Abstract
When I presented my topic at ISPI’s THE Performance Improvement Conference in 2014, I was prepared to share my ideas with colleagues about the nuances of Agile to buttress comparisons with the standards and principles of human performance technology (HPT). What my audience that day wanted was the basics of Agile. They asked me, in a dozen different ways, "What the heck is Agile?" This chapter provides an introduction to Agile software development and direction for those who want to explore further. If you are already well into your Agile journey, I have a few tidbits for you as well.
The Scrum Team consists of a Product Owner, the Development Team, and a Scrum Master. Scrum Teams are self-organizing and cross-functional. Self-organizing teams choose how best to accomplish their work, rather than being directed by others outside the team. Cross-functional teams have all competencies needed to accomplish the work without depending on others not part of the team. The team model in Scrum is designed to optimize flexibility, creativity, and productivity.
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Notes
- 1.
http://www.scrumguides.org/docs/scrumguide/v1/scrum-guide-us.pdf , page 4. This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/ or send a letter to Creative Commons, PO Box 1866, Mountain View, CA 94042, USA.
- 2.
Manifesto for Agile Software Development is the official name. Most people just call it the Agile Manifesto.
- 3.
No women were among the original signatories. Walk through any cubicle farm of a software development function, and you will see that there are very few women in the field. Estimates vary, but a safe one would be that women make up no more than 25 percent of software engineers. Visit http://womeninagile.com to hear what some of the leading female voices have to say about Agile and women’s role in it.
- 4.
I will describe XP and Scrum in some detail later in this book. The remainder on this list, while important in their own ways, are among dozens of frameworks, methods, and practices that I won’t bother to define.
- 5.
- 6.
See http://agilemanifesto.org/principles.html . © 2001.
- 7.
“Death march” is a wonderfully macabre term used in project management and software development to describe a team’s shared feelings of hopelessness and despair on the road to what appears to be certain project failure.
- 8.
All metrics presented in this section come from VersionOne (2014), 8th Annual State of Agile Development Survey, available at the Library of White Papers of the VersionOne website, http://www.versionone.com/pdf/2013-state-of-agile-survey.pdf .
- 9.
By “popular,” I mean it has become a full-fledged cottage industry. The ScrumAlliance, which provides a range of certification programs, has 350,000 active (dues-paying) members. Being an Agile consultant specializing in Scrum can be a nice way to make a living. The marketing success of Scrum has bred some cynicism by some of the Agile purists. They may have a point in some cases, but overall, the popularity of Scrum is largely responsible for the rise in popularity of Agile in general, as well as its expansion beyond the software business, both of which are good things.
- 10.
In Chapter 6, I introduce agile performance improvement, which focuses on how the people involved in the process interact, not just the flow of work.
- 11.
As a general guideline, a four-week sprint calls for an eight-hour planning meeting; two-weeks a four-hour meeting; one week a two-hour meeting. The team can make the decision to make the meeting longer or shorter. My team usually does four hours of planning for a four-week sprint. Thorough preparation by the product owner is the key to efficient and acrimony-free sprint planning meetings.
- 12.
As you learn about Agile, you might hear that the product owner is not supposed to or does not have to attend the daily scrum. I disagree. The product owner is part of the scrum team. Bad things happen when the product owner gets disconnected from the team.
- 13.
One highly regarded book on this topic is Lyssa Adkins’ Coaching Agile Teams (Addison-Wesley, 2010).
- 14.
Some companies have gone so far as to make the Scrum titles their employees’ official job titles.
- 15.
Rubin, Kenny. (2012). T-shaped Skills and Swarming Make for Flexible Scrum and Agile Teams. Retrieved March 20, 2015 from Scrum Expert: http://www.scrumexpert.com/knowledge/t-shaped-skills-and-swarming-make-for-flexible-scrum-and-agile-teams/
- 16.
The 16-page pamphlet is available for free at http://www.scrumguides.org/docs/scrumguide/v1/scrum-guide-us.pdf .
- 17.
Mike Cohn, “Release Planning: Retiring the Term but not the Technique” blog, August 19, 2012. Mountain Goat Software: http://www.mountaingoatsoftware.com/blog/release-planning-retiring-term-not-technique .
- 18.
Kenneth S. Rubin, Essential Scrum: A Practical Guide to the Most Popular Agile Process, Addison-Wesley, 2012.
- 19.
The same cannot quite be said for Scrum.org, the publisher of the Scrum Guide, whose tagline remains, as of this writing, “Improving the Profession of Software Development.”
- 20.
See Chapter 5 for more about refactoring.
- 21.
The specks of paint on the floor represent technical debt, discussed in Chapter 5.
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Winter, B. (2015). The Basics of Agile. In: Agile Performance Improvement. Apress, Berkeley, CA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4842-0892-2_4
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