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What is Agile Project Management?

What is Agile Project Management?

Agile project management is an iterative and incremental approach to software development under which requirements and solutions evolve through the collaborative effort of self-organizing and cross-functional teams and their end user/client.

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What is Scrum?

What is Scrum?

Scrum is a simple way to do complex things. 'Agile Methodology' is an umbrella term under which resides many frameworks and Scrum is the most popular one of them all. So much so that 'Agile' and 'Scrum' are often used interchangeably.

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What is a Scrum Board?

A Scrum board is the face of your process, a visual status of your sprint, showing your work split across different stages of your workflow. Before we get into the Scrum Board, let's brush up on what we know about Scrum. Scrum and Kanban are popular frameworks for implementing agile practices in teams.

Agile Planning

Planning in the waterfall side of the project management world is often associated with fixed-scope projects and working overtime to meet hard deadlines. Agile project management is associated with more recent ideas like fluidity and adaption to change.

Sprint planning

Sprint planning is a Scrum meeting that helps the team decide what they're going to work on in the upcoming sprint. During the sprint planning meeting, the team determines the sprint goal and the user stories for their sprint backlog.

Backlog Management

A product backlog is a prioritized list of all the product's requirements, usually taken from the product roadmap and stakeholder input. It's an integral piece to any Scrum process. All the user stories, tasks, bugs, and enhancements go via the backlog before they're taken by the team.

What is Kanban?

What is Kanban?

Kanban is a system of visualizing work and limiting work in progress to achieve higher levels of productivity. Kanban's work-in-progress principle prevents tasks from getting stuck in the "Doing" stage and helps teams focus on getting more done.

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What is an epic?

What is an epic?

An epic is a large user story which is too big to fit into a sprint. This high-level story is usually split into smaller ones, each of which can be completed within a sprint. In that sense, an epic is a collection of user stories with a unified goal. There is no standard form or template to use in writing epics. Some teams use the "As a , I want ..." template which is usually reserved for user stories while others just use phrases like "Zylker Phase 2" or "Google Maps Integration".

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Kanban vs. Scrum

Kanban vs. Scrum

As far as debates in the agile world go, this is a pretty famous one. Scrum and Kanban are the two most popular frameworks under the agile methodology. The agile methodology simply gives you a set of values, while these frameworks help your team implement those values as practices. While they have their differences, both are derived from agile values. In a sense, they are siblings and as we all know, there is never a clear winner in sibling rivalry. Let's size up our candidates.

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What are user stories?

What are user stories?

A user story is a short, informal description of how a potential user might interact with a feature and is usually told from the user's perspective. A user story is usually written in non-technical language and describes the value the feature or product in question adds to the end user. User stories are critical in agile software development to encourage discussions and to keep feature development focused on the customer.

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Daily stand-up meetings

Holding a daily stand-up meeting is an effective practice whose importance is often underplayed or overlooked by agile teams. A daily stand-up meeting or a daily Scrum is a 15-minute time-boxed meeting that an agile team holds every day. Scrum methodology emphasizes face-to-face communication and this is done through the prescribed four meetings: sprint planning, daily stand-up, sprint retrospectives, and sprint review. The daily stand-up meeting is usually held at the same time and place and sets the context for each day's work.

Sprint reviews

Sprint reviews are meetings held at the end of a sprint to present the product increment worked on in that sprint to key stakeholders and get their feedback. The product backlog is also updated according to the information that has surfaced during the sprint duration. At the end of every sprint, a sprint review is held, followed by the sprint retrospective.

Sprint Retrospectives

The cornerstone of agile methodologies is adapting to change quickly and efficiently. This adaptability is made possible by agile's use of small and frequent feedback loops. According to the agile manifesto, the last agile principle is "At regular intervals, the team reflects on how to become more effective, then tunes and adjusts its behavior accordingly." In the Scrum process, this practice is realized in the form of a sprint retrospective.

Agile Reports

Besides the obvious advantage of visibility, reports also help you make informed decisions in the future. This is all the more crucial for an agile team whose methodology emphasizes on the inspect-and-adapt approach. Empiricism is a core tenet of the Scrum framework, and reports play an important part in implementing this.

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