Agile is an iterative process that emphasizes frequent inspection and adaptation. The Agile Manifesto values individuals and interactions, working software, customer collaboration, and responding to change over processes, tools, contracts, and following a plan. Common Agile methodologies include Scrum, Extreme Programming (XP), Lean, Kanban, Feature-Driven Development (FDD), Dynamic Systems Development Method (DSDM), and Crystal. Scrum uses sprints, daily stand-ups, and artifacts like product backlogs and increments. XP focuses on simplicity, feedback, and pair programming. Lean aims to eliminate waste. Kanban uses visual boards and limits work-in-progress. FDD develops features incrementally. DSDM prioritizes

1. Introduction to Agile
Sangeetha Siddhantam PMP, PMI-ACP

2. What Is Agile and why knowledge workers use it?
For any Knowledge workers (software engineers, doctors, lawyers,
accountants etc..) there are two important components they emphasize on:
1. Process
2. Quality
Since knowledge work is less structured and invisible, we as knowledge
workers continuously learn, innovate and emphasize on changing things.
This is when we adapt a process called Agile.
Agile is a process that is iterative and incremental where small sections are
completed for frequent inspections and adaptability.

3. A document called Agile Manifesto includes a statement of four values and twelve guiding principles.
Four values:
• Individuals and interactions over processes and tools.
• Working software over comprehensive documentation.
• Customer collaboration over contract negotiation.
• Responding to change over following a plan.
Twelve principles:
• Highest priority is to satisfy the customer through early and continuous delivery of valuable software.
• Welcome changes, even late in development.
• Deliver working software frequently, from a couple of weeks to couple of months .
• Business people and developers must work together daily throughout the project.
• Build projects around motivated individual.
• The most efficient and effective method of conveying is face-to-face conversation.
• Working software is the primary measure of progress.
• Promoters sustainable development. The sponsors, developers and users should be able to maintain a constant pace indefinitely.
• Continuous attention to technical excellence and good design enhances agility.
• Simplicity.
• Self –organizing teams.
• At regular intervals, the team reflects on how to become more effective, then tunes and adjusts its behavior accordingly.

4. Agile Methodologies
Most common Agile Mythologies are:
• Scrum
• Extreme Programming(XP)
• Lean product development
• Kanban
• Feature-Driven Development
• Dynamic Systems Development Method(DSDM)
• Crystal

5. Discussing Agile Methodologies

6. Often, there is misconception that scrum is a methodology. Scrum is a part of Agile
Methodologies. Scrum is a framework where we document deadlines, requirement, roles,
meeting details ETC that is useful for the team in executing the project. This document in
Scrum is called as “Scrum framework”.
Scrum Pillars and Values:
1. Transparency
2. Inspection
3. Adaptation
Scrum 5 fundamental values:
1. Focus
2. Courage
3. Openness
4. Commitment
5. Respect
Scrum

7. Scrum Process
In this we shall discuss Key Scrum concept-Sprint and the roles in Scrum team, artifacts.
Sprints
Sprint = Timeboxed (time-limited)
Each Sprint = A mini project
Sprint “No Changes” are made
Sprint can be cancelled before timebox
Timeboxed =1 month or less Iteration for a releasable product
Scrum sprints = 1 or 2 weeks
Sequence of activities in each sprint:
Sprint planning meeting
Daily scrum
Sprint review meeting
Sprint retrospective meeting

8. Scrum Team Roles:
Development Team: Very highly motivated, self starters, energetic professional
who build the product incrementally.
Product Owner: Basically he is the one who envisions the product. Takes
responsibility for product backlog. Makes sure team understands product vision
and goals. He is the only one who can cancel the sprint.
Scrum Master: Motivates and empowers the team. Facilitates the meeting and
coaches the team. Ensures that the team can work efficiently without any
problems. He can work on multiple projects and assist in product owner.
Scrum Activities(Events, Ceremonies)
Backlog refinement: In these meetings project team members gather to discuss
about the backlog and this process is called as grooming the backlog.
Sprint Planning Meeting: Scrum Master facilitates this meeting. As part of
sprint planning meeting Product Owner presents the updated backlog items to
the team members and they discuss what will be delivered in the upcoming
sprint.
Daily Scrum: This is only for development team members and these meeting
are for only 15 minutes. Team briefly asks 3 question:
1.What have I done since the last daily scrum?
2.What do I plan to do today?
3.Are there any impediments to me progress?
Sprint Review: In this meeting product owner, stakeholders, development team
members, scrum master and potentially anyone who are involved in this project
attend. During this meeting team members show the demo or prototype of the
product, to the product owner for his acceptance.
Sprint Retrospective: The meeting is basically for the development team
members where they reflect on the work they did before they move on to next
sprint.

