Agile Final
Favor full-service suppliers
place an emphasis on engagements that deliver full value (as in the idea of completed independent feature sets).
The dotted burndown line is the
plan
XP is most known for
popularizing a holistic set of practices intended to improve the results of software projects
The word Kanban is literally translated as
"visual sign" or "card."
SAFe® focuses on
detailing practices, roles, and activities at the portfolio, program, and team levels with an emphasis on organizing the enterprise around value streams that focus on providing continuous value to the customer.
Project leaders in geographically distributed and dispersed project organizations should encourage
dialog at the team and executive level to tailor techniques for the context and to manage expectations about the effort required to do so.
The Crystal family of methodologies use
different colors based on "weight" to determine which methodology to use
When a team sees what it has not yet completed as it works through an iteration, the team may become
dispirited and possibly rush to complete the work without meeting the acceptance criteria.
Values in the middle portion (between agile and predictive) of the Model for suitability chart indicate
a hybrid approach could work well
Agile teams plan
a little, deliver, learn, and then replan a little more in an ongoing cycle.
Teams estimate what they can complete, which is
a measure of capacity
Demonstrations or reviews are
a necessary part of the agile project flow
Boehm and Turner adopted some of the elements from DSDM and Crystal to develop
a popular assessment model to help determine if projects should be undertaken with agile or more traditional approaches.
Results around the outside of the Model for suitability chart indicate
a predictive approach may be more suitable
The Scrum team consists of
a product owner, development team, and scrum master
Graduated time and materials
a shared financial risk approach
A collaborative approach is one that pursues
a shared-risk-reward relationship, where all sides win
The team might need to scale the work of several agile projects into
a single agile program
Another approach to pivot is to ask for
a single person from each department to be temporarily, yet fully allocated, to the highest priority project.
Scrum
a single-team process framework used to manage product development
eXtreme Programming (XP)
a software development method based on frequent cycles
Dynamic scope option
a supplier may offer the customer the option to vary the project scope at specified points in the project. The customer can adjust features to fit the capacity.
Kanban in lean manufacturing
a system for scheduling inventory control and replenishment
Scrumban is an agile approach originally designed as
a way to transition from Scrum to Kanban, where teams use Scrum as a framework and Kanban for process improvement
A range of frameworks (such as the Scaled Agile Framework, Large Scale Scrum, and Disciplined Agile) and approaches (e.g., Scrum of Scrums) have emerged to cater to
initiatives that require the collaboration of multiple agile teams in a program or portfolio
Once teams start to work in a cohesive and cooperative manner, they will challenge
internal management policies
Qualitative measures focus on
practices the team has chosen and assess how well the team uses those practices, for example, the business satisfaction with delivered features, the morale of the team; and anything else the team wants to track as a qualitative measure
The work in progress (WIP) limits at the top of each column allows the team to
see how to pull work across the board
Ri means to
separate or leave
Teams run their own
standups
The organization can design a structure that
supports agile approaches across the entire portfolio
Scrum of Scrums (SoS), also known as "meta Scrum," is a
technique used when two or more Scrum teams consisting of three to nine members each need to coordinate their work instead of one large Scrum team
The features remaining burndown line shows
that the rate of feature completion
Another antipattern typically seen in standups is
that the team begins to solve problems as they become apparent.
The Crystal family of approach recommends that smaller, less critical projects be
undertaken with lighter controls and simpler approaches
AN AGILE PMO IS
-VALUE-DRIVEN -INVITATION-ORIENTED -MULTIDISCIPLINARY
In response to these organizational impediments to agility, project leaders can try various approaches to accelerate a cultural compatibility for:
-Visible and active executive sponsorship, -Change management practices, including communication and coaching, -Progressively pacing the adoption of agile practices on a project-by-project basis -Incremental introduction of agile practices to the team; and -Leading by example by using agile techniques and practices where possible.
In iteration-based agile stand-up meetings, everyone answers the following questions in a round-robin fashion:
-What did I complete since the last standup? -What am I planning to complete between now and the next standup? -What are my impediments (or risks or problems)?
