The role of stand up meetings in agile software development ( benefit) Essay

The role of stand up meetings in agile software development ( benefit) - Essay Example This study investigated one of the most important elements of the Agile approach, daily stand-up meetings. Over 40 percent of all the respondents were developers, the other bigger proportions were made up of project managers, analysts, software testers and solution architects. This can probably be attributed to the fact that in any process of software development, developers play the greatest role as they are directly involved in the technical processes. According to Martin (2003), an Agile development team needs sufficient software development personnel with deep experience and good working relationship to succeed. Project managers also formed a substantial proportion of all respondents; this too can be explained by the fact that every Agile team has got to be led by a project manager. Sometimes we have a larger project split into smaller project tasks each with a project manager (Larman, 2004). Other roles represented by respondents included Team Leads, Scrum Masters, CEOs, Testers , Delivery Managers, Agile coaches and Product owners. Many responses were not obtained from these groups, probably because they did not play huge roles in their team or they happened to be in leadership positions e.g. CEOs and Team Leads.The software development process function better at optimal conditions; this can only be made possible with the right number of members in a team, each playing a key role. Depending on the company and software development requirements of a project, Agile team sizes differ from project to another, Scrum and DSMD recommend that an ideal project team should have about 10 or twelve people. XP does not have a particular preferred number but recommends that teams be as small as possible. Over 83.8 percent of the respondents indicated that they worked in a team of between one and ten members - these are relatively small groups. Many software developers prefer to carry out projects in small flexible and manageable groups as recommended by the Agile methodo logy. Agile software development is particularly very iterative and participative and requires excellent communication, consultations and interaction between the members. For such teams to work effectively they require a moderate to minimum number of members for flexibility and greater team bonding, for example, stand-up meetings can be more effective and practical with fewer members in the team rather than a large number of members (Larman, 2004). A number of different Agile methods are used in software development. These include Scrum, DSDM, Extreme Programming, and Lean-Kanban. The choice of method is largely determined by software development needs as well as preference. According to Larman (2004), project needs sometimes dictate the choice of method between the various Agile methods. - Developer preferences also play a large part in determination of the methods to be adopted, in most cases once a method is adopted it is used by a company consistently for all other projects. Thi s study found that scrum is the most preferred Agile method with over 59 percent of the respondents using it. The popularity of scrum can be attributed to its ease of use and flexibility. According to Rising and Janoff (2000), Scrum remains the most