Agile s/w development process

Characteristics of Scrum:
A product backlog of prioritized work to be done; It is a set of requirements that you would implement in your product

Completion of a fixed set of backlog items in a series of short iterations or sprints; - Sometimes you call it as a sprint backlog - you will identify a set of requirements that you implement in a perticular sprint.

A brief daily meeting or scrum, at which progress is explained, upcoming work is described and impediments are raised. - This is a all hands meeting. You will have the architect, developers, testers and the scrum master sitting in the same room and discussiing about the progress and the issues. The best part is - every one is involved in the discussion and you can get on the spot clarifications.

A brief sprint planning session in which the backlog items for the sprint will be defined.

A brief sprint retrospective, at which all team members reflect about the past sprint. This happens at the end of each sprint. The team members retrospects the performance of the team - issues faced in the current sprint - improvements needed and all. This retrospective meeting is very important as the minutes of this meeting can be considered for planning the next sprint

Currently we are following Scrum in our projects - and we are able to get a shippable product by the end of every SPRINT


XP - Extreme Programming:
This is another agile development method that is mostly being used in conjunction with SCRUM. This method talks about the implementing best practices in the development cycles.