In Flow-based agile stand-up meetings, The team assesses the board from right to left. The questions are:
-What do we need to do to advance this piece of work? -Is anyone working on anything that is not on the board? -What do we need to finish as a team? -Are there any bottlenecks or blockers to the flow of work?
Team members may decide to retrospect at these key times:
-When the team completes a release or ships something. It does not have to be a monumental increment. It can be any release, no matter how small. -When more than a few weeks have passed since the previous retrospective. -When the team appears to be stuck and completed work is not flowing through the team. -When the team reaches any other milestone.
An agile project charter answers these questions:
-Why are we doing this project? This is the project vision. -Who benefits and how? This may be part of the project vision and/or project purpose. -What does done mean for the project? These are the project's release criteria. -How are we going to work together? This explains the intended flow of work.
Conversely, there are other institutional characteristics that may be roadblocks to achieving the changes associated with organizational agility. Examples of these include:
-Work is decomposed into departmental silos, creating dependencies that prevent accelerated delivery instead of building cross-functional teams with guidance from centers of competencies. -Procurement strategies are based on short-term pricing strategies, rather than long-term competencies. -Leaders are rewarded for local efficiencies rather than end-to-end flow of project delivery or optimizing the whole (in regard to the organization). -Employees are specialized contributors with limited tools or incentives to diversify their skills instead of building T-shaped specialists. -Decentralized portfolios pull employees simultaneously onto too many projects at once instead of keeping them focused on one project at a time.
SCORE THE Model for suitability QUESTIONS FROM 1 TO 10
1 TO 10
Teams often have a goal of spending not more than
1 hour per week refining stories for the next batch of work.
Timebox the standup to no longer than
15 minutes
Working Software Responding to Change Individuals and Interactions Customer Collaboration 1. over processes and tools 2. over comprehensive documentation 3. over contract negotiation 4. over following a plan
2. over comprehensive documentation 4. over following a plan 1. over processes and tools 3. over contract negotiation
In most effective agile teams size tend to range from
6-9 members
When a team uses story points, be aware that the number of story points a team can complete in a given time is
unique to that team
Teams produce increments of
value for delivery and feedback
Utilizing very short feedback loops is an iterative approach for
waste reduction
The PMO should strive to deliver
what is needed and keep the pulse on its customers to ensure that it knows and is able to adapt to their needs
Agile measures
what the team delivers, not what the team predicts it will deliver
Project leaders should take the time to assess
where emphasis is most often applied in the organization
Some iteration-based projects use burndown charts to see
where the project is going over time
Every project needs a project charter so the project team knows
why this project matters, where the team is headed and what the project objective is
Changes associated with accelerated delivery
will test the organization's ability to accommodate that delivery
As a general guideline, demonstrate whatever the team has as a
working product at least once every 2 weeks.
A team can coalesce by
working together, and the project charter is a great way to start working
There are two key factors that further motivate the use of change management practices in an agile context:
-Changes associated with accelerated delivery -Changes associated with agile approaches
The following technical practices, many of which come from eXtreme Programming, may help the team to deliver at their maximum speed:
-Continuous integration -Test at all levels -Acceptance Test-Driven Development (ATDD) -Test-Driven Development (TDD) and Behavior-Driven Development (BDD) -Spikes (timeboxed research or experiments)
For the Model for suitability of agile approach, Organizational and project attributes are assessed under three main categories:
-Culture -Team -Project
Some organizations have been transforming their PMOs into agile centers of excellence that provide such services as:
-Developing and implementing standards -Developing personnel through training and mentoring -Multiproject management -Facilitating organizational learning -Managing stakeholders -Recruiting, selecting, and evaluating team leaders -Executing specialized tasks for projects
Feature-Driven Development activities are supported by a core set of software engineering best practices:
-Domain object modeling -Developing by feature -Individual class ownership -Feature teams -Inspections -Configuration management -Regular builds -Visibility of progress and results.
There are many ways for the product owner to conduct backlog preparation and refinement meetings, including for example:
-Encourage the team to work as triads of developer, tester, business analyst/product owner to discuss and write the story. -Present the overall story concept to the team. The team discusses and refines it into as many stories as required. -Work with the team to find various ways to explore and write the stories together, making sure all of the stories are small enough so the team can produce a steady flow of completed work. Consider becoming able to complete a story at least once a day.
