Agile Methodology

10 Key excerpts on "Agile Methodology"

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  eBook - ePub

  Adapting Configuration Management for Agile Teams

  Balancing Sustainability and Speed

  • Mario E. Moreira(Author)
  • 2010(Publication Date)
  • Wiley

    (Publisher)

  CHAPTER 3

  Agile Primer

  Agile methods for software development are one of the hottest changes in the methodology field. Agile is an umbrella term that includes various approaches, methods, and techniques that use short iterations and continuous customer feedback so that the project team can evolve the customer need (a.k.a., product). What the customer sees as progress is not the standard documents and status reports but instead tangible working product functionality. This approach allows the customer to reconsider and adjust their need until it is transformed into a valuable working product. Progress is not considered until a piece of functionality is built. Functionality equates to a value to the customer. This ultimately means delivering business value (what the customer really wants). Of course this implies that you have to continuously work with the customer to get there.

  Agile methods provide a means of adapting quickly for teams facing unpredictable or rapidly changing requirements. Agile introduces a structured approach to software development to ensure the customer gets early and periodic views of their solution for continuous feedback, more assurance that they are getting a solution that solves their business need, and a working solution in typically a shorter time frame.

  Implementing Agile methods impacts the culture because it relies on more than just implementing a process or new practices. Instead the organization needs to move away from the hierarchical command and control model, which includes ceremony (i.e., protocol) and requires approvals from the top down, and instead move to a more heterarchical world of a self-empowering team model moving empowerment and decision making to the lowest possible level, where most of the relationships and relevant data are present to make the best decision.

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  eBook - ePub

  Going Beyond the Waterfall

  Managing Scope Effectively Across the Project Life Cycle

  • Barbara Davis, Darren Radford(Authors)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • J. Ross Publishing

    (Publisher)

  SECTION 3: APPLYING PROJECT AND ARCHITECTURE METHODOLOGIES Passage contains an image IMPLICATIONS OF AGILE ON SCOPE

  There is increasing pressure on organizations to deliver working solutions to business in ever-shorter timescales without compromising quality. The processes by which solutions are developed must be agile and deliver what the business needs, when it needs it.

  WHAT IS AGILE?

  In this context, Agile development is a group of methods that provides a flexible yet controlled process that can be used to deliver solutions. Historically, the development methods have been applied to software development, but agile methods can be used for initiatives that have no technology element at all.

  In the project context, Agile is a delivery method based on iterative, incremental, and evolutionary development and delivery principles, as originally defined by Watts Humphries (IBM) and Hadar Ziv (University of California). It was designed as a means to deliver blocks of usable functionality in increments through short development and delivery cycles, typically called “sprints.” This “speed of delivery” represents one key differentiator between the traditional, sequential methodology known as “Waterfall.” Agile principles consider requirements as uncertain and even indefinable until the end user has had the chance to work with the solution, with both requirements and the solution evolving through collaboration as the project progresses. “Uncertainty is inherent and inevitable in software development processes and products.”1 By delivering blocks of functionality in each sprint, the end users then have the opportunity to work with and comment on the product as it is being developed and refined.

  Each sprint is directed by a person called a “scrum master,” and can be anywhere from two to four weeks in duration. Figure 7.1

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  eBook - ePub

  Agile Project Management For Dummies

  • Mark C. Layton, Steven J. Ostermiller, Dean J. Kynaston(Authors)
  • 2020(Publication Date)
  • For Dummies

    (Publisher)

  The Agile Manifesto and the agile principles on their own wouldn’t be enough to launch you into agile product development, eager as you might be to do so. The reason is that principles and practices are different. The approaches described in this book, however, provide you with the necessary practices to be successful.

  Agile is a descriptive term for a number of techniques and methods that have the following similarities:

  • Demonstrating valuable and potentially shippable functionality in short iterations called iterative development
  • Emphasis on simplicity, transparency, and situation-specific strategies
  • Cross-functional, self-organizing teams
  • Working functionality as the measure of progress
  • Responsiveness to changing requirements

  Synonyms of the word agile — including resilient, flexible, nimble, adaptive, lightweight, and responsive — give additional insights into what it means to be agile.

  Similarly, throughout this book, we reference agile teams. Agile teams, which include scrum teams (scrum being the most popular agile framework), are teams who adhere to the agile values and principles to become more resilient, flexible, nimble, adaptive, lightweight, and responsive in meeting their customer’s needs.

  Agile product development is an empirical approach. In other words, you do something in practice and adjust your approach based on experience rather than theory. With regards to product development, an empirical approach is braced by the following pillars:

  • Unfettered transparency: Everyone involved in the process understands and can contribute to the development of the process.
  • Frequent inspection: The inspector must inspect the product regularly and possess the skills to identify variances from acceptance criteria.
  • Immediate adaptation: The development team must be able to adjust quickly to minimize further product deviations.

  A host of approaches have agile characteristics. Three, however, are commonly used: lean product development, scrum, and extreme programming (XP). These three approaches work perfectly together and share many common elements, although they use different terminology or have a slightly different focus. Broadly, lean and scrum focus on structure. Extreme programming does that, too, but is more specific about development practices, focusing more on technical design, coding, testing, and integration. (From an approach called extreme programming,

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  eBook - ePub

  Hands-On Software Engineering with Python

  Move beyond basic programming and construct reliable and efficient software with complex code

  • Brian Allbee(Author)
  • 2018(Publication Date)
  • Packt Publishing

    (Publisher)
• 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. Sponsors, developers, and users should be able 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.
You may refer to The Agile Manifesto at http://Agilemanifesto.org/ for more details.
In an application, these principles lead to a few common characteristics across different methodologies. There may be exceptions in other methodologies that are still considered Agile, but for our purposes, and with respect to the specific methodologies discussed here, those common traits are as follows:
• Development happens in a sequence of iterations, each of which has one to many goals
• Each goal is a subset of the final system
• At the conclusion of each iteration, the system is deployable and operational (perhaps only for a given value of operational)
• Requirements are defined in detail in small chunks, and may not be defined at all until just before the iteration that they're going to be worked on
Scrum is claimed to be the most popular, or at least most widely used, Agile development methodology (the
12th Annual State
of Agile Report