Agile Web Development Process
Feature Planning Workshop
A feature planning workshop is essentially a brainstorming session. The participants should at least include developer's team manager and a person leading a project in your organization. Other developers, software users and other stakeholders could also add value. During the workshop the identified requirements are captured in the form of user stories and prioritized.
Estimate and Schedule
After the feature planning workshop, the developers estimate how long each user story will take to implement. Work is divided into one or two week cycles (iterations) and resources are allocated accordingly. You should then receive an estimate and an iteration schedule.
Weekly/Fortnightly Demonstration and Planning Meetings
Once the project is given the go ahead, you may want to meet developers again to plan the first iteration cycle - define goals for the iteration, clarify, detail and re-prioritize features. Then the development team goes away to write the code and tests while constantly collaborating with you to make sure they are building what you want.
At the end of the iteration, developers should demonstrate the completed features for that iteration. You should provide feedback and proceed to plan the second iteration in more detail. The process should keep repeating itself until the application is complete.
Completion
Once all the iterations are completed and you are happy with the result, the developers should deploy the final version of the application to your server. But the relationship should not end here - make sure they are there to support you if needed.
For more information on how to make sure your project runs smoothly, read 5 Ways To Keep a Web Project on The Rails.