Some organizations will have characteristics that more easily support agile principles of cross-department collaboration, continuous learning, and evolving internal processes. Examples of these change-friendly characteristics include:
-Executive management's willingness to change; -Organization's willingness to shift the way it views, reviews, and assesses employees; -Centralization or decentralization of project, program, and portfolio management functions; -Focus on short-term budgeting and metrics versus long-term goals; and -Talent management maturity and capabilities.
The Kanban Method may be best used when a team or organization is in need of the following conditions:
-Flexibility -Focus on continuous delivery -Increased productivity and quality -Increased efficiency -Team member focus -Variability in the workload -Reduction of waste
Eight principles guide the use of the DSDM framework:
-Focus on the business need. -Deliver on time. -Collaborate. -Never compromise quality. -Build incrementally from firm foundations. -Develop iteratively. -Communicate continuously and clearly. -Demonstrate control (use appropriate techniques).
Crystal Methodology Common Properties
-Frequent delivery -Reflective improvement -Close or osmotic communication -Personal safety -Focus -Easy access to expert users -Technical environment with automated tests, configuration management, and frequent integration
The structure of an organization strongly influences its ability to pivot to new information or shifting market needs. Here is a listing of key characteristics:
-Geography -Functionalized structures -Size of project deliverable -Allocation of people to projects -Procurement-heavy organizations
A continuum of the refinement should be:
-Just-in-time refinement for flow-based agile. The team takes the next card off the to-do column and discusses it. -Many iteration-based agile teams use a timeboxed 1-hour discussion midway through a 2-week iteration. -Multiple refinement discussions for iteration-based agile teams. Teams can use this when they are new to the product, the product area, or the problem domain.
The PMI publication, Managing Change in Organizations: A Practice Guide [2], describes a comprehensive and holistic approach for successfully introducing meaningful change. The recommendations offered there include:
-Models for describing change dynamics, -Framework for achieving change, and -Application of change management practices at the project, program, and portfolio levels.
Some contracting techniques that can formalize this dynamic include the following:
-Multi-tiered structure -Emphasize value delivered -Fixed-price increments -Not-to-exceed time and materials -Graduated time and materials -Early cancellation option -Dynamic scope option -Team augmentation -Favor full-service suppliers
Disciplined Agile (DA) blends various agile techniques according to the following principles:
-People-first. -Learning-oriented. -Full delivery life cycle. -Goal-driven. -Enterprise awareness. -Scalable.
Crystal Methodology Core Values
-PeopleFrequent -Interaction -Community -Skills -Talents -Communications
There are six primary roles on a Feature-Driven Development project where individuals can take on one or more of the following roles:
-Project manager -Chief architect -Development manager -Chief programmer -Class owner -Domain expert.
The servant leadership approaches work in the following order
-Purpose -People -Process
Chartering ideas for team members to use as a basis for their social contract:
-Team values, such as sustainable pace and core hours; -Working agreements, such as what "ready" means so the team can take in work; what "done" means so the team can judge completeness consistently; respecting the timebox; or the use of work-in-process limits; -Ground rules, such as one person talking in a meeting; and -Group norms, such as how the team treats meeting times.
The team might need a team charter because
Agile teams require team norms and an understanding of how to work together
Iterative life cycle
An approach that allows feedback for unfinished work to improve and modify that work.
Agile life cycle
An approach that is both iterative and incremental to refine work items and deliver frequently.
Incremental life cycle
An approach that provides finished deliverables that the customer may be able to use immidiately.
Project assessment
Are there high rates of change? Is incremental delivery possible? How critical is the project?
Increased efficiency
Checking each task for value adding or non-value-added activities and removing the non-value adding activities
Developing personnel through training and mentoring
Coordinate agile training courses, coaches, and mentors to help people transition to an agile mindset and upgrade their skills. Encourage and support people to attend local agile events.
