Agile Practice Guide Pdf Free
Gwenda Arguin
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Agile can be tricky for everyone, especially UX. We often have to adapt how we work and help others understand how we fit and contribute. The goal of this study guide is to provide tangible tools and tips to make the adaptation process clear and easy.
For more in-depth understanding on how UX fits into Lean and Agile ways of working and tangible practices for navigating challenges, take our full-day course, Lean UX & Agile at the UX Conference. Or, explore our research report, Effective Agile UX Product Development.
We not only discuss the implications that The Agile Practice guide has on the PMI-ACP exam and your PMI-ACP exam prep, we also examine the core chapters of the new guide and discuss application and adaptation implications. We explore many elements of the guide and learn more about its content and use in a variety of domains.
Mike Griffiths: Sure! So the Agile Alliance is a not-for-profit group that exists to promote and educate people about Agile methods. So Agile is a broad umbrella of methods. People are very familiar with Scrum but it includes other approaches such as XP and Feature-Driven Development and another type there.
The Agile Alliance is like I say is not-for-profit group that creates their own conferences and promotes Agile and Agile practices in organizations. So there are resource center. You can go there to learn more about Agile and techniques.
Mike Griffiths: So it was really to provide guidance for project practitioners that are frequently in the space of having Agile teams or being asked to spin up Agile teams quite often in less than Agile environments. So we described the hybrid environment being where we have some Agile elements in play but parts of the organization are still traditionally predictive or plan-driver.\
And so the Agile Practice Guide was really the basic steps for project practitioners who are in that space, who would like to become more Agile and perhaps not sure how to do that or what steps to follow. And we wanted to provide a methodology agnostic independent way of providing that guidance.
Jesse Fewell: Well Mike would say was a hybrid approach. We had a very firm fixed deadline for the perspective publication. I mean this is a publication project and so there is a fixed deadline that had to synchronize with the publication of PMBOK Guide Sixth Edition. Because we needed to align with that from a content perspective and from a product delivery perspective. But within those firm fixed kind of constraints before which a lot of things happen and after which a lot of things happened, we were very organic and very fluid and very iterative in the creation of the draft, the manuscript itself.
Mike Griffiths: So we started I think in August of 2016 with our kickoff meeting. We basically only had from then until the end of the year to do our writing. So we had from August through December to get the first draft written and then it went out for pair review. So we had 30 Agile practitioners and 30 PMI sort of more traditional project managers review it and provide feedback.
Cornelius Fichtner: Personal interest last year at the conference in San Diego I believe we were, you had a workshop where people could come in and also provide input. How was that input used in order to develop the guide?
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In the nearly 20 years since the Agile Manifesto became a rallying cry for software development teams, organizations have used Agile development practices to deliver value at a rapid pace. Compared to traditional development teams, Agile teams:
When the team, stakeholders and customer have a shared understanding of the goals, they are more likely to get the desired results. The most effective software development teams make collaboration and other Agile best practices their standard way of working.
Organizations operating in dynamic market environments need Agile teams who can work within short development cycles to achieve a faster time-to-market. Particularly in the technology space, Agile teams are desirable because they are more innovative, adaptable and responsive to rapidly changing conditions. Using methods designed to produce frequent, high-quality, sustainable releases, Agile teams can deliver tested, working software in two- to four-week iterations.
How is that possible? An Agile team is a tight-knit group of three to 10 highly skilled people who work together full-time, usually in close proximity. The team has what it takes to get the job done. Individual team members represent diverse functional areas, so programmers, designers, testers, analysts, technical writers and others collaborate throughout the development process. Team members learn to speak the same language, no matter what their discipline. They also put ego aside to ask for and accept help, and they share accountability for the outcomes, both the successes and the rare failures. Teams learn from every iteration, continuously adding to the list of Agile best practices that guide them.
Agile projects are driven by a shared commitment to the values, principles and practices that define the Agile methodology. The 17 authors of the Agile Manifesto were practicing software developers who had experienced a better way to build software. Many of their practices derived from popular frameworks such as Scrum and Kanban. The authors committed a collection of values and principles into writing in 2001, at a gathering of software developers in Snowbird, Utah. Most notably, their Agile practices put people before processes.
The authors of the Agile Manifesto joined with like-minded individuals to form the Agile Alliance, dedicated to sharing information about methods and practices for building more effective software solutions.
Countless Agile best practices and development strategies are now part of the body of knowledge, giving Agile teams the benefit of learning from those before them. Equally important are the best practices concerning how groups of individuals can work together more efficiently and effectively. Even the best developers and testers need to up their interpersonal games to deliver products of value to users. That calls for more effective communication and collaboration among the development team, business stakeholders and the customer.
The customer is satisfied when requirements are fulfilled, expectations are met, and wants and needs are gratified. Short of mindreading, software developers have come up with various ways to discover what the customer wants and to deliver exactly that. Traditionally, teams record user requirements at one end of the funnel, then deliver the product at the other end with negligible customer interaction in between. An Agile team is in near-constant communication with the customer, clarifying expectations, collaborating on fixes, and communicating options not previously considered.
This frequent interaction between the team and the customer is what promotes creativity and heightens quality. The best teams manage the risk of customers coming back with too many changes by collaborating on how to satisfy their demands. Together, they devise a better way to make the product do what users want it to do. It may not work the way the customer initially envisioned, but it will function in a more innovative and sustainable way.
Agile teams operate on the assumption that individuals accomplish more when they rely on each other, than when they rely upon the processes and tools that are the mainstays of software development. Working together empowers and emboldens teams to take the imaginative leaps that produce truly innovative software. Apart from collaboration, simple teamwork is perhaps the most important skill in the lexicon of Agile best practices.
Global teams face significant challenges, not only with geographic isolation of working groups or individuals, but also with time zone differences that limit when team members are available. Creating a virtual room with videoconferencing services, FaceTime mobile devices or cloud-based collaboration software is a passable alternative to in-person conversations. Conference calls, phone/VOIP or group text messages are generally poor substitutes.
Self-organizing teams choose how they will execute the work, and who will do what. They divide the work into increments that can be completed within each iteration, and into tasks that can be completed each day. Management does not assign tasks or look over their shoulders. The team is entrusted with making the right decisions. For this arrangement to work, each team member has to be confident in their work and commit to pushing through the most difficult, frustrating blocks. As a whole, teams share responsibility and accountability, stepping outside of individual roles to resolve issues together. If the outcome misses the mark, the team learns and adapts. Management does not second-guess or redirect.
Unless members have extensive prior experience, Agile teams do not intuitively know how to self-organize, and plan and execute an Agile software development project. It takes training, coaching and mentoring to make an Agile team. A team that is performing at full throttle still benefits from a mentor who can help them grow their skills.
When Agile teams consistently produce high-quality output, organizations that started small often want to scale the Agile development process to more products. Using the Agile methodology, multiple teams can work simultaneously on individual product releases or on multiple product releases in the portfolio. These teams can synchronize the planning and execution of their work using an Agile delivery solution that automates Agile practices and accelerates delivery. Even at scale, Agile teams can continue to self-organize and collaborate to achieve product goals.
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