1. Agile project management focuses on continuous improvement, scope flexibility, team input, and delivering essential quality products. Agile project management approaches include scrum as a framework, extreme programming (XP) for building in quality upfront, and lean thinking to eliminate waste.
2. Agile project management is an iterative approach to managing software development projects that focuses on continuous releases and incorporating customer feedback with every iteration.
Traditional agile project management can be categorized into two frameworks: scrum and kanban. While scrum is focused on fixed-length project iterations, kanban is focused on continuous releases. Upon completion, the team immediately moves on to the next.
How scrum works
Scrum is a framework for agile project management that uses fixed-length iterations of work, called sprints. There are four ceremonies that bring structure to each sprint.
SPRINT PLANNING
A team planning meeting that determines what to complete in the coming sprint.
SPRINT DEMO
A sharing meeting where the team shows what they've shipped in that sprint.
DAILY SCRUM
Also known as a stand-up, a 15-minute mini-meeting for the software team to sync.
RETROSPECTIVE
A review of what did and didn't go well with actions to make the next sprint better.
How kanban works
Kanban is a framework for agile project management that matches the work to the team's capacity. It's focused on getting things done as fast as possible, giving teams the ability to react to change even faster than scrum.
The kanban framework includes the following four components:
LIST OF WORK
(OR STORIES)
List of work, or stories, are defined as issues or tasks that need to get done.
WORK IN PROGRESS
(WIP) LIMITS
A rule to limit the amount of work to be done based on the team's capacity.
WORK IN PROGRESS
(WIP) LIMITS
A rule to limit the amount of work to be done based on the team's capacity.
CONTINUOUS RELEASES
The team works on the amount of stories within the WIP limit and can release at anytime.
Agile project estimating
Project estimating is an extremely important aspect of both kanban and scrum project management. For kanban, many teams set their WIP limit for each state based on their previous experiences and team size. Scrum teams use project estimating to identify how much work can be done in a particular sprint. Many agile teams adopt unique estimating techniques like planning poker, ideal hours, or story points to determine a numeric value for the task at hand.
Agile reporting
Project estimations come into play at the beginning and end of each sprint. They help teams determine what they can get done at the beginning of the sprint, but also show how accurate those initial estimates were at the end.
- Software Firm/team Advantages of using Agile:
- Our highest priority is to satisfy the customer through early and continuous delivery of valuable software.
- Welcome changing requirements, even late in development. Agile processes harness change for the customer’s competitive advantage.
- Deliver working software frequently, from a couple of weeks to a couple of months, with a preference to the shorter timescale.
- Business people and developers must work together daily throughout the project.
- 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 and a big community of agile practitioners with whom you can share knowledge.
- You can detect and fix issues and defects faster
- Working software is the primary measure of progress.
- Agile processes promote sustainable development. The 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.
- Developers can improve their coding skills based on QA feedback.
- You can experiment and test ideas because it costs are low
- Disadvantages of agile project management
- Documentation tends to get sidetracked, which makes it harder for new members to get up to speed
- It’s more difficult to measure progress than in waterfall because progress happens across several cycles
- Agile demands more time and energy from everyone because developers and customers must constantly interact with each other
- When developers run out of work, they can’t work on a different project because they’ll be needed soon
- Projects can become ever-lasting because there’s no clear end of that system.
- Clients who work on a specified budget or schedule can’t know how much the project will actually cost, which makes for a very complicated sales cycle (until iteration ends is not something clients like to hear)
- Teams can get sidetracked into delivering new functionality at the expense of technical debt, which increases the amount of unplanned work
- Features that are too big to fit into one or even several cycles are avoided because they don’t fit in nicely into the philosophy
- You need a long term vision for the product and actively work on communicating it
- Products lack cohesion and the user journey is fragmented because the design is fragmented. The more time passes, the more disjointed software ends up.
- Short cycles don’t leave enough time for the design thinking process so designers have to redevelop the experience over and over due to negative feedback.