Multiproject management
Coordinate between agile teams by communicating between projects. Consider sharing items such as progress, issues, and retrospective findings and improvement experiments. Help manage major customer releases at the program level and investment themes at the portfolio level using an appropriate framework.
When teams have a lot of work in progress, they
delay their overall feature delivery
A Feature-Driven Development project is organized around five processes or activities, which are performed iteratively:
Develop an overall model -Build a features list -Plan by feature -Design by feature -Build by features.
Recruiting, selecting, and evaluating team leaders
Develop guidelines for interviewing agile practitioners.
Test at all levels
Employ system-level testing for end-to-end information and unit testing for the building blocks. In between, understand if there is a need for integration testing and where.
Agile Mindset is defined by values, guided by principles and manifested through change?
False
Agile teams rarely mix their practices to incorporate more than one approach.
False
As an agile project leader, first focus on how you can create a team that is cross-functional and only 75% dedicated to one team.
False
By building a small increment and then testing and reviewing it, the team can explore uncertainty a a low cost in a short time maximize risk and reducing business value delivery.
False
It is necessary to use a single approach for an entire project.
False
The PMBOK guide sixth edition, defines the Agile Practitioner as the person assigned by the performing organization to lead the team that is responsible for achieving the project objectives.
False
Team assessment
Is the team of a suitable size to be successful in adopting agile, do its members have the necessary experience and access to business representatives to be successful?
Culture assessment
Is there a supportive environment with buy-in for the approach and trust in the team?
The supplier can help build collaboration and trust by
delivering value early and often
Facilitating organizational learning
Gather project velocity profiles and capture, store, and index retrospective findings.
Changes associated with agile approaches
Leaders should consider change management techniques to address the hurdles of transitioning to the use of agile approaches
Not-to-exceed time and materials
Limit the overall budget to a fixed amount. This allows the customer to incorporate new ideas and innovations into the project not originally planned
Team member focus
Limited work in progress allows the team to focus on the current work.
Continuous integration
Perform frequent incorporation of work into the whole, no matter the product, and then retest to determine that the entire product still works as intended.
Scrum Artifacts
Product backlog, Sprint backlog, Increments
As the team completes the features usually in the form of user stories, the team periodically
demonstrates the working product
Increased productivity and quality
Productivity and quality are increased by limiting work in progress.
Geographically distributed and dispersed project organizations challenges
Project leaders and regional managers may have alternative or even competing goals. Additionally, cultural differences, language barriers, and lower visibility can slow down productivity.
Managing stakeholders
Provide product owner training, guidance on acceptance testing, and how to evaluate and give feedback on systems. Champion the importance of subject matter experts (SMEs) to projects.
Developing and implementing standards
Provide templates for user stories, test cases, cumulative flow diagrams, etc. Provide agile tools and educate supporting groups on iterative development concepts.
The goal of the team charter is to
create an agile environment in which team members can work to the best of their ability as a team.
Multi-tiered structure
Rather than formalizing an entire contracting relationship in a single document, project parties can achieve more flexibility by describing different aspects in different documents
Fixed-price increments
Rather than lock an entire project scope and budget into a single agreement, a project can decompose the scope into fixed-price microdeliverables, such as user stories
Scrum framework consists of
Scrum roles, events, artifacts, and rules, and uses an iterative approach to deliver working product.
Scrum Events
Sprint, Sprint planning, Daily scrum, Sprint review, Sprint retrospective
Metrics matter because they focus on
customer value
Focus on continuous delivery
Teams are focused on flowing work through the system to completion and not beginning new work until work in progress is completed.
Flexibility
Teams are typically not bound by timeboxes and will work on the highest priority item in the backlog of work.
Executing specialized tasks for projects
Train and provide retrospective facilitators, create agreements with agile project troubleshooters, and provide mentors and coaches.
Reduction of waste
Transparency makes waste visible so it can be removed.
Pain Point: Team struggles with obstacles
Troubleshooting Possibilities: A servant leader can help clear these obstacles. If the team doesn't know the options they have, consider a coach. Sometimes, the team needs to escalate stories the team or servant leader has not been able to remove.
