Obsidian’s agile development methodology include three principles: 

• Lean Thinking – Traditional application development approaches include significant waste in the duplication of information across documents, slack time for reviews, and long independent test periods. Our agile teams produce only the documentation needed. The documentation is assessed and code is tested as it is developed to minimize final review and testing time.

• Continuous Improvement – We accomplish this through retrospectives that take place regularly, where our team reflects on process improvements and identifies actions to improve the quality of the product and the velocity of the team.

• Transparency – Processes, decisions, user stories, burn down charts, and other key information about the development effort are available to all stakeholders.

• SAFe (Scaled Agile Framework) - is a set of organization and workflow patterns intended to guide the enterprise in scaling lean and agile practices (Kanban, SCRUM, and scaling frameworks) while enhancing business agility and enabling customer centricity.

 

Obsidian has a mature practice within the following agile methods and frameworks:

• Kanban - this development and delivery model works as a fan-in and fan-out process where the development team pull user stories from an intake board and funnels them through staged development until complete

• Scrum - this development and delivery cadence focuses on a sprint and meeting structure that includes planning (priorities identified), commitment (decision on the work that is accomplished in a sprint), and communication (through daily standups for commitment status, challenges, strategies).

• DaD (Disciplined Agile Delivery) - this framework enables the SCRUM team ‘sprint zero’ to take flight, commonly utilized for base platform technology and architecture tradeoffs, as well as programming language, build tools, and test decision making.

• LeSS (Large Scale Scrum) - this development within a SCRUM team-of-teams framework enables large-scale planning, typically involving a SCRUM comprised of the SCRUM team leads at or near the end of the SCRUM team sprints. 

 

Obsidian uses cloud-based tools to manage our projects and focuses on foundational practices used by all of our agile teams that include the following:

• Frequent Delivery – Projects deliver usable products to users at frequent sprint intervals to meet mission needs

• Time-boxed Iterations – We have fixed-length, 2-week iterations as a standard cadence for planning, completing, and demonstrating functionality

• User Stories – These are our basic unit of planning, executing, and tracking work, with user stories being defined as small, independent, and testable units of functionality

• Product Owner – Each project has a representative for the business integrated with the team with the authority to make timely decisions for development, prioritization, and acceptance

• Release Planning – We conduct release planning exercises that culminate in release planning reviews (RPRs)

• Iteration Reviews – We facilitate reviews at the end of each iteration to demonstrate and test functionality to solicit feedback from stakeholders

• Retrospectives – We hold meetings at the end of each iteration to reflect on our team’s performance and identify opportunities for improvement

• Continuous Testing – We use automated tools to test user stories against acceptance criteria in various test environments during the iteration the stories are developed

 

Cybersecurity – We train our developers according to NIST's National Initiative for Cybersecurity Education (NICE) guidelines and include security requirements when developing user stories. We use automated security testing tools as part of our continuous testing.