Agile Assessments have been an essential element of the Agile transformation framework, facilitated and supported through the Agile Leadership Team, Agile consultants, and Agile consultants. In order to maximize your Agile implementation, begin with an assessment of the current status/gap in your requirements. The purpose of Agile assessments is to gather data, identify needs, prioritize issues, build prototypes, create testing scripts, and deliver requirements on time.
Self-discovery has been one of the most important features of Agile implementation and continues to be recognized as an integral principle of Agile methodology. It enables your team to take ownership over their processes and reap the rewards from the collaboration of stakeholders. Self-discovering, also known as active learning, involves functional verification of processes and enables your team to adapt to changes. Therefore, agile assessments form a core part of your overall Agile implementation process and help you understand what is working and what is not.
There are two key elements of Agile assessments – test automation and self-discovery. With test automation, automated tools to verify that a functional requirement is correctly implemented. When Agile teams apply self-discovery, they identify how a prior implementation affected users and how it can be tested against the latest requirements. Agile tools such as Scrum and backlog are designed to automate discovery and allow the full lifecycle of software development cycles to run efficiently. These tools also encourage the continuous exchange of ideas and collaboration between the testers and developers.
To implement Agile and create your first self-discovery cycle, identify your current Agile evaluation methodology. It could be an outcome-driven assessment where you collect customer feedback to improve the quality and deliverability of your deliverables. You could also use an instructional development or IDD (Institute of Continuing Education) approach to assess the impact of new releases on your user groups. Another approach may be an empirical assessment where you ask your users for their thoughts, concerns, or problems and analyze these through the lens of your Agile software project. Once you have a list of potential solutions, you can refine the list to find the best solution.
Most Agile assessments start with a formal definition of the requirements and follow a process of Scrum testing to verify that the requirements have been delivered using the targeted delivery strategy. Once you have defined the requirements, you will need to provide a formal verification to the stakeholders. The most popular Agile assessment tools include Scrum, Nedo, Whitebox, and YAG. There are many other Agile assessment options available, but these three deliver strong results with simple user interface designs.