Pain Point: Unclear working agreements for the team
Troubleshooting Possibilities: Agile chartering for alignment-values, principles, and working agreements
Pain Point: Unclear team context
Troubleshooting Possibilities: Agile chartering for context-boundaries, committed assets, and prospective analysis
Pain Point: Unclear purpose or mission for the team
Troubleshooting Possibilities: Agile chartering for purpose-vision, mission, and mission tests
Pain Point: Siloed teams, instead of cross-functional teams
Troubleshooting Possibilities: Ask the people who are part of projects to self-organize as cross-functional teams. Use servant leadership skills to help the managers understand why agile needs cross-functional teams.
Pain Point: False starts, wasted efforts
Troubleshooting Possibilities: Ask the product owner to become an integral part of the team.
Pain Point: Unexpected or unforeseen delays
Troubleshooting Possibilities: Ask the team to check in more often, use kanban boards to see the flow of work and work in progress limits to understand the impact of the demands on the team or product. Also track impediments and impediment removal on an impediment board.
Pain Point: Slow or no improvement in the teamwork process
Troubleshooting Possibilities: Capture no more than three items to improve at each retrospective. Ask the servant leader to help the team learn how to integrate those items.
Pain Point: Defects
Troubleshooting Possibilities: Consider the technical practices that work for the environment. Some possibilities are: pair work, collective product ownership, pervasive testing (test-driven and automated testing approaches) and a robust definition of done.
Pain Point: Too much product complexity
Troubleshooting Possibilities: For software and non-software encourage the team always to be thinking "What is the simplest thing that would work?" and apply the agile principle of "Simplicity--the art of maximizing the amount of work not done". These help reduce complexity.
Pain Point: Unclear requirements
Troubleshooting Possibilities: Help sponsors and stakeholders craft a product vision. Consider building a product roadmap using specification by example, user story mapping, and impact mapping. Bring the team and product owner together to clarify the expectations and value of a requirement. Progressively decompose roadmap into backlog of smaller, concrete requirements.
Pain Point: Unclear work assignments or work progress
Troubleshooting Possibilities: Help the team learn that they self-manage their work. Consider kanban boards to see the flow of work. Consider a daily standup to walk the board and see what work is where.
Pain Point: Too much upfront work leading to rework
Troubleshooting Possibilities: Instead of much upfront work, consider team spikes to learn. In addition, measure the WIP during the beginning of the project and see what the team's options are to deliver value instead of designs. Shorten iterations and create a robust definition of done.
Pain Point: Rush/wait uneven flow of work
Troubleshooting Possibilities: Plan to the team's capacity and not more. Ask people to stop multitasking and be dedicated to one team. Ask the team to work as pairs, a swarm, or mob to even out the capabilities across the entire team.
Pain Point: Work delays/overruns due to Insufficiently refined product backlog items
Troubleshooting Possibilities: Product owner and team workshop stories together. Create a definition of ready for the stories. Consider splitting stories to use smaller stories.
Pain Point: Inefficiently ordered product backlog items
Troubleshooting Possibilities: Rank with value including cost of delay divided by duration (CD3) and other value models
Pain Point: Inaccurate estimation
Troubleshooting Possibilities: Reduce story size by splitting stories. Use relative estimation with the entire team to estimate. Consider agile modeling or spiking to understand what the story is.
Pain Point: Technical debt (degraded code quality)
Troubleshooting Possibilities: Refactoring, agile modeling, pervasive testing, automated code quality analysis, definition of done
Pain Point: Impossible stakeholder demands
Troubleshooting Possibilities: Servant leadership to work with this stakeholder (and possibly product owner).
Pain Point: Work is not complete
Troubleshooting Possibilities: Team defines definition of done for stories including acceptance criteria. Also add release criteria for projects.
Pain Point: Poor user experience
Troubleshooting Possibilities: User experience design practices included in the development team involve users early and often.
A chaotic situation can emerge if both technology uncertainty and requirements uncertainty are very high.
True
A core tenet in both the values and the principles of the Agile Manifesto is the importance of individuals and interactions.
True
Agile approaches emphasize servant leadership as a way to empower teams.
True
Agile practitioners select practices based on their needs?
