Agile Essentials You Always Wanted To Know

A Beginner's Guide to Scrum, Agile Planning, Execution, Project Management & Agile Methodologies

Vibrant Publishers, Kalpesh Ashar

• Publisher: Vibrant Publishers
• Year: 2020
• eBook ISBN: 9781636510064
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business Strategy
• Index: Business

• Agile Manifesto Principles and Values
• Scrum Pillars, Roles, and Artifacts
• Agile Planning and Execution
• Agile Project Management

A blueprint to understanding agile methodologies and mastering agile project management.

Agile Essentials You Always Wanted To Know is a complete, compact and easily understandable guide for anyone wanting to learn the fundamentals of Agile.

Agile methodology can be greatly beneficial for many projects and organizations. But what exactly is Agile and is it always beneficial? Agile Essentials You Always Wanted To Know provides a primary understanding of the Agile development methodology, when it is appropriate to use it, and the commonly used Agile practices. By understanding Agile through this book, you will be able to adapt to the changing project requirements and complete your projects faster. If you want to optimize the workflow and learn to efficiently manage the various stages of a project, this book is the resource you need.

You will gain an understanding of the following concepts from this book:

• An overall understanding of Agile, its methodologies and common practices
• An introduction to Scrum, a key Agile methodology
• The various aspects of Agile planning as well as execution
• The applicability of Agile in development and operations
• The concepts and practices in Agile tracking and reporting

Agile Overview

In this chapter we shall look at what is Agile and why it is needed. We shall also learn the pre-requisites to use Agile, its main characteristics, and the myths around it. Here we shall take a brief look at the various popular Agile methodologies. Key learnings: The meaning of Agile Background of Agile Applicability of Agile The Agile Manifesto Agile characteristics and the myths around it The most popular Agile methodologies – Scrum, XP, Lean, and Kanban

Agile is a word that has gained immense popularity in the recent decade or so. It is quite likely that you have heard about it from your colleagues, friends, customers, or other professional acquaintances. It is also quite possible that you have been involved in Agile projects yourself. Whichever be the case, there is a general realization out there that Agile is the way to go for executing work on a lot of projects and operations in future.

Even though Agile as a term has been used by several people, its understanding might still be hazy in their minds. In this chapter we shall try to clarify what Agile is and what it is not, where it is needed, why it is needed, its basic characteristics, and methodologies.

1.1 What is Agile?

Agile is simply a concept that states how work should be done. This work can be a part of a project or regular operations. The concept of Agile has several different implementations, which are called methodologies. These methodologies can either be applied individually to work or together in combination. Most common Agile implementations are a combination of several Agile methodologies.

Agile is not recommended for all kind of work. There are two pre-requisites that need to be satisfied to get the real benefits of Agile. There pre-requisites are:

1. Work has high uncertainty in scope – Scope means the work that needs to be done on the project or operations. In several cases, scope is quite clear in the minds of the customer and other stakeholders. However, in most cases, the customer only knows some part of the problem. Hence, the solution providers are asked to take up a few known requirements to start off and learn as they go. In such cases, scope is not clear in the beginning and it evolves as the work progresses. This is especially common on projects, as scope on projects is progressively elaborated – clarified as the work progresses.
2. Work involves “knowledge workers” – The term “knowledge workers” stands for highly skilled resources. Work that requires such resources is best positioned to apply Agile concepts, as one of the key characteristics of Agile is to give a lot of decision-making authority to the team. Hence, the team needs to have the required skills to take proper decisions.

1.2 Need for Agile

Work was happening in the past even without Agile. Then the question that comes to mind is – why do we need Agile? In order to understand the answer to this question, let’s look at how work happened in the past and what were the major drawbacks of that approach.

The traditional approach to perform work was to gather and document all the requirements in the beginning, plan all of them at once, and then begin execution.

This is depicted in the diagram below.