9. Scrum Artifacts:
Product Increment: Once the product owner and the team members agree on the
definition of done in scrum and once they get the acceptance from product owner during
sprint review for the demo or the prototype of the product it potentially become
shippable to the customer. In plain words it is a product that is potentially shippable to
the customer.
Product Backlog: Product owner prioritizes the product backlog. This is a list of things
that need to be done to develop a product.
Sprint Backlog: During Sprint planning meeting the development team selects items
from product backlog with high prioritized items to be completed. Unlike product
backlog which is owned by product owner sprint backlog is owned by development
team. Development team decided the list of tasks to be completed before each sprint.

10. Extreme Programming
Extreme Programming also know as XP focuses on the best practices of software development.
Core Values:
Simplicity
Communication
Feedback
Courage
Respect
XP Team Roles:
Coach: Mentor, facilitator and motivator to the team
Customer: A business representative who envision the product, explain, write and prioritize the user stories and Being in
the role of a customer in XP is similar to product owner in scrum.
Programmers: Being a programmer in XP is a very important role. As they are the people who builds the Product and
writes coding for user stories.
Testers: They assure high quality of the product and assist customer who is a business representative in writing user
stories.

11. XP Core Practices
Whole Team : To maximize the resources XP practice recommend that all the team members, sit together so, as to
perform different role as it may require resources to wear different hats.(e.g., one programmer can anytime be a tester or a
business analyst when its required.
Planning Games: There are two planning games
1. Release planning
2. Iteration planning
Release plan is a design(e.g. high level draft) for the entire project. Release plan usually have one or two releases in one
year depending on the complexity of the project.
Since release plan that is a high level design we create iteration plans for the whole team. During Iteration planning the
team selects the user stories with high priority to be developed in each iteration. Each iteration typically is from a week
to three weeks depending on the velocity of the team. Because once we have a fair idea we can revisit the release plan
frequently and make changes. Remember Agile principles where we welcoming changes late in the development.
Small Releases: During iteration level releasing a prototype or showing a working demo for getting feedback, the team
has to do frequent small releases. By doing small releases they can provide high quality to the product.

12. Customer Test: Customer writes the user stories and acceptance criteria during customer test the
team demonstrates the features as defined by the customer.
Collective Code Ownership: During collective code, team collaboratively works on new ideas and
try to fix problems. Since multiple people work during development stage by collectively coding
it maximizes the visibility of the progress in coding.
Code standards: In our previously bullet we talked about collective coding. To protect the work of
coders there is a standard format that the coding style is the same for all the developers working
on the same project.
Sustainable Pace: For attaining high quality in the product the developers need to be at their best
active and sharp to provide us with the desired results. They cannot be sleep deprived and come
back and start working because remember this is a knowledge work where we are learning
everyday.
Metaphor: Set of common names given where any team members can use .
Continuous Integration: As per the definition of integrity the quality of being honest and having
strong moral principles Frequent changes are made during coding phase, XP encourages
Continuous integration through the process of coding.

13. Test-Driven Development: Prior to coding, testing team write their own user stories and acceptance criteria so that once
coding is coding they test, and it fails they go back in rewriting the code till it passes the acceptance criteria. Remember that
these are written by the team not by customer.
Refactoring: The entire purpose of refactoring is to remove redundancy in coding without impacting the original
functionality.
Simple Design: “Let’s keep it simple” that’s the mantra of the XP team because keeping the code simple not only remove
duplication etc. but gives us flexibility if we have to do any changes to improve the efficiency of the overall product.
Pair Programming: Extra pair of eyes are always good . Working in pairs is always beneficial this goes without saying.
Reason when you are coding its one person can do the coding and the other can always review it . Kind of like team work.

14. Lean Product Development
There is always a misconception that lean is Agile methodology. The entire reasons why projects prefer to implement Agile is to
reduce waste. The main idea of Lean is to reduce waste.
7 Principles of Lean Core Concepts:
1. Eliminate Waste: Lean ideology is to eliminate waste. Any value that does not either add or benefit customer product is
considered as waste. Lets consider adding extra features to the product beyond requested by customer is waste of time, resources
that could be useful on some other projects and budget.
There are Seven wastes of Lean:
1.1.Partially done work
2.2.Extra processes
3.3.Extra features
4.4.Task switching
5.5.Waiting
6.6.Motion
7.7.Defects
2. Amplify Learning: For knowledge workers not just limited to people in the area of technology, a medical practitioner or a
teacher should continuously upgrade their skills. Keep themselves abreast with new dimensions in their required fields. The best
way is to communicate and getting feedback and reflect on what we learned or what we should learn.

