Chapter 12. Agile (Adaptive) Project Management
12.5 Key Takeaways
Key Takeaways
- Agile project management approach has been utilized by project teams since 1990s when it started to emerge among software developers.
- In 2001, agile practitioners published a manifesto named “Manifesto for agile software development” that put forward a set of guiding principles for agile project management.
- Agile manifesto highlights the importance of “individuals and interactions”, “working software”, “customer collaboration”, and “responding to change” to distinguish itself with the traditional waterfall project management approach.
- While waterfall approach is linear and sequential, agile approach compresses the sequential phases in small timeboxes (iterations) to create increments at the end of each timebox.
- There main agile roles are cross-functional teams and their members, product owners, and team facilitators.
- Common agile practices are team charter, user stories and backlog, planning of each iteration or cycle, daily standups. demonstration or reviews, retrospectives, and backlog refinement.
- The structure of a user story is generally in a format as follows: As a “user/stakeholder”, I want to “perform a function / an action / an app feature” so that I can “acquire a benefit / an expected outcome”.
- The Agile Practice Guide by PMI (Project Management Institute) lists the single-team agile methods as Scrum, Extreme Programming (XP), Kanban, Crystal methods, Scrumban, Feature-Driven Development (FDD), Dynamic Systems Development Method (DSDM), and Agile Unified Process (AgileUP).
- The SAFe® (Scaled Agile Framework) is the most common scaling framework according to the 15th State of Agile Report published in 2021. It focuses on providing a knowledge base of patterns for scaling development work across all levels of the enterprise.
