Spending the last week at work experience at Agile Collective has given us the insight on how agile development works when implementing websites. We both learned a range of information, such as how to create a website using a content management system, as well as how Agile Collective works as a cooperative.
From being able to attend a client meeting we were able to see how sprints (a period of continuous development) work when developing a website. We were then shown processes such as seeing how the team looked back at the previous sprint, where the team evaluated their progress, noting down what went well in the last 2 weeks and what could be improved on. Then we were able to see how the team planned the next sprint by using a Kanban board to assess the importance of tasks needed to be completed. This was definitely a valuable experience since we saw that the team, including the client, were able to make changes to the project after the experience of the last sprint.
Instead of the traditional way of development (specification then hand-off to development team) agile uses communication in order to closely work with the clients and to quickly design build and test, reducing time and cost. From the meeting, we saw how tasks are broken down into individual steps, given a difficult and priority rating, created, and then given to the client in order to test and add content. This has shown us how important communication in order to efficiently create products and not allow misunderstandings.
One of the main surprises when we first came to Agile Collective was the use of Drupal, a content management system. Learning Drupal has been very useful as it allows the creation of websites without having to build them from the ground up. It allows for many useful features such as automatically creating a format to make pages look consistent and reducing the need to copy code to each page in order to keep the format consistent. Furthermore, since Drupal is open source, many people have created additional modules that you can import and use. This showed us that the web development community is very friendly and supportive as they are willing to create modules and leave them open for others to used.
Overall it has been a very enjoyable experience and we wish the best to the whole team at Agile!
Abdullah Iqbal and James Zhao are Year 12 work experience students.