints to complete the work.

The data used to calculate a team's velocity is depicted on the project burndown and burnup charts.

2. Big Visible Charts - Burndown, Burnup, and Other Charts: 

Big visible charts are big charts placed near the Agile team workspaces that convey the progress of the project team in various ways. t is not just the team members who can make use of this, but also the stakeholders who can get a grip on the team's progress. Pictorial representations help in clear understanding and help in easy analysis. Thus, these charts aid the team in working effectively towards the overall progress in developing the software. Big visible charts implement the essential Agile values of transparency and communication. The goal of a big visible chart is to display information so clearly that it is seen even from across the room. It communicates the work to be done or the flow of work.

• Burndown Charts:
  A burndown chart is one of the most important tracking tools for Agile projects. It tracks the work remaining on the project and the possibility of the deadline being met. The vertical axis measures the work remaining and the horizontal axis marks the iterations. The planned date of the project is marked in a burndown chart. The progress of each iteration is marked on the chart and is projected forward to see if the end date is likely to be met.
  
  Though its application and usage may vary, plotting a burndown using effort remaining is the most useful and efficient way of using burndown charts.
  
  Burndown can be tracked at either the sprint level or the release level. Sprint burndowns are often tracked using effort remaining whereas release burn-downs are tracked using story points.
  
  
• Burnup Charts:
  A burnup chart tracks the amount of work done. It has more information than a burndown chart because it shows the quantity of work in the whole project. A burnup chart shows the Changing goal or scope of the project, which is difficult to show in the burndown chart.
  
  
• Process Improvement Charts:
  Process improvement charts are a type of big visible charts that measure specific issues that the team would like to improve upon. These charts stay only as long as they are necessary.
  
  The process improvement charts are created and maintained as a team responsibility and are kept up-to-date. Each team member updates his status. Some charts have information updated daily based on the day's progress; this is updated by a particular team member. The main goal of these charts is process improvement. People usually tend to improve their status when the team shows progress towards a mutual goal.
  
  
  
  
  
• Other Charts:
  The iteration and release planning boards are other examples of big visible charts. The calendar is another useful status chart that displays important dates and iteration numbers. They also give information as to when a team member is not available in the office, along with their contact information.
  
  
  

3. Informative Workspace:

An informative workspace is not a tool, but rather a practice. It is a workspace that has feedback mechanisms incorporated to help the people who are working in it. As a workspace is the main hub of the development effort, an informative workspace has to be created by arranging it with the information necessary to head for the project. The important feature of an informative workspace is that it advertises information in the room. An informative workspace makes the team members understand the phase of the project by just walking into the room. This can be done by blending the physical and virtual elements of a work environment. For example, visual displays and electronic devices that are connected to automated processes can be part of such an environment. It conveys status information without asking for it and interrupting the team members and thus, helps to improve the trust of the stakeholder.

Big visible charts described earlier are part of informative workspaces.

4. Hand-Drawn Charts:

The main benefit of the informative workspace is that the information displayed is constantly visible from everywhere in the room. However, for computerized charts to meet that criterion, projectors or plasma screens have to be installed everywhere, which is difficult and expensive. In such scenarios, hand-drawn charts are a solution. As the information in the charts constantly changes, it is easier to use flip charts and whiteboards to draw a chart than to create one on a computer.

5. Task Board:

A task board represents at a minimum, three columns, to-do, in-progress, and 'done', and is used for organizing a team's work. It mostly displays the work to be performed during the current iteration. Some teams also include their backlog as a column on the task board. Distributed teams mostly use online task board applications but, ideally, the task board consists of note cards or sticky notes affixed to a wall. The task board illustrates different forms of work such as user stories or just tasks.