True
Our highest priority is to satisfy the customer through early and continous delivery of valuable software.
True
Servant leaders remove organizational impediments.
True
Siloed organizations create impediments for forming cross-functional agile teams
True
There are four types of life cycles
True
An agile-based PMO approach is based on
a customer-collaboration mindset and is present in all PMO programs
Clusters of values around the center of the Model for suitability chart indicate
a good fit for agile approaches
Lead time is useful to understand
cycle time from the first look at a particular feature to the length of time it took to release it to the customer
Variability in the workload
When there is unpredictability in the way that work arrives, and it becomes impossible for teams to make predictable commitments; even for short periods of time.
Test-Driven Development (TDD) and Behavior-Driven Development (BDD)
Writing automated tests before writing/creating the product actually helps people design and mistake-proof the product.
Iterations help a team create
a cadence for delivery and many kinds of feedback
Early cancellation option
a contract can offer the customer to buy the remainder of the project for a cancellation fee
The development team in Scrum is
a cross-functional, self-organizing team consisting of team members who have everything they need within the team to deliver working product without depending on others outside of the team.
Transparency and open collaboration are
absolutely key to organizational agility
The product owner sees the demonstration and
accepts or declines stories.
Dynamic Systems Development Method (DSDM) is an
agile project delivery framework initially designed to add more rigor to existing iterative methods popular in the 1990s.
The Dynamic Systems Development Method (DSDM) developed
an Agile Project Suitability Questionnaire and an Organizational Suitability Questionnaire to help gauge likely fit and potential problem areas.
A common practice is to treat the change process as
an agile project with its own backlog of changes that could be introduced and prioritized by the team, based on perceived value or other considerations
Teams benefit from allocating enough time to learn, either from
an interim retrospective or an end-of-the-project retrospective.
Spikes (timeboxed research or experiments)
are useful for learning and may be used in circumstances such as: estimation, acceptance criteria definition, and understanding the flow of a user's action through the product.
Because learning is such a large part of the project, the team needs to
balance uncertainty and provide value to the customers
In agile, if there is low variability in the team's work and if the team members are not multitasking, the team's capacity can
become stable. This allows better prediction for the next couple of weeks.
When teams provide their own units of measure, teams are
better able to assess and estimate and deliver their work
Cultures, structures, and policies can influence
both the direction and the outcome of any project
Many project failures stem from
breakdowns in the customer-supplier relationship
Teams consider their story size so they do not
try to commit to more stories than there is team capacity to complete within one iteration.
When teams measure only story points, they measure
capacity, not finished work, which violates the principle of "the primary measure of progress is working software"
Designed for holistic use
centered on a single project activity, such as estimation or reflecting. Intended to guide a broad set of project activities.
Ha means to
change or digress
Every time features are added to the project, the burndown line
changes
The burnup will show
changes in scope during the iteration and allow teams to see what they have accomplished
Understanding the organization and the industry requirements that an organization needs to satisfy allows for
choosing the right conversations, the right tradeoffs, and, especially, the right techniques
Agile is built on a synergy of
collaboration and trust
Kanban board (large display) is made up of
columns that represent the states the work needs to flow through in order to get to done
In the Kanban Method, it is more important to
complete work than it is to start new work
The product backlog burnup chart shows
completed work compared to total expected work at interval milestones or iterations
DSDM is known best for its emphasis on
constraint-driven delivery
In order to support project-specific needs, the PMO needs to be
conversant in several competencies beyond project management itself, because different projects require distinct capabilities
Teams, including the product owner, need feedback to
decide how early to ask for product feedback.
Agile favors
empirical and value-based measurements instead of predictive measurements
Surrogate measurements such as percent done are less useful than
empirical measurements such as finished features
The most important cultural norm in an organization willing to try any new method or technique is
enabling a safe work environment
The goal of SoS is to
ensure the teams are coordinating work and removing impediments to optimize the efficiency of all the teams
The scrum master is responsible for
ensuring the Scrum process is upheld and works to ensure the Scrum team adheres to the practices and rules as well as coaches the team on removing impediments.
