All You Need to Know About Agile

Agile is a project management approach that's more flexible and efficient than other methodologies. As a result, agile enables project teams to adapt faster and easier, making it ideal for many unknown projects. This guide will help you understand how to implement an Agile approach to your projects.

Why Agile?

Agile supports teams in delivering a prototype and iterating on it. Agile helps teams troubleshoot issues and work efficiently. Agile allows teams to prioritize features, work collaboratively, and make course corrections based on stakeholder feedback.

What is Agile Methodology?

The Agile Manifesto is a set of values and principles to guide development projects. The four values are:

1. Individuals and interactions over processes and tools working.
2. Software over comprehensive documentation.
3. Customer collaboration over contract negotiation.
4. Responding to change by following a plan.

Principles of Agile

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

Agile is a method for completing your projects faster, ensuring your project team members never get stuck in analysis or gridlock. We'll work with you and the client or customer to review requirements, design the solution, and regularly deliver working software.

There are several frameworks you can choose when running an Agile project. Some of the most popular ones include:

Scrum

Scrum is a project management framework that makes it easier to create products in an incremental, iterative way. Scrum is the foundation of many other agile methods, so a Scrum practitioner must understand it.

Scrum teams are self-organizing and strive to work toward a common goal with frequent inspections of the work and continuous improvement.

At the end of each sprint, they should have an option to release a potentially shippable product that provides customers with an opportunity for early feedback and fast changes based on their reactions. Scrum is the most widely used Agile software development framework. It is defined by:

3 Roles in the Scrum Team

5 Scrum Activities or Events

4 Scrum Artifacts

5 Scrum Values

Extreme Programming

Extreme Programming (XP) is an agile software development system that focuses on quickly delivering high-quality software through engineering best practices. XP improves software projects in five ways: simplicity, feedback, respect, courage, and communication. It also uses twelve techniques:

1. The Planning Game
2. Simple Design
3. Small Releases
4. Testing
5. Refactoring
6. System Metaphor
7. Coding Standards
8. Pair Programming
9. 40-hour workweek
10. On-site Customer
11. Collective Code Ownership
12. Continuous Integration

Extreme programming involves working closely with all the internal and external stakeholders to plan, estimate, and deliver high-priority tasks incrementally.

Dynamic Systems Development Method (DSDM)

The Dynamic Systems Development Method framework is a flexible approach to delivering a project on time and within budget. The framework emphasizes using the best practices for planning, managing, executing, and on-time project delivery. It provides a simple way to manage projects of all sizes for any industry sector.

The following principles form the basis of DSDM:

1. Focus on business needs
2. Deliver on time
3. Build incrementally from firm foundations
4. Never compromise on quality
5. Collaborative and cooperative approach
6. Develop iteratively
7. Demonstrate control
8. Communicate continuously and clearly

Kanban

Kanban is a popular framework for agile software development. The Kanban method uses a board divided into horizontal lanes, on which you can write cards to show what your team is working on. It's used by groups that need to deliver in a continuous flow and are not tied to a definite schedule.

Kanban is based on three fundamental principles:

Visualize the workflow: The visual representation of the development process helps you keep track of your progress.

Continuous measure and improvement of the life cycle: Teams focus on eliminating unnecessary activities to reduce the time needed to complete their work, thus improving the throughput of their projects.

Limit Work in Progress: The number of tasks assigned to each phase is limited, ensuring that everyone in the team has a chance to work on what they need to do.

Benefits of Agile

Agile project management can benefit the following types of organizations and projects:

• Organizations that work in a fast-paced environment, such as technology companies, must be able to adapt quickly.
• Companies often focus on learning from their mistakes and coming up with new ideas.
• Projects involve many interdependent tasks that require frequent communication and teamwork.
• Projects in which stakeholders respond quickly to each version of the product.
• Companies that want to create a prototype before they start building their final product.
• Organizations that depend on close relationships with their customers and other external parties will benefit from agile development processes.

Conclusion

Agile is all about creating a feedback loop or a process of continuous improvement and gaining insight from the client or customer. The agile design approach breaks time limitations, narrowly defined deliverables, and scope creep, thereby offering content for creativity and innovation.

Agile is flexible and fluid. It has many iterations and millions of developers and teams worldwide. Still, at its heart, it emphasizes communication and building the right piece of software for the right people in the right way.

In more concrete terms: change is a constant, and we embrace that. Textbooks have changed, music has changed, and technology is changing too. We should accept change in education when our learners have fully embraced using technology to consume content every day.