Agile Environment: Product Owner

I have worked closely with a waterfall environment and currently am an active member of an agile environment at my current employer. For the most part, I know the ins and outs of the agile environment from acting in the role of Product Owner. As the Product Owner I work directly with the Scrum Master and developers to prioritize the work that needs to be done to achieve desired results for the business. Not only do I prioritize the work to be done, I also have to make critical decisions on when to engage the business and when to consider the development efforts releasable for the business. It’s a fun and fast paced role but I have seen, that if one member isn’t doing their job it can make the entire project crash. Let’s take a quick look …show more content…
The requirements are drafted and then usually take months to develop with the end users seeing final product at the time of production release. A few factors that make the waterfall approach less desirable is that when the project runs out of time and money that testing can be cut short causing quality to suffer. Also, because software isn’t available until towards the end of the project if changes are find the waterfall project isn’t good at handling the change. A change to the original requirements would cause for additional requirements to be drafted which can lead to more months before the final product is production ready.
To sum up the difference the Waterfall approach goes from one step of the phase to the other where agile goes back and forth to ensure all aspects are covered. Please reference the image below from Segue Technologies where it clearly illustrates the flow of waterfall vs. …show more content…
Scrums are usually 15 min stand up meetings where the scrum master, product owner, and the dev team meet to discuss what the team worked on yesterday, what they are working on today, and what challenges they are facing. This allows for the team to quickly get answers to questions and enage the team on issues that they are having during development. Instead of writing all the requirements upfront, small scale user stories are created of all the items that the team could ever want to design. Then the Product Owner takes the backlog and breaks off the items that needs to be completed into rational chunks to allow the development work to start. All during development, the Product Owner has access to the dev team to see the work being developed which allows the business to begin coming up with new ideas and concepts early in the development