Part 2: Agile
Agile
Timeboxed, iterative approach to software delivery that builds software incrementally from the start of the project, instead of trying to deliver it all at once near the end. It works by breaking down projects into little bits of user functionally called user stories, prioritizing them, and then continuously delivering them in short (1-4) week cycles called iterations. An approach with a set of methods, or frameworks that are optimized to help with specific problems that project teams run into, and kept simple so they are relatively straightforward to implement. Each of those methodologies or frameworks consists of practices, tools, and techniques that are optimized to make them as easy as possible to adopt
Manifesto for agile software development
Values
Individual and interaction over processes and tools
Working software over comprehensive documentation
Customer collaboration over contract negotiation
Responding to change by following a plan
Principles
Customer satisfaction Deliver frequently
Attention to excellence Welcome change
Measure by working product Simplicity
Motivated individuals Working together daily
Self-organizing teams Sustainable pace
Face-to-face communication Reflect and adjust
Agile mindset
Creating and responding to change in uncertain environments.
Set of attitudes supporting an agile working environment including (respect, collaboration, improvement, focus on delivering value, and the ability to adapt to change).
Focused on helping team members share information, which makes it much easier for them to make important project decisions rather than just relying on a boss or project manager to make those decisions. Being agile isn’t simply a matter of using a certain set of tools or practices or following a specific methodology, it involves (a new mindset, and way of thinking, based on the decision of the Agile views manifesto including values and principles).
Project life cycles
Predictive life cycle (Traditional- Plan driven)
planning occurring upfront, then executing in a single pass; a sequential process. Takes advantage of high certainty around firm requirements, a stable team, and low risk. Predictive projects do not typically deliver business value until the end of the project.
Iterative life cycle
Allows feedback for unfinished work to improve and modify that work. Projects benefit from iterative life cycles when complexity is high, when the project incurs frequent changes, or when the scope is subject to differing stakeholders’ views of the desired final product. Iterative life cycles improve the product or result through successive prototypes or proofs of concept. Each new prototype yields new stakeholder feedback and team insights. Then, the team incorporates the new information by repeating one or more project activities in the next cycle. Iteration help identify and reduce uncertainty in the project. Iterative life cycles may take longer because they are optimized for learning rather than speed of delivery.
Incremental life cycle
Provides finished deliverables that customers may be able to use immediately. Some projects optimize for speed of delivery. Many businesses and initiatives cannot afford to wait for customers everything in these cases, customers are willing to receive a subset of the overall solution. This frequent delivery of smaller deliverables is called an incremental life cycle.
Agile life cycle (Change driven)
An approach that is both iterative and incremental to refine work items and deliver frequently. The agile life cycle combines both iterative and incremental approaches to adapt to high degrees of change and deliver project value more often. In particular, customer satisfaction increases with early and continuous delivery of valuable products. Moreover, an incremental deliverable that is functional and provides value is the primary measure of progress
Hybrid life cycle
Combination of predictive, iterative, incremental, and agile. Not necessary to use a single approach for an entire project. Projects often combine elements of different life cycles to achieve certain goals. One of the challenges while transitioning to agile is department silos. While transitioning, Organizational readiness must be improved by addressing impediments and agile. PM should confirm team capabilities before introducing adaptive tools.
Scrum Framework
Scrum is an agile process that allows us to focus on delivering the highest business value in the shortest time. It allows us to rapidly and repeatedly inspect actual working software (every two weeks to one month). The business sets the priorities. Teams self-organize to determine the best way to deliver the highest priority features. Every two weeks to a month anyone can see real working software and decide to release it as is or continue to enhance it for another time. Includes three pillars. Transparency (common understanding of what done means in a scrum project (we all know what is going on). Inspection (reviewing the project to determine the completeness of the project; finding self-organize the root cause of variances. (Check your work as you do it). Adaption (adjustment to the scrum process to mitigate problems or bad trends (ok to change).
Scrum ceremonies (Events, meetings)
Sprint (iteration) planning meeting
Evaluate the product backlog, select a sprint (iteration) goal, plan how to achieve the sprint goal, create sprint (iteration) backlog tasks from prioritized product backlog items, and estimate spring backlog and tasks in hours. (8 hours depends on the dependingweekThe )
Scrum meeting (Daily standup)
The 15-minute time-boxed meeting, daily scrum is held every day at the same time and location, the daily scrum is for the development team only, and the development, and what we can call attendees should stand, during the meeting, each team member answers three questions: what have you done since yesterday? What are you planning to do today? Do you have any problems preventing you from accomplishing your goal? Any blockers? Enhancing communication between team members and the flow of development.
Sprint (iteration) review meeting
Hosted at the end of every sprint, attendees will be the development team, the product owner, the scrum master, and sometimes other project stakeholders. The development team will demo the work created in the increment. The group will decide if “Done” has been achieved. The development team and the product owner will discuss the sprint and the remaining items in the product backlog.
