Introduction to Crystal Methods (III)：Incremental practice of the Crystal

I. Incremental Development Process

The crystal approach involves many specific practices, such as incremental development. In the crystal orange method and crystal Clear method, incremental development also includes many activities, which are:

• Staging
• Monitoring
• Revision and Review
• Parallelism and flux

Let’s learn more about these activities.

1. Staging

At this stage, the incremental plan for the next step is formulated. At this stage, developers need to plan for the next version, listing the projects to be completed from the first month to the last month. In addition, the development team will select the requirements to be achieved in the increment and make reasonable adjustments according to the delivery ability of the group.

2. Monitoring

Monitoring ensures that the progress is carried out according to the plan. In other words, it refers to the team's deliverables in the whole software development process, involving the growth and stability of the group. At different stages, the continuous progress of various stages can be measured, such as:

• Start: When the project work begins, the development team begins to develop a plan;
• Review 1: Reviewing the project plan and ensure that all key points are covered;
• Review 2: Monitoring the occurrence of coding and design analysis;
• Test: Once the coding is complete, the test requirements will appear. In turn, it is necessary to check whether the test is performed correctly;
• Delivery: After testing the function, it can be delivered to the customer. However, before that, the person in charge must check whether the delivered functions meet the customer's expectations;
• Stability stages：It refers to observing whether the project is stable enough;
• Feedback: This is a continuous process, which will last until after the project is delivered.

3. Revision and Review

Each increment and release has many iterations associated with it. The iteration includes the following activities:

• Construction: Developers do the design and coding;
• Demonstration and testing：The tester performs this phase;
• Review of the objectives of the increment: The developer reviews whether the current progress is working in the planned direction.

4. Parallelism and flux

Parallelism and flux mean that two jobs are performed at the same time. In other words, this means that when the team confirms that all deliverables are stable enough, the next task begins. Now, most units can process the work assigned to them in parallel at this stage.

5. Holistic Diversity Strategy

Since the teams applying the Crystal Clear method are generally very small, it does not require a diversification strategy. Therefore, all approaches other than the Crystal Clear follow an overall diversification strategy, which means that large teams need to be divided into smaller groups based on functionality and expertise. In a more profound sense, this idea is that a team should contain multiple functions.

6. Method Improvement

This is a basic technique for simplifying the crystal method. The method uses data from project interviews, workshops, and feedback to discover or define a new style or fine-tune an existing approach to crystal methods. The idea behind it is to fix or improve the current development process.

7. User Viewings

The Crystal method suggests that users should look at each delivered version of the product twice and eventually deliver the product. This, in turn, reduces the chance of checking or testing for errors. For large projects, the number of user views can be increased to 3 at a time.

8. Reflection Workshops

The crystal methods of most small projects (such as Crystal Clear and Crystal Orange) do not define whether to use specific technologies in their projects. They can not only adopt other popular methods, such as XP, Scrum, etc. but also use them to replace the Crystal.

The crystal method holds reflection workshops before and after each increment. These workshops aim to enable teams to learn from test results, feedback, and experience.

Unlike other methods, Crystal has a habit of adjusting projects and methods to people and budget: different ways are used for teams of various sizes. Crystal provides a clear idea of when to use which form. Therefore, using the Crystal method saves time and effort for the team.

II. Advantages and Disadvantages of the Crystal Method

1. Advantages

• Firstly, the crystal method is flexible and can be adjusted according to the project type, team size, and project needs;
• Second, it is the key to prioritizing the delivery of projects;
• Then, the project can have up to 10 team members;
• In addition, this method promotes effective team communication and helps team members learn from each other;
• Finally, the team usually prepares a fixed price contract, which helps determine the team size and plan according to the budget.

2. Disadvantages

• First, the principles to be followed may vary depending on the size of the team and the project, which will be difficult to understand;
• Second, it needs continuous communication, which is why it may not apply to projects with multiple work areas;
• Also, since planning and development do not depend on requirements, it becomes challenging to switch from one method to another in the middle of the project.

Therefore, the team applying the crystal method should consider whether the approach is flexible or not, plan, integrate the strengths of each family, and achieve the smooth delivery of products.