Professional Documents
Culture Documents
- Book 1
Agile Snippets
David Geoffrey Litten
Agile Primer
BOOK 1
BOOK 1
assumption leads to another error, and that is than organization must use either agile or
traditional project management.
A fact that his little known is that DSDM Atern was originally designed to integrate with the
PRINCE2 methodology. DSDM Atern can be used straight out of the box allowing
organizations two that simply adopt this tried and tested approach.
If an organization already uses PRINCE2, then adopting agile project management will enable
them to harness the power of both and hence provide a complimentary best practice set of
processes.
Both agile project management and DSDM Atern have a formally recognize certification process
which case the development of professionalism as part of an individuals professional
development.
The Agile project management certification provides both foundation and practitioner levels
which allowed an individual to progress from a basic level to a more advanced level.
Project managers will be able to develop their agile management skills because agile project
management training is based on best practice, and allows that individual to have a different
set of management skills and experience when applying for agile project management
positions.
DSDM Atern uses five key techniques to do this:
MoSCoW prioritization
Facilitated workshops
Iterative development
Modeling and prototyping
Timeboxing
DSDM Atern also has a considerable life cycle which is designed to create frequent product
delivery, iterative and incremental development, and active business involvement plus only
delivery of business benefits.
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Pre project
Feasibility
Foundations
Exploration
Engineering
Deployment
Post-project
There is flexibility in applying the above phases, for example the feasibility and foundations
phases may be combined. In addition, there are various permutations of how the exploration
and engineering phases are used within a given project time frame.
DSDM Atern has a philosophy that any project must be aligned to clearly defined strategic
goals, and be focused on early and frequent delivery of business benefits.
In addition DSDM Atern defines EIGHT principles which are fundamental to successfully
applying both the approach and its philosophy.
DSDM Atern also describes a set of defined roles and responsibilities at both the project and
the solution development team levels:
Project level roles: The business sponsor, the business visionary, the project manager, and the
technical coordinator.
Solution development team roles: Team leader, business ambassador all, business analyst,
solution developer, solution tester, and technical adviser.
CasaBlanca Publishing 2014 |www.agileprojectmanagementprimer.com | agile easy read snippets
BOOK 1
Agile methodology.
The term agile methodology is derived from a set of techniques and methods that have the
following characteristics:
Development of the products occurs within multiple iterations and this is called iterative
development
This last bullet describing an empirical approach in agile means that everyone involved
understands the process and makes contributions to its being refined.
For this to work, independent inspection of each product by suitably skilled individuals must
occur in order to identify any variances from the acceptance criteria. This further infers that
the solution development team must adapt and adjust quickly to minimize further product
deviations.
As you might expect, there are various approaches that could be considered agile. But the main
three that are generally recognized as agile are; lean software development, extreme
programming (XP), and scrum.
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The above diagram suggests that each process step is done in strict sequence, but that is not
the fall set of information that Dr. Royce described! He actually added the fact that in the case
of a project where the product was being developed for the first time, that the version
deployed by the customer should be the second version which of course means that his
intention was that the waterfall method should be iterative in nature:
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Returning now to the agile methodology, there is a great deal of common ground between the
three approaches of lean, extreme programming, and scrum. These can be summarised as part
of the agile manifesto and the twelve agile principles
Each approach includes engaging everyone, using the entire team, and applying the principle of
collective ownership within a cross functional solution development team.
In addition, the emphasis is upon optimizing the whole team within a test driven development
harnessing continuous integration product increments. The approach is also summarize fast
delivery via small releases using between one and four week sprints.
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The project manager is responsible for communication and for ensuring that information about
the projects progress is available to stakeholders while minimizing interruptions to the solution
development team.
As a mindset, the project manager must keep their focus to always welcome changing
requirements to the project, no matter or at what point during the life cycle that they arise.
BOOK 1
An Agile Methodology uses the approach of iterative and incremental product creation and
delivery, and that the lower level, this is carried out within each development Timebox typically
lasting only a few weeks.
Because prioritization is used to allow dropping the lower prioritized features, then each
Timebox can guarantee it will finish on time by delivering the minimum usable subset of the
requirements.
In this way, if Timeboxes deliver on time, then so do the increments, the project phases or
stages, and indeed eventually, the project itself.
