Agile Project Management by Jeremy Savell

A basic and straightforward overview of what Agile is, presenting some framework examples that are well known today, such as Scrum or Kanban—everything condensed in a 100’s pages book that you can read in a couple of hours.

Chapters

1. The fluid manifesto
2. Being agile
3. Agile process
4. Planning for success
5. Agile communication
6. Scrum basics
7. Introduction to Kanban
8. Building an adaptive team
9. Leadership and collaborative management
10. Common errors behind agile failure
11. Final words: agile is adaptation

“The benefits of Agile projects extend no only to the team using it, but also to the customer receiving the final product.”

“There is an underlying critical metric that consistently leads to the success of an Agile project: communication. Miscommunication, under-communication, or poor communication of any type leads to the collapse and failure of said project.”

Key takeaways

Projects that followed a Waterfall methodology tended to exceed their expenses over time, while the product delivered was below standard and difficult to use.

That situation originated that a group of developers signed a brief, 68-word manifesto in 2001.

A brief background

During the 1960s, software got into a big crisis; creating software was complex but changing it later became pure chaos. Waterfall to the rescue.

Waterfall outlined a simple, logical set of processes that a company would need to follow for a project to be successful. Its name comes from the metaphor of water gently cascading down a predictable, steady, incremental stream. Its life cycle of software development would be in six simple steps.

1. Requirements
2. Analysis
3. Design
4. Code
5. Testing
6. Operations

For 10 years, Waterfall was the standard methodology in the software universe. And for 10 more years, chaos persisted. Although the intention was good, the reality is that the ever-changing set of constraints does not cope very well with this methodology because each step is dependent on the previous one.

86% of the time a company uses the Waterfall method for project management, the customer receives inadequate or useless software. A lot of software projects were unused or never finished.

During the 70’ and 80’, Iterations and Incremental Development (IID) proved to be a viable option. In the 90’ surges an Evolutionary Delivery (ED), which changes the situation. The developer is responsible for listening to the user’s reactions early and often. The user starts playing a direct role in the development process.

A few years later, a new method surged Rapid Iterative Production Prototyping (RIPP), later called Rapid Application Development (RAD), which they claimed “Working software in 90 days… or your money back.”

Lastly, during the 90’ Extreme Programming (XP), Scrum, and Crystal were defined in detail.

These distinct yet similar solutions were decentralized, working independently of one another. This realization led to that night in Utag the unification of these ideas under one banner, in one document.

Agile became the definitive standard for software development.

The Agile Manifesto

• Individuals and interactions over processes and tools
• Working software over comprehensive documentation
• Customer collaboration over contract negotiation
• Responding to change over following a plan

That is, while there is value in the items on the rights, we value the items on the left more.