Introduction to Agile

Course Details

• Skills Gained
• Understand Agile values and principles, and how to build the discipline to support those principles in your everyday practice
• Appreciate the history of Agile and how the collection of principles and practices came together to enable customer success
• Examine Agile methods, including: Scrum, Extreme Programming, Lean Software Development, Kanban
• Draw best practices from the various methodologies that will contribute to your team success
• Talk the talk: learning the Agile terminology, roles and forums with their context
• Walk through the processes that support Agile principles to enable the delivery of great products
• Begin to map the transition of your existing team or enterprise-level processes to Agile
• Discover the power of Agile teams through communication, collaboration and cadence
• Uncover the pitfalls that teams will encounter in an Agile transition and understand how to overcome those challenges
• Lay the foundation upon which you can build a learning team and organization
• Agile Overview
• Making the Case for Change – Organizational change (which an Agile transformation is) is difficult to achieve unless there is a clear understanding among everyone involved about why it is necessary.
• Exercise: Make a list of software project problems that you would like to correct.
• The Agile Paradigm Shift
• Agile techniques are based on a completely different mental model and set of paradigms about projects. In this section, we begin to explore the mindset that that the Agile methods are built upon.
• A Paradigm for Complexity – The inherent complexity of developing software is the source of most software project failures, so the Agile methods embrace paradigms that are designed for complexity
• Predictive vs. Adaptive – A key difference between traditional and Agile paradigms concerns our ability to predict how the project will unfold. The Agile approach is to expect that our predictions may
• The Agile Foundation
• We continue exploring the Agile mindset by examining the foundations upon which the Agile methods were built.
• Agile Manifesto – The value system upon which Agile is built
• Agile Principles – The necessary elements for making Agile work
• Agile Benefits – Actual benefits as reported in the State of Agile Report
• Agile Methodologies
• Lean – All of the Agile methods are based on the principles first formalized in Lean Manufacturing, so we start with Lean Software Development
• Scrum – The most widely-used of the Agile methods, Scrum is a good method to use to understand the basic iterative practices employed by most Agile teams
• Kanban – Originally created by the Lean Movement and more recently embraced by the Agile Community, Kanban provides an alternative process structure that (unlike the other Agile methods), is not based
• XP – Extreme Programming (XP) is one of the few Agile methods that goes into detail about technical programming practices, so we will take some time to explore them.
• Custom Hybrid – We complete this section by observing that many teams create their own custom Agile method by drawing practices from several Agile methods and combining them in unique ways.
• Exercise: See for yourself how common practices that Lean counsels against can make a team less efficient.
• Building the Agile Team
• Systems Thinking – Seeing the Agile team as more than a collection of people
• What Makes a Great Team – The secret of an effective team goes way beyond the process they are using
• Agile Team Roles – Agile teams have some unique and important roles
• Team Best Practices – Guidance from Agile coaches on how to lead an Agile team to be the best they can be
• Exercise: Make a list of the attributes of great teams you have been a part of.
• Inspect and Adapt
• Iteration Review – A status check helps the team to stay on track and know if they need to take corrective action
• Demo – A show-and-tell with the customer ensures that what they just built is indeed what the customer expected and needs
• Retrospective – A mini-lessons-learned gives them the opportunity to improve how they work—beginning the very next day
• Agile Adoption
• Leading Change – A look and organizational change management
• Exercise: What will you do in your organization with what you just learned?