Many agile teams use story points to
estimate effort
Learning takes place by
experimenting, delivering small increments of value, and getting feedback on what has been accomplished thus far
The PMO's objective is to
facilitate and enable this goal
The team "walks" the Kanban or task board in some way, and anyone from the team can
facilitate the standup.
When Project Managers act as servant leaders, the emphasis shifts from managing coordination to
facilitating collaboration
The team can measure completed work in a
feature burnup/burndown chart and in a product backlog burnup chart
Earned value in agile is based on
finished features
Enterprise Scrum is a
framework designed to apply the Scrum method on a more holistic organizational level rather than a single product development effort
Large Scale Scrum (LeSS) is a
framework for organizing several development teams toward a common goal extending the Scrum method
When teams plan enough time, they can structure their retrospective to
gather data, process that data, and decide what to try later as an experiment
Projects with highly functionalized structures may find
general resistance to collaboration across its organization
No matter what strategy or plan you implement with your team, its success is going to be
governed by the people implementing the plan
watermelon project
green on the outside, red on the inside
Organizational culture runs along a continuum, from
highly predictive plans to lean startup where everything is an experiment
Popular in modern use
holistically designed and well formalized, but are simply not commonly being used in most projects or organizations
The total features line shows
how the project's total features changed over time
The team's social contract—its team charter—is
how the team members interact with each other
The teams need the feedback from each iteration to learn about
how they work and how to improve
Teams do not need a formal process for chartering as long as the teams understand
how to work together
Project teams can use metrics for
improved forecasts and decision making
Burnups, burndowns (capacity measures) and lead time, and cycle time (predictability measures) are useful for
in-the-moment measurements
Organizational change management covers the skills and techniques for
influencing changes that support agility.
In flow-based agile, the team demonstrates completed work when
it is time to do so, usually when enough features have accumulated into a set that is coherent
Retrospectives help the team learn from
its previous work on the product and its process
Flow-based agile teams use different measurements:
lead time, cycle time, and response time
The retrospective allows the team to
learn about, improve, and adapt its process.
A team that does not demonstrate or release cannot
learn fast enough and is likely not adopting agile techniques
The product owner in Scrum is responsible for
maximizing the value of the product
For large projects, this group to Model for suitability COMPLETE THE QUESTIONNAIRE
may include representatives from the sponsoring group, project execution team, impacted business group(s), project governance group(s), and customer community
For small projects, this group to COMPLETE THE Model for suitability QUESTIONNAIRE
may simply be the sponsor, technical lead, and a customer
Metrics for agile projects contain
meaningful information that provide a historical track record, because agile projects deliver value (finished work) on a regular basis
Feature-Driven Development (FDD) was developed to
meet the specific needs of a large software development project
Teams use standups to
microcommit to each other, uncover problems, and ensure the work flows smoothly through the team.
Emphasize value delivered
milestones and payment terms can be structured based on value-driven deliverables in order to enhance the project's agility
Reducing the size of a project deliverable will
motivate more frequent handoffs across departments, and thus more frequent interactions and a faster flow of value across the organization.
While project leaders may not have the ability to change organizational dynamics as they see fit, they are expected to
navigate those dynamics skillfully
Shu means to
obey and protect
As organizations progress to greater agility, there will be
obvious needs for additional business units to change the way they interact and perform their responsibilities
A team can only finish
one story at a time
The backlog is the
ordered list of all the work, presented in story form, for a team
The willingness and ability to create new competences within an organization when the need arises is a mark of
organizational agility
In Scrumban, the work is
organized into small "sprints" and leverages the use of kanban boards to visualize and monitor the work
Once the team establishes a reliable velocity (average stories or story points per iteration) or the average cycle time, the team can
predict how much longer the project will take.
In iteration-based agile, the product owner often works with the team to
prepare some stories for the upcoming iteration during one or more sessions in the middle of the iteration
Disciplined Agile (DA) is a
process decision framework that integrates several agile best practices into a comprehensive model
When product owners make the stories smaller and teams see
progress in the form of a finished product, teams learn what they are able to do for the future.
Use kanban boards to track
progress, showing the new approaches already in use as "done," those being tried as "in progress," and those still waiting to be introduced as "to do."