This kind of approach is termed as a “Waterfall Model” in software industry. However, similar model was being used in several industries, where each stage was done completely before moving to the next stage. When using this delivery approach, the customer gets to see the final deliverables only during later part of testing or during delivery stage. If at that time the customer does not like some of the deliverables and requests major changes, then one needs to go back to the previous stages of requirements, design, or development to incorporate them. This could involve a lot of rework, which involves time, effort, and money. Hence, making changes using this approach was quite cumbersome. This approach is sometimes even referred to as the “Big Bang Approach”, as all the deliverables are shown to the customer together at a later part of the project.

One other issue that arises with the above sequential approach is that if the customer needs to request for changes anywhere during the stages, for example, during development or testing, then once again that could involve a lot of rework by going back to the previous stages.

As we discuss above, handling changes could be quite a challenge in the sequential model. Due to this, the team is most often reluctant to incorporate changes in the work. This means that the team is not customer centric (does not concentrate on the customer’s benefit). As appalling as this may sound, it is quite true.

This is where we enter the world of Agile. The main reason why Agile came into existence is in order to manage changes better. The term Agile comes from the term “Agility”, which means our ability to change course rapidly and easily. Agile keeps customer benefit as the top priority by “embracing” changes. When we apply Agile, we always concentrate only on delivering what is beneficial to the customer.

The diagram below describes how work is done in Agile.

Work on Agile is done in short cycles called iterations, where each iteration consists of all the stages. The total work is completed by going through several such small cycles, each cycle delivering some part of the functionality.

1.3 Agile Characteristics

The key characteristics of Agile are as follows:

1. Incremental – The entire system is divided into pieces and built piece by piece. For example, if we have requirements for building various features of a system, and each feature is divided into sub-features, we will build all sub-features of one feature before moving to the next feature. This is shown in the diagram below:

2. Iterative – A few initial parts of the system are built and improved upon as we get customer feedback. The entire system is built little by little and continuously improved until it is acceptable. For example, if we have requirements for building various features of a system, and each feature is divided into sub-features, we will build a few sub-features of multiple features before moving to the rest of the sub-features. This is shown in the diagram below:

3. Adaptive – Being able to change course rapidly and easily is one of the key characteristics and the foundation of Agile.

The main difference between traditional approach and Agile approach is as shown in the below diagram.

Note: You may have noticed that Test is coming in an earlier stage in Agile. This is not a mistake but by design. We shall see later in this book a concept called Test Driven Development, that is commonly practiced in Agile.

1.4 Agile Myths

Over the years as Agile became popular, there have been several myths that have also crept in about it. Some of them could also be due to the human inertia to change. Here are these myths:

1. It is a silver bullet that ensures success of a project – It is seen that some people think that if their project is failing, they should introduce Agile and all the issues will get resolved and success will be guaranteed. This is not true. Agile does help in improving project success, but only when the pre-requisites (two pre-requisites described in an earlier section) are satisfied. However, it does not guarantee success.
2. It does not require documentation – Agile is about being customer centric by doing only value-added things and cutting waste. This means that critical documentation would still be made, but those documents that are less useful and seen as a waste, might not be made. So, making a statement that no documentation is needed is incorrect.
3. There is no need to plan – Planning in Agile is done in increments (parts) instead of all upfront planning. Planning might not be as detailed as in the traditional approach, but it does exist and done only to the extent that the team deems adequate.
4. It does not need a disciplined approach – There are several values, principles, and practices defined in various Agile methodologies that we follow. Some of them are stringent, but most of them are quite flexible and are left to the team to decide how and which ones to apply. This does not mean that it is not a disciplined approach; it is simply more flexible in allowing selection and implementation of the approach.
5. It involves a lot of rework – This is exactly the opposite, as we get customer feedback for each iteration and build further. Due to this early feedback, the rework is in fact lesser than in the traditional approach.

1.5 Agile Manifesto

The work we do in Agile must adhere to the Agile Manifesto. This document was prepared by the founding fathers of Agile, and it consists of 4 values and 12 principles.

1.5.1 Agile Mindset

The Agile Mindset is the way ...

Table of contents

• Introduction
• Agile Overview
• Chapter Summary
• Scrum
• Chapter Summary
• Agile Planning
• Chapter Summary
• Agile Execution
• Chapter Summary
• Agile Tracking and Reporting
• Chapter Summary
• Agile Project Management
• Chapter Summary
• Glossary