Phases of an agile project

There are two tracks of the agile project: discovery and delivery. Workflows are handed between these two phases as insights are gained and software is delivered. Within each track are phases, which occur in repeated cycles.

Discovery Track

The discovery track is where you connect with your users, understand their problems, and validate any assumptions or solutions you arrive at. It happens continuously alongside development, but also sequentially with the insights and ideas you generate informing the delivery track.

Discovery Phase

This phase is typically at the beginning of a project engagement and also repeated throughout the product lifecycle. This phase is used to understand the people and systems who may be impacted by and involved in what you build, their needs, what problem that needs to be solved, and what may affect your work - including policy, legislation, and technology. You will begin to test a wide variety of solution ideas in this phase so you can narrow those down before moving into alpha.

Prototyping Phase

In the Prototyping phase, you will develop robust prototypes and continue to test those out with users, clients, and your team. This is where you will implement what you have imagined, challenge your ideas, and determine whether to move forward with them.

Delivery Track

Delivery is where you implement lessons learned in discovery. As the product is iterated on, its new state goes back to discovery to be assessed.

Beta Phase

Beta is where you take your prioritized solution from Prototyping and start building it to be production-ready. This is the time to test the working application with a subset of users in a production-like environment, and understand how it will function when live.

Live Phase

The Live phase is where you will deliver the service to your users and focus on maintaining and iterating on it.

Handing off your service

What to do when your time working on the service is over.

Table of contents

• Discovery Phase
• How the Prototyping Phase Works
• How the Beta Phase Works
• How to Go Live
• Handing Off Your Service