Agile is one of the most popular methodologies in project management and its practices are appreciated by many developers and managers all over the world. What are the key Agile practices that make the methodology famous and beloved? To