Sprint (iteration) Retrospective
After the sprint review, but before the next sprint planning meeting. Lesson learned and opportunities for improvement. Review of the product owner’s feedback about the last iteration. They discuss what worked well, what did not work well, and what we can improve upon for next time. When an organization is transitioning, and The scope of the gathering adjusting stage to agile, if any problem occurs, they must discuss it here.
Sprint
Time-box of 1 month or less during which a “done”, usable, and potentially product increment is created by the development team. During the sprint, no changes are made that would affect the sprint goal, and no changes to the development team members. Quality goals do not decrease. The scope may be clarified and re-negotiated between the product owner and development team as more is learned. Scope creep can be avoided because of (the time-box).
Scum Roles
Product owner
Has a vision for the project, ensuring the value of the work the development team performs, gathering input from end-users, customers, team, and other stakeholders, responsible for prioritizing the product backlog, adjusting maximizing features, and priority every iteration as needed.
Scrum Master
Responsible for the scrum process, making sure it’s used correctly and maximizing its benefits, clearly communicating vision, goals, and product backlog items to the development team, maximizing facilitating the daily scrum meetings and facilitating, and becoming responsible for removing any obstacle (blockers) that are brought up by the team during those meetings, protect the team by making sure they do not over commit themselves to what they can achieve during a sprint (iteration), coaches the product owner. If the client has a lack of technical knowledge, the PM should engage the client in every iteration. Ensure the team has a common understanding of agile. project coordinator who reports to you and understands the business linkage with product features is your best replacement during your absence from the Scrum team
Development Team
A cross-functional group of people responsible for managing itself to develop the product, teams are self-organizing; organize and manage their work, and everyone on the project works together to complete the set of work they have collectively committed to complete within a sprint. Accountability belongs to the development team as a whole. When the team doesn’t know about the priority of two packages, they should consult the product owner. If the work exceeds their capacity, they should collaborate with the product owner to remove or modify items. And the task is complex they must work as a cross-functional team. The project team must handle documenting tasks.
Scrum Artifacts
Product Backlog
Master list of high-level requirements prioritized by the product owner, a living document that is maintained and posted visibly, when a project is initiated, there is no comprehensive, time-consuming effort to write down all foreseeable tasks, the product backlog evolves as the product and the environment in which it will be used evolves. The product backlog is dynamic; it constantly changes to identify what the product needs to be appropriate, competitive, and useful, items in the product backlog are re-prioritized at the start of each sprint.
Sprint (iteration) backlog
list to be completed during the sprint. This list is determined in the iteration/sprint planning meeting, if work is unclear, define a sprint backlog with a larger amount of time, then break it down later. Any team member can add, delete or change the sprint backlog items. The team is self-organizing- team members sign up for tasks that aren’t assigned. Each task identifies who is responsible for doing the work and the estimated amount of work remaining on the task on any given day during the sprint.
Product increment (Shippable product)
Product roadmap/ Product vision statement/ Release plan
A high-level visual summary of the product of the project that includes goals, milestones, and potential deliverables.
Grooming the backlog (backlog refinement)
Refinement is a way of progressively elaborating the backlog. Thus, the backlog remains current and reflects the needs of the stakeholder The product owner and the scrum teams meet regularly during the sprint to refine the backlog, it needs to be kept continuously updated, prioritizing or refining the backlog is called Grooming. The meetings help in adding new stories, removing irrelevant user stories, prioritizing/ reprioritizing the user stories, and splitting large stories into smaller stories. A prioritized list of backlog items is produced during a backlog refinement meeting. Which occurs before the sprint planning meeting. The product owner then represents the updated backlog items during the sprint planning meeting.
Minimum viable product (MVP)
A version of a product with just enough features to be usable by early customers who can then provide feedback for the future. With MVP, all stakeholders have an opportunity to see and experience some form of project outcomes. Ideas and concepts become reality, even if only at the bare minimum. Establishing MVP inspires the team to achieve that aim. Minimum viable product ignites short-termed urgency and a feeling of accomplishment. All new required regulations must be included.
Scrum of scrums (Meta-Scrum)
Used in environments that have multiple scrum teams. It is a time-boxed session in which a representative from each team shares high-level updates on their respective team’s work and articulates their progress and impediments. It should follow the various team’s daily standup, so the latest information is communicated.
Lean
An agile method used primarily in manufacturing that focuses on achieving outcomes with little or no waste such as minimizing work in progress and JIT planning. The life cycle lends itself well to teams delivering project-based work with quickly evolving requirements
User story
The tool used in agile software development captures a description of a software feature from an end-user perspective. It describes the type of user, what they want, and why, it helps to create a simplified description of a requirement. User stories are written on index cards or sticky notes, they are the items in the product backlog. For example (As a customer, I want a shopping cart feature, so that I can easily purchase items online.