The Shu-Ha-Ri model of skills acquisition describes
progression from obeying the rule
Formalized for common use
proprietary in nature and designed for specific use by a single organization or within a single context. Intended for common use in a variety of contexts.
The Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe®) focuses on
providing a knowledge base of patterns for scaling development work across all levels of the enterprise.
The customer can help build collaboration and trust by
providing timely feedback
The retrospective is about looking at the
qualitative (people's feelings) and quantitative (measurements) data, then using that data to find root causes, designing countermeasures, and developing action plans.
The purpose of the sessions in the middle of the iteration is to
refine enough stories so the team understands what the stories are and how large the stories are in relation to each other.
After the team completes work in iteration or flow, the team can
replan
Model for suitability of agile approach
represents a synthesis of several suitability filter attributes to help organizations assess and discuss whether projects should be undertaken using predictive, hybrid, or agile approaches.
If the product owner is unsure of the dependencies, the product owner can
request the team to spike the feature in order to understand the risks.
The single most important practice is the
retrospective
Agile techniques for procurement-heavy organizations
retrospectives and follow up on possible improvement areas when the vendor is still engaged can help mitigate loss of product knowledge.
There is more than one way to
scale work
Crystal methodologies are designed to
scale, and provide a selection of methodology rigor based on project size (number of people involved in the project) and the criticality of the project.
The problem with predictive measurements is
that they often do not reflect reality
The guidance of the most widespread agile methods such as Scrum and eXtreme Programming focus on
the activities of a single, small, usually colocated, cross-functional team
Project leaders wanting to achieve agility should consider
the current and future states of both of these aspects in their organization.
A more deliberate perspective incorporates
the desire for employee engagement. This is achieved by inviting only those interested to engage with PMO services.
Burndowns show
the effect of team members multitasking, stories that are too large, or team members out of the office.
In iteration-based agile, the team demonstrates all completed work items at
the end of the iteration
Acceptance Test-Driven Development (ATDD)
the entire team gets together and discusses the acceptance criteria for a work product. Then the team creates the tests, which allows the team to write just enough code and automated tests to meet the criteria.
A fundamental part of what makes a project agile is
the frequent delivery of a working product.
The use of the word crystal comes from
the gemstone where the various "faces" represent underlying core principles and values
Regardless of the approach, a critical success factor is
the healthy agile team
Rolling out changes in a transparent and appealing way improves
the likelihood of their success
In agile, the team limits its estimation to
the next few weeks at most
The Kanban Method is less prescriptive than some agile approaches and thus less disruptive to begin implementing as it is
the original "start where you are" method
The features complete line shows
the pace the team completes features
Velocity
the sum of the story point sizes for the features actually completed in this iteration, allows the team to plan its next capacity more accurately by looking at its historical performance
One problem with status reporting is
the team's ability to predict completion or to use traffic light status to describe the project
cycle time
the time required to process an item
response time
the time that an item waits until work starts
lead time
the total time it takes to deliver an item, measured from the time it is added to the board to the moment it is completed
Culture will always influence
the use of agile approaches
Burnup charts show
the work completed
A cumulative flow diagram shows
the work in progress across a board
Only in a safe, honest, and transparent environment can team members and leaders truly reflect on
their successes to ensure their projects continue to advance, or apply lessons learned on failed projects so they do not fall back into the same patterns.
One of the antipatterns typically seen in standups is
they become status meetings
Projects incur more risk when
those involved in the contract take the perspective of winners vs. losers
Scrum is run on
timeboxes of 1 month or less with consistent durations called sprints where a potentially releasable increment of product is produced
The goal of large-scale agile projects is
to coordinate the efforts of different teams to bring value to customers
Team augmentation
to embed the supplier's services directly into the customer organization. Funding teams instead of a specific scope preserves the customer's strategic discretion on what work should actually be done.
The intent of Agile Unified Process (AgileUP) is
to perform more iterative cycles across seven key disciplines, and incorporate the associated feedback before formal delivery
The Crystal family of approach recommends that Large, mission or life critical projects
to use more rigor and validation.