Because such planning, requirements prioritization, product development, testing and
demonstrating occurs within each Timebox and increment, this significantly lowers the risk of
product development veering in the wrong direction, or worse, delivering a product that is not
what the business needs.
Because of the approach used in an agile project, the development pace tends to be fairly
consistent mainly due to the active involvement of business representatives, early delivery of
benefits, and frequent demonstrations of the product being acceptable to the business.
Compare this to a traditional project, where often in an attempt to meet an unrealistic and
bloated set of requirements and specifications (not to mention unrealistic milestone delivery
dates), forces the development team to work longer and unrealistic hours in order to meet such
targets.
In summary, the job of an agile project manager working within an agile project consists of:
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Here, you can clearly see that Scrum fits neatly at the Team Management level. Of course, the Solution
Development Team creates the products or deliverable of the project.
DSDM straddles all disciplines, dipping into project management.
But the piece that was always missing was the harnessing of the project management discipline and cocoordinating that downward into the solution development team.
Further, the disciplines needed to work together for any type of project as well as just software/IT
projects.
Fosters close cooperation between the scrum team and others stakeholders
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In this way the members of the scrum team, the solution development team, the product owner, and
the scrum master work closely together on a daily basis throughout the project.
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The following diagram (also known as the alien baby due to its shape) shows how the agile roles have
evolved:
Here, it could be argued that the Agile Scrum Master role has been shared between several other
roles. However, this does not stop for a single individual from taking these roles on as an individual.
The challenge has always been finding a single individual who has the necessary knowledge, skills, and
experience to carry out the agile scrum master role.
Splitting the responsibilities into more than one role therefore, makes sense as it shares these attributes
among the solution development team.
Here then, are the roles that COULD share the title of agile scrum master:
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Project Manager.
This role provides high-level management direction to the solution development team and focus is on
optimizing the teams environment, removing distractions, planning and managing at a high-level, and
being delivery focused.
The role includes communicating with senior management, planning and monitoring progress at the
project-level, providing resources, and handling any escalated problems or issues from the team.
Team leader.
This role reports to the project manager and is responsible for ensuring that the solution development
team functions effectively and efficiently while meeting their product deliverable objectives.
The team leader plans and co-ordinates all aspects of product delivery at the detailed level, and is a
leadership rather than management role.
Business Ambassador.
This role represents the business area being addressed and as such represents those who will make
direct use of the solution. The role must ensure that the products are fit for business purpose and is
responsible for the day-to-day communication between the project and the business.
DSDM Coach.
This was formerly called the Agile Coach, but now more correctly is focused to help the team get the
most out of the DSDM approach.
Summary.
As you can see from the above diagram, the environment of agile has evolved and matured to both
recognize and include various disciplines within any project or endeavor.
Since the term Agile Scrum Master was derived from the use of agile for software development projects,
it quite rightly continues to be used.
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However, as more definition has evolved around the roles used within a full blown generic Agile project,
the Agile Scrum Master role may need to be shared between several individuals, working closely
together throughout the project, and contributing their own knowledge skills and experience towards
that of an agile scrum master.
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Each of these steps is conducted in an Iterative manner giving opportunities for early testing.
Agile testing will also happened at the end of each increment, after say, several Timeboxes have
been completed, and this is often an opportunity to perform integration testing.
There are limitless sequences with regard to the time frame of Timeboxes and increments, and
hence every project should have a defined testing strategy which will take cognizance of one of
Agiles major strengths, and that is to deploy higher priority products early in to the appropriate
life business area.
For the same reasons, the requirements or features will have been prioritized using the
MoSCoW approach, and so it makes sense to test the higher priority features/products first.
This in and of itself, reduces project risk.
In a similar manner, some tests will significantly reduce the risk of a product being deployed
within the life business area, while other tests have less risk. For this reason, products with a
high risk should be tested first.
Wherever possible, tests should be made repeatable as it is likely that each test will be run
more than once for each product before it is accepted by the customer. All tests along with the
acceptance criteria are specified for a given product before it is created.
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One of the key techniques for an agile project is the use of facilitated workshops, and these can
be used very effectively for agile testing. Examples of the use of workshops include:
For final fast inspections and walk-throughs of processes, documentation and modeling
To create agile testing documentation such as the business testing strategy
To resolve and repair any defects found during testing
As a risk assessment workshop to prioritize associated tests against product risks
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Check out more of my quality downloadable Project Management Video Training Products:
Dave Litten
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