Story points
Units of measurement for expressing the overall size of a user story and its associated effort, show how hard it is to implement a user story, this could depend on (Complexity, extent of unknowns, effort, and time). High Value And High Risk FIRST.
Smallest story (Story A-2)/ Medium-sized story (B-5)/ Large-sized story (story C-13)
T-shirt size (S, M, L, XL, 2XL)
Team velocity
The sum of the story point sizes for the features completed in this iteration, allows the team to plan its next capacity more accurately by looking at its historical performance. To calculate the estimated duration for a project we divide the story remaining by the velocity of the team and then multiply the number by the sprint duration. When the velocity drop because of the replacement of team members they must back to forming and storming stages.
T-shirt size (S, M, L, XL, 2XL)
Planning poker
Each team member of the team receives a deck of cards numbered for example 1,2,3,5,8,13 and 18. This can be extended as required. The product owner reads each story card and answers the team’s questions, if any. Each team member assesses the effort for the story and selects a story point card based on relative sizing. When requested by the scrum master, everyone holds up the numbered card with their estimation at the same time. If there are outliers, team members should explain why their estimates are high or low. After discussion, the team members re-estimate until a consensus is reached.
Spike
The time-boxed period is designated to reduce uncertainty by learning about a feature, technology, or process. This helps to better estimate and develop an upcoming feature or fix defects. It helps in reducing project risks and should require minimal time and effort, not more than two days, exploring an approach, and investigating an issue, the story may be too big to estimate appropriately and the team may use a spike to analyze the implied behavior so they can split the story into estimable pieces.
Information radiators
Proactively manage the stakeholder expectation, provide transparency in work being performed, and provide the team’s daily progress, work quality, impediments, and risks.
Examples (Burnup charts, Burndown charts, Kanban or Task boards, and Impediment logs).
Burnup chart
Tool used to track how much work has been completed, and show the total amount of work for a project or iteration. When new work is added the total work line clearly shows the increase in scope and total work.
Burndown chart
A simple tool that tracks a team’s work progress against the amount of time remaining to complete the work. The chart shows the ideal rate of effort needed to reach work completion by a set of data. Using a burndown chart helps you to communicate progress, track remaining works, plan for future events, and reach work completion on time. When the actual line is below the planned one, means having enough bandwidth available to finish the job within the sprint duration. So, the team should focus on this area to identify what had a positive impact.
Impediment logs
Any factor that prevents the team from achieving its sprint goal. The prime responsibility of scrum masters is to quickly resolve the impediments. Those impediments are showcased impediments logs, to give an overall view of impediments that are resolved and outstanding.
Feature chart.
This will show how requirements grew during the project. It plots time on the X axis vs. features (# of features remaining, # of features complete, and # total of features) on the Y axis
KANBAN Method (Visual Board)
Japanese word meaning “signboard”, Originated in Toyota. It is a popular framework used to implement agile and software development. It requires real-time communication of capacity and full transparency of work. Work items are represented visually on a Kanban board, allowing team members to see the state of every piece of work at any time. Using cards, physical or electronic boards can track work as it progresses across various stages or categories.
To Do, in progress, Done. The principles of Kanban are to visualize the workflow, limit work in progress, manage the workflow, make process policies clear, and aim for collaborative improvements. KANBAN pull system: Work item completed, next item pulled into WIP (work in progress), not a real need for iterations. In the Kanban method, it is more important to complete work than it is to start new work, there is no value derived from work that is not completed so the team works together to implement and adhere to the WIP limits a get each piece of work through the system to “Done “.
Kanban Scrum
Time-boxed iterations are optional Time boxed iterations are an essential part
All team members own the board product owner, scrum master, the development team
Release continuous delivery Release at the end of each sprint
Change can happen at any time Teams should not make changes during the sprint
Limits by number of cards Limits per iteration
Extreme programming (XP)
An agile software development method that leads to higher quality software, stresses customer satisfaction, more frequent releases in shorter cycles, and responsiveness to changing customer requirements.
XP Core Values (Communication. Respect. Courage. Feedback. Simplicity)
XP Team Roles (Coach. Customer. Programmer. Testers).
Servant leadership
Agile approaches emphasize servant leadership to empower teams. It is the practice of leading through service to the team, by focusing on addressing the needs of the team to enable the highest possible team performance. The role of a servant leader is to facilitate the team’s discovery and definition of agile. Manage relationships to build communication and coordination across the organization. Educate stakeholders about why and how to be agile, support the team through mentoring, and encouragement, celebrate with the team and external group, help the team with technical project management activities, remove impediments to progress, and shield the team from interruptions. Servant leaders work in this order
Purpose Work with the team to define the “Why” or purpose so they can engage and coalesce around the goal of the project. People: Once the purpose is established, encourage the team to create an environment where everyone can succeed. Process: Do not plan on following the “Perfect” agile process, but instead, look for the results. The team delivers finished value.
Stay tuned for Part 3, All The Luck with your PMI-PMP Journey!