Product Improvement Plan | Agile Development

The purpose of this assignment is to think about product improvement in terms of the development resources required. This will be in support of a discussion of agile methods in class.

For a short tutorial on agile, watch this video. (You may also find this Wikipedia entry useful
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agile_software_development ) Links to an external site.

Links to an external site.

Consider your focal product. (You can change it for this assignment if you'd like.)

Develop a list of at least 12 product improvements. These should vary in complexity -- and can be very simple (e.g., change a navigation scheme or design elements) or very complex (e.g., change  the approach to the product entirely).

FIrst, rank order these improvements in terms of their impact on user satisfaction. That is, if this improvement were fully implemented, how much would it improve the benefit the product delivers to the customer.

Next, estimate the relative technical effort required to implement the improvements. For some of you, this will be easy. For those with little experience in software development, you will have to use your judgment and do your best. You can use hours of effort, or some arbitrary units like "points" to estimate relative effort.

Finally, assign these improvements to "sprint-sized" buckets for the application of an agile development process. Assume the sprints are two weeks in duration, unless you know the organization responsible for the product uses a different cadence, in which case you may use the corresponding sprint duration. You will also need to assume a team size. You can assume whatever team size you'd like, but if you don't have any information on the team for the product, assume it's comprised of two full-time software engineers. (Again, do your best, if this is not something you've ever done.)

Deliver a one-page PDF document showing the "sprint buckets" in order of target completion, and containing a label for the improvement, a short description of the improvement, your importance estimate, and your time estimate. This can be presented in the form a simple table with a set of rows assigned to each "sprint bucket."