9. Planning Agile Projects

Risk

A combination of the likelihood of an event or condition occurring or not occurring, and the impact that outcome has.

Sprint Backlog

A subset of the items from the Product Backlog that are planned for the next increment.

Daily Stand-Up

A tool to encourage regular sharing and collaboration.

Agile Project Management

A way you can make projects more adaptable and easy in their movements.

Agile

Able to move quickly and easily; marked by ready ability to move with quick, easy grace.

Ideal Time

Actual working.

Crystal

Aimed toward smaller teams and to be ultralight; can be tailored to fit the project and the environment.

If I Had $100

Aims to build priorities.

Prune the Product Tree

Aims to get the team brainstorming and evaluating the product's functionality and feature.

Sailboat

Aims to identify risks and opportunities.

Make + Move a Mountain

Aims to identify some of the tasks and other planning needs of the product features or releases.

Product Backlog Items (PBIs)

All the items needed for the product; may or may not include user stories, but they do include all the work expected for the product.

Extreme Programming (XP)

An agile discipline based on the values of simplicity, communication, feedback, respect, and courage.

Velocity

An estimate based on the historical data of previous sprints, assumptions on the current team's composition and competencies, and the sprint to sprint comparison in terms of time and resources or other constraints.

Project Management Institute (PMI)

An internationally recognized and esteemed standards organization focused on the emerging approach of Project Management.

Project Stakeholder

Any person or group that has interest, either for gain or for loss, or is impacted, either positively or negatively, by the project.

Story Map

Assists in visualizing the connections and interdependencies of the stories.

Prioritization

Based on value.

Traditional Project Management

Begins with defining all the work that would need to be done, identifying stakeholders and their expectations, and setting out to get a formal agreement from stakeholders on all the work that would need to be done.

Knowledge-Based Work

Better suited to agile project management; for example, technical fields.

Lean Software Development

Born from the Toyota Production System.

Collocation

Bringing team members into close proximity to each other.

Timeboxes

Confined time frames where the agile team have planned what is feasible for the team and valuable for the business.

Feedback

Core XP value; getting input and others' perspectives early.

Release Plan

Developed by the product owner; based on the roadmap, a high-level timetable can be laid out.

Adaptive Planning

Domain Five; focuses on how to prepare and deal with fluctuation, feedback, and changes; means knowing how to best estimate and build different levels of plans.

Features

Drive the development efforts.

Kanban

Emerged from Toyota's Just in Time delivery system, or JIT; assists in the inventory or workflow; a Japanese word that translates roughly to "signboard" or "billboard."

Agile Coach

Ensures the proper understanding of agile practices; knowledgeable about how to make his or her players, or team members, more productive and effective, while constantly seeking out ways to improve their performance.

Product Vision

Guides the project from its inception to its conclusion.

Agile Project Manager

Helps create a team that has the interpersonal and technical skills needed to achieve all known project objectives in order to create a business value with minimal delay; works in a servant leadership capacity when managing an agile project.

Focus

Knowing what to work on and the time to work on it.

Product Roadmap

Lays out the high level path of the product and its required features; the visual layout of the product's deliverables and their ordered plans for release.

Product Plan

Looking at the product and related products for as long a period of time as possible gives perspective of how the currently discussed projects fits within the overall program.

Estimation

Needed to guess how long work items or tasks will take to complete; imprecise in agile.

User Stories

Quick summaries that explain the needs of various users.

Sprint

Refers to the physical burst of running that is common in team games, such as rugby.

Dynamic Systems Development Method (DSDM)

Serves as a compliment to scrum and the scrum team's focus on product development processes; its most recent rebranding in 2014 positioned it alongside the other project management and service management frameworks.

Agile Games

Sometimes referred to as innovation or creativity games; gets the agile team out of the mundane rut that many teams fall victim to.

Product Backlog

Takes the work and effort needed for the product and lists them out.

Stakeholders

Team, business analysts, operational managers, and many other potential business representatives we use to gather the correct and fullest input and resourcing.

Negative Risk

The anti-value; threats.

Progressive Elaboration

The continual expansion of an idea using new information; expected in agile estimation; also referred to as rolling wave planning.

Release Planning

The customer presents the desired functionality and features, and the programmers estimate the feasibility and difficulty.

Strategic Level

The highest, most overarching level; plans are centered around the overall story of the project and the aims of the product.

Daily Plan

The most immediate level; what are we going to do today or in the next twenty-four hours.

Scrum

The most well-known agile project management approach; tries to take some of that immediate chaos and box it.

Product Owner

The one person who looks out for and makes certain the project is reaching its highest value; responsible for setting and updating the product vision.

ScrumMaster

The steward of the Scrum project management processes and methods; facilitates the processes of Scrum to fulfill the project's needs, with heavy attention to the enforcement of timeboxes.

Work in Progress (WIP)

The work the team is currently working on.

Tools

Things you use to get agile work done.

Techniques

Ways you use things or approaches.

Iteration Planning

When the whole team decides what can be delivered and worked on during an iteration, which typically two weeks.

Minimal Marketable Features (MFFs)

With the story maps, the release plans can be progressively elaborated and the iterations can be planned and progressively elaborated as well.

Feature-Driven Development Method (FDD)

Works to identify features, build plans and teams around those features, and deliver them.