15. 3.Deliver Fast: The entire reason for delivering the product as early is to get feedback. In Agile we go through multiple
iterations of the product and each iteration as we know is a mini project. Feedback enhances us to incorporate any changes
into next iteration. By doing this we continue to build high quality in the product.
4.Empower the team: One of the core Agile principles says is to motivate people. By doing this we can assure the team that
"am here to support us regardless of the outcome”. Because removing the fear and giving them chance to explore options is
very important. This build confidence in the team and empowers them.
5.Optimize the whole: As the saying “what we measure is what we get”. To get the best out of everything not just limited to
product quality but also team members, individual contractors, systems etc. anyone, anything involved needs to be measured
or optimize as a whole to get maximum results.
6.Build quality in: Again as per couple of principles, Agile enhances good design by continuous attention This is one of the
reasons we go through multiple iterations delivering the product frequently for getting the feedback. Lean focuses in building
high quality by implementing various techniques.
7.Defer decisions: Lean encourages deferred decisions because some decisions that are irreversible can be done really late in
the project. In this way we can eliminate risk in the project.

16. Kanban
Kanban which means “signboard” in Japanese language is one of the lean methods a to implement and manage software
development effectively in Agile.
Kanban Five Principles
1. Visualize the workflow: If “signboard” is what Kanban means, this suggest that lets visualize the workflow using
“signboards”. As knowledge workers we are visualizing a intangible idea, to accomplish this idea , they need to
enable a model where they can visualize the workflow.
2. Manage flow: Because of high visibility of workflow it gives us a chance to manage workflow effectively. As this
enables us to produce high quality results.
3. Make process policies explicit: In Kanban policies has to be made crystal clear. This enables the team members for
collective decision
4. Improve collaboration: By working collaboratively team not comes up with new ideas, but they also improve the
process by removing any impediments. This strengthens building high quality into any projects or products.

17. 5. Limit work in progress(WIP)
To understand Limit WIP we need to understand 2 terms:
Pull System
WIP
Pull system — When customer begin the order, there are two things that is taken care with pull system
• Eliminating waste by not producing too many orders. e.g. if the customer request 15 features they shall get
no more than 15 features.
• Saves time. Of course by implementing pull system we are not only eliminating waste and saving time but
this also results in increased profits.
WIP — Again going by the definition of Kanban which is a signboard, work in progress(WIP) uses cards as their
signboard for visualizing the workflow. As these cards are placed in the most trafficked area where everyone can
sees the progress of work happening in the project. Henceforth, for us to understand limit work in progress(WIP)
is a strategy to remove any roadblock or impediments in smooth flow of the project.

18. Feature Driven Development(FDD)
Feature driven development is more customer centric. Team adapting extreme programming(XP) builds some
features for customers for their approval. Basically features are added incrementally to the product. For instance
customer wants General Ledger reconciled. For us to calculate GL we need many other features of accounting like
A/R, A/P, P&L etc. As we develop these features we show the working prototype to the customer for their feedback.
There are 5 FDD process
1. Develop an overall model
2. Build a feature list
3. Plan by feature
4. Design by feature
5. Build by feature

19. FDD Best practices
1. Domain object modelling: FDD encourages building a model and supporting artifacts for the problems that team
encounters that needs to be solved.
2. Developing by feature: As discussed above the main idea of FDD is a working prototype having customer value to
it. Decomposing complex functions into features every two weeks or lesser for customer feedback, team can
provide high build in quality.
3. Individual Class (code)ownership: If we recollect XP(extreme Programming ) one of the Agile methodology it
encourages collective ownership. FDD encourages single ownership. Reason behind this is feature driven are small
customer value features that are delivered every 2 weeks or less. If changes are required it becomes easier to modify
as single owner owns the coding.
4. Feature teams: Team works collaboratively to find best options for developing the features, as to reduce any risk
because of single ownership.
5. Inspections: Just as in scrum pillars and values inspections are frequently done to see how the project is progressing
towards the goal. Inspections in FDD ensures the same.
6. Configuration management: Helps in tracking any changes in the features including in contractual documents.
7. Regular builds: By regularly building new changes the integrate with existing code we can demonstrate working
models for customer feedback
8. Visibility of progress and results: Features are delivered frequently in FDD. This enables us high visibility of the
work that has being progressed so far.

20. Dynamic Systems Development Method (DSDM)
One of the early agile methodology. DSDM has broader aspects like fixing cost, schedule, quality and uses a prioritization
technique(MOSCOW method).
Lets elaborate MOSCOW:
Mo - Must have
S - Should have
Co - Could have
W -Won’t have
Prioritization technique (MOSCOW method) is frequently used in new product development.

21. Crystal
Developed by Alistair Cockburn the primary focus is on people and interaction, business criticality and business priority
of software development project. Crystal framework is categorized:
Crystal clear
Crystal yellow
Crystal Orange
Crystal red
Crystal magenta
This enables Agile methods to tailor its specifications according to the uniqueness of the project.

22. Changes in Project Management are happening at a fast pace. I started my career as a traditional (waterfall) project
manager, but currently, I use Waterfall and Agile methodologies in tandem. I have extensive experience in facilitating
and training teams in several industry domains using various techniques in project management. If you have any
questions, please feel free to contact me at san.sidd@yahoo.com.
You can also connect with me on LinkedIn https://linkedin.com/in/san-sidd