Is it Agile or Waterfall or what? Which one do you use? Also, which tools do you use when using either of the models?
gitlab.
Maybe someone might be able to tell me where my thoughts fall into. The methods I use involve utilising all of gitlab.
So, I take the roadmap per quarter, as created by the founding/senior management team. Then I split those high levels ideas down into monthly milestones. Each milestone has it's own issues, which are assigned to teams or individuals, with all the relevant information and people involved. So I guess it's waterfall?
But I also take into account customer requirements & deployments so if anything does come in then it can be quantified and prioritised in order to ensure the dev team aren't doing something that's not needed or not of critical priority.
Gitlab has kind of like a trello board for issues within each project/product so it's easy to track and maintain. I also use the "estimation" stuff too, which provides feedback on accuracy of predicting timeframes for issues allowing me to improve the predictions and surrounding processes.
My next steps are to allow users of my product to automatically submit issues to the project via email. I.e. they email support@me.com then I get an email to my inbox and it also automatically creates an "Unclassified" or "pending" issues in gitlab with a custom template and then I'd review the issue to determine if it's a new feature, enhancement or bug along with a priority. Once the issue is complete/fixed then an automated email would be sent back to the user/email who submitted the issue and tell them something like "the issue has been fixed/you will see this new feature in release X.X.X at date XX/XX/XXXX."
Organizing without attaching a label to it is important. Especially for small teams. I've grown to enjoy Agile sprints, but feel that - most like a programming language or framework - it depends on the project/team/environment. In this case, something like Waterfall may be more effective. Another good example is that, in Agile you also have Kanban, not just Scrum.
If the glove fits wear it... just make sure you get the job done by reaching milestones and setting goals.
I have worked on both. Agile & Waterfall.
When i joined the team, the team was following waterfall, Each enhancement, feature request was considered as a Change Request (CR) and one CR is assigned to an individual with a given deadline of 1-2 months depending upon the importance and type of work required. No daily statuses are required , you meet your team lead/client if their is any issue and everything is with you until you finish the requirement. The responsibility of complete CR is on you (Security of code (Manual, Automatic WebScan, Checkmarx, Sonar Cube), Performance of code, Code Review (IQA,EQA), Unit Test and at last Deployment). PS : Deploying the CR is also the responsibility of person working on it (Team is always ready to help. But, at last its your CR and you are the one leading everything).
After 1 yr we started migrating to Agile, and now from almost 1 yr we are following Agile.
In Agile the earlier CR is divided into small tasks (User Stories, Defect Stories, Data Management Stories) and assigned to individuals. Means now the entire team or many people are working on same CR. Deadlines are short and for user-stories (2 Weeks). Their are separate members who handle code security, and deployments. So, we only need to focus on development (+ Code Review, Test Cases :P ).
Their is daily status call and you need to tell the current status of US and issues you are facing.
Well for me , Agile works best. The same work is divided and completed quickly.
Tools : We are using in-house developed tool for all Agile activities. ( Used by fortune 500 companies :P ).
PS : Their may be certain things which we follows but, i have missed or may have certain deviations from perfect Agile .