by Jason Gardner (ed.)
Migration projects are complex, requiring an enormous level of commitment from everyone on the team. But at the end of the day, these massive overhauls are more about results than processes. When it comes to sprint reviews, however, the traditional measures of displayable progress can make things a little complicated. But don’t worry – there are ways to navigate these challenges and still have a productive, informative sprint review!
Use User Stories
User stories are a step-by-step approach to outlining the user’s experience with your product. Rather than focusing on the implementation of features, we outline the user’s needs and objectives and identify what features they will use to achieve their goals. This means they are highly tailored to the user and serve as a guide throughout the entire migration project. Using user stories as the basis for our sprint review means we can track progress from a user’s perspective. We can demonstrate what we’ve accomplished and what still needs to be done, all while keeping the user’s needs in mind.
Build a Demo Environment
Building the environment that will house the application during testing and demos as a separate entity can be very helpful. It can allow the stakeholders to interact with the new application in a controlled environment and fully understand how it will look and feel in the end. This demo environment can function as a timeline to track progress and show iterations of development. It is also helpful for future testing environments.
Showcase Interfaces and Interactions
In migration projects, very often, progress is not reflected in a visual sense. Instead, progress is made behind the scenes in the application’s foundation and infrastructure. However, displaying success in an interface and interaction will help bridge the gap between the work that has been done and the progress shown at the sprint review meeting. It is also very helpful for user feedback. The more progress can be demonstrated visually, the easier it is for stakeholders to understand.
Highlight Continuous Integration and Agile Practices
A migration project is perfect for adopting agile methodology and continuous integration. These practices help in making sure everything is on track. Using a scrum board we can track issues and progress on every story and issue with ease. This practice can help identify the areas where you need to focus for the next sprint. Highlighting the attention on agile practices and continuous integration helps stakeholders recognize that the project is progressing smoothly.
Conclusion
While migration projects are definitely more complicated than some other development processes, we shouldn’t let that discourage us from using proven agile strategies and tactics to stay on track. Instead, we can use user stories and demos to showcase development progress, highlighting a user-centered focus and making the progress more visible. We can also showcase interfaces and interactions, as well as highlight continuous integration to prove progress made between sprints. By using these strategies, we can make the sprint review process more productive in migration and other complicated development projects.
