The Agile Process is designed to manage a consistent, predictable flow of deliverable work for stakeholders through a set of principles that center on self-improving delivery team. For more information about the Agile Process, please look at the following resources:

Agile software development

https://agilemanifesto.org/

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For Sage, this means adopting a more just-in-time approach to software development, by taking this approach we aim to do the following:

• Increase delivery predictability

• Improve quality

• Reduce Rework

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Roles and Responsibilities

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Product Owner

The Product Owner (PO) is responsible for managing the backlog and set of priorities supported by the needs of the consumers or the organization. The PO’s responsibilities are as follows:

• MUST provide prepared, groomed stories with Acceptance Criteria

• MUST NOT add new work after sprint begins

• MUST keep the backlog fully groomed, ready for new work

• SHOULD bring a list to Sprint Planning

Delivery Team

The Delivery team is the group who performs work and builds the product, as prioritized by the PO.

• MAY reject any story for lack of Acceptance Criteria, understandability or sizing

• MUST provide estimate, used to determine amt of work possible in the sprint

• MUST commit to chosen work for the sprint
  
  

Agile Events/Ceremonies

Backlog Grooming (PO, Dev): Prep stories for Dev Triage. Break big stories into smaller stories, ensure quality Acceptance Criteria.  Stories are in Open status, may be assigned to the PO or unassigned. Once the PO feels the story is ready for the Dev Team to triage, estimate and review, the status is updated to Ready For Dev Triage, the story should be Unassigned. PO is the primary creator of stories that arise from end user interaction but Devs can generate stories that arise from technical requirements or decomposition of a high level story into finer grained technical tasks. In such a case the Dev is responsible for writing the acceptance criteria and moving to Ready for Dev Triage. These issues should be ‘stories’ and not ‘epics’, the writing of which is the purview of the PO.

Dev Triage (Dev & PO):  Devs review groomed stories, provide estimates, uncover assumptions.  Reject or accept stories to be worked. Rejected stories return to Open status and are assigned to the PO. The PO must correct any deficiencies to bring the story back to Dev Triage (or may simply need to make explicit corrections defined by the team to move the story to Ready For Team). If a story is written by a Dev, the PO will review the story, including the acceptance criteria.

In order to move to Ready For Team, the following MUST be present:

• There MUST BE a Story Point value

• There MUST BE a Program Code

• There SHOULD BE an OKR linked

If tasks have interdependencies, they are moved to the Ready For Team backlog in such an order that each task comes after the tasks it depends on.

Sprint Planning Preparation (PO): PO establishes the priority of stories in the backlog, maintaining the required order of dependent tasks.

Sprint Planning (Dev & PO):  PO brings prioritized list of tickets in the Ready For Team status, team accepts tickets for sprint based on estimates and capacity.  Rejected tickets remain unassigned in the Ready For Team status. Accepted tickets are assigned to team members and put into the sprint (by adding a Sprint value to the ticket).

Retrospective (Dev Driven): Review sprint goals, achievements, experiments.  Choose new experiments for next sprint. 

Demos : Demos are an opportunity to share the work from the delivery team with the PO, consumers and other delivery teams. Demos should be short in length, unscripted and raw. The focus is on early feedback from the PO and consumers and knowledge transfer to other delivery team members (and other delivery teams).

Deep Backlog Grooming: This is a monthly or quarterly meeting to triage the oldest and lower priority items in the backlog with the goal of cleaning the old items to be moved into one of the following states by triaging the item:

• If it is sufficient, move it forward to Ready Dev Triage

• If it is no longer relevant, or too old, user no longer needs it, resolve it Won’t Do with standard message to the user, who can later reopen with more information

• If neither of these states is appropriate, assign it back to the reporter (if possible) (or PO, if not) to get additional information necessary.

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