Agile is trendy, Agile is cool, you need to work with Agile teams. All of us have heard this a million times. It’s a common believe that Agile principles in software development work great; however, the question of how to implement them in your team, in your environment, with your clients still remain a mystery for many companies.
The #1 principle in the Agile manifesto goes as: “Individuals and interactions over processes and tools“, and this is absolutely true. It must be said that Agile is not just about working in iterations, doing a daily standup or writing a unit test after the all.
It’s hard to overestimate the role of communication in Agile team. Perhaps, it might seem obvious but until recently I haven’t actually though of this. Provided that the communication isn’t build effectively on various levels (whether it’s communication between Dev Team and Product Owner, Product Owner and Users or even within the Dev Team), no matter how technology savvy you are, problems are inevitable. So, Agile is all about people and building ties between them, connecting their expertise for the betterment of the product.
~ Vlad Lipsky, Android Developer
In Agile world Individuals and interactions are essential to high-performing teams. To facilitate communication, Agile methodologies offer us a clear division of roles in a the team (Product Owner, Dev Team, Stakeholders) and a number of frameworks which help to make the product development process more effective (such as Scrum, Kanban, XP and others).
Communication is intangible, but we all feel when something is wrong with it. So, how to build effective communication? How to get your Client to interact with the team? How to work with the feedback from your users?
Check out this cool video we came across which gives answers to many questions in less then 15 min. What’s especially cool about this video, it clarifies in simple words the role of a very important person on Agile team – the Product Owner. Keep agile and be cool 😉