🏃‍♂️Agile Project Management Unit 1 – Intro to Agile Project Management

What's Agile All About?

• Agile is an iterative approach to project management and software development that helps teams deliver value to customers faster and with fewer headaches
• Focuses on delivering working software incrementally rather than all at once at the end of a project
• Emphasizes collaboration, flexibility, and rapid response to change over following a rigid, predefined plan
• Prioritizes individuals and interactions, working software, customer collaboration, and responding to change
• Aims to deliver high-quality software that meets customer needs through adaptive planning, early delivery, and continuous improvement
• Encourages face-to-face communication and collaboration among team members and stakeholders
• Promotes sustainable development practices that enable teams to maintain a constant pace indefinitely

Key Agile Principles and Values

• Customer satisfaction through early and continuous delivery of valuable software is a top priority
• Welcome changing requirements, even late in development, and harness change for the customer's competitive advantage
• Deliver working software frequently, from a couple of weeks to a couple of months, with a preference for the shorter timescale
• Business people and developers must work together daily throughout the project
• Build projects around motivated individuals, give them the environment and support they need, and trust them to get the job done
• The most efficient and effective method of conveying information to and within a development team is face-to-face conversation
• Working software is the primary measure of progress
• Agile processes promote sustainable development, enabling sponsors, developers, and users to maintain a constant pace indefinitely
• Continuous attention to technical excellence and good design enhances agility
• Simplicity, the art of maximizing the amount of work not done, is essential
• The best architectures, requirements, and designs emerge from self-organizing teams
• At regular intervals, the team reflects on how to become more effective, then tunes and adjusts its behavior accordingly

Agile vs Traditional Project Management

• Agile is iterative and incremental, while traditional project management (waterfall) is linear and sequential
• Agile emphasizes flexibility and adaptability, while traditional project management follows a fixed plan
• Agile delivers working software in short iterations (sprints), while traditional project management delivers the entire project at the end
• Agile involves close collaboration between the development team and the customer, while traditional project management often keeps them separate
• Agile embraces change and allows for requirements to evolve, while traditional project management aims to avoid changes to the initial plan
• Agile focuses on delivering value to the customer, while traditional project management focuses on delivering the project on time, within budget, and to the original specifications
• Agile relies on self-organizing, cross-functional teams, while traditional project management has a hierarchical structure with defined roles and responsibilities

Popular Agile Frameworks

• Scrum
  • Iterative and incremental framework for managing complex projects
  • Consists of roles (Product Owner, Scrum Master, Development Team), events (Sprint Planning, Daily Scrum, Sprint Review, Sprint Retrospective), and artifacts (Product Backlog, Sprint Backlog, Increment)
• Kanban
  • Visual system for managing work as it moves through a process
  • Focuses on visualizing workflow, limiting work in progress, managing flow, making process policies explicit, and continuously improving
• Extreme Programming (XP)
  • Emphasizes frequent releases, continuous integration, pair programming, test-driven development, and close customer collaboration
• Lean Software Development
  • Applies lean manufacturing principles to software development
  • Focuses on eliminating waste, amplifying learning, deciding as late as possible, delivering as fast as possible, empowering the team, building integrity, and seeing the whole
• Crystal
  • Family of lightweight, adaptable methodologies that emphasize people, communication, and flexibility
  • Includes Crystal Clear, Crystal Yellow, Crystal Orange, and others, based on project size and criticality

Roles in Agile Teams

• Product Owner
  • Represents the stakeholders and is responsible for maximizing the value of the product
  • Defines and prioritizes the Product Backlog, ensures that the team understands the items in the backlog, and makes the final decision on what gets built
• Scrum Master
  • Facilitates the Scrum process and helps the team adhere to Scrum theory, practices, and rules
  • Removes impediments to the team's progress, coaches the team on self-organization and cross-functionality, and shields the team from external interferences
• Development Team
  • Consists of professionals who do the work of delivering a potentially releasable Increment of "Done" product at the end of each Sprint
  • Self-organizing, cross-functional, and accountable for delivering the product
• Stakeholders
  • Individuals or groups who have an interest in the project's outcome (customers, users, sponsors, executives, etc.)
  • Provide input, feedback, and support throughout the project

Agile Planning and Estimation Techniques

• User Stories
  • Short, simple descriptions of a feature told from the perspective of the person who desires the new capability, usually a user or customer
  • Typically follow the format: "As a [type of user], I want [some goal] so that [some reason]"
• Story Points
  • Relative unit of measure used to estimate the overall effort required to fully implement a product backlog item or any other piece of work
  • Assigned based on factors such as complexity, uncertainty, and effort, rather than actual time
• Planning Poker
  • Consensus-based estimation technique used to estimate the relative size of user stories or tasks
  • Each team member has a deck of cards with values (usually Fibonacci sequence) and simultaneously selects a card representing their estimate for a given item
• Velocity
  • Measure of the amount of work a team can complete in a single sprint, usually calculated in story points
  • Used to predict how much work the team can complete in future sprints and to plan accordingly
• Release Planning
  • Process of creating a high-level plan that defines which features will be delivered in each release and when those releases will occur
  • Considers factors such as business priorities, dependencies, team capacity, and technical constraints

Agile Meetings and Ceremonies

• Sprint Planning
  • Meeting at the beginning of each sprint where the team collaborates to define the sprint goal and select items from the product backlog to work on during the sprint
• Daily Scrum (Stand-up)
  • Short, time-boxed meeting (usually 15 minutes) held every day at the same time and place
  • Each team member answers three questions: What did I do yesterday? What will I do today? Are there any impediments in my way?
• Sprint Review
  • Meeting at the end of each sprint where the team demonstrates the work they have completed to stakeholders and gathers feedback
• Sprint Retrospective
  • Meeting at the end of each sprint where the team reflects on their process, identifies areas for improvement, and creates a plan to implement those improvements in the next sprint
• Backlog Refinement (Grooming)
  • Ongoing process where the team collaborates with the Product Owner to review, refine, and prioritize items in the product backlog
  • Helps ensure that the backlog remains up-to-date, relevant, and understood by all team members

Tools and Software for Agile Projects

• Jira
  • Popular issue tracking and project management tool that supports agile methodologies like Scrum and Kanban
  • Provides features for creating and managing user stories, sprints, backlogs, and reports
• Trello
  • Visual collaboration tool that uses boards, lists, and cards to organize and prioritize projects
  • Suitable for teams using Kanban or other agile methodologies
• Asana
  • Web and mobile application designed to help teams organize, track, and manage their work
  • Supports agile practices through features like task lists, Kanban boards, and custom fields
• Slack
  • Cloud-based team collaboration and communication platform
  • Integrates with many agile project management tools and supports real-time messaging, file sharing, and video conferencing
• GitHub
  • Web-based version control and collaboration platform for software development
  • Supports agile practices through features like issue tracking, pull requests, and continuous integration/continuous deployment (CI/CD)
• Zoom
  • Video conferencing and online meeting platform
  • Facilitates remote collaboration and communication for agile teams, especially during events like daily stand-ups, sprint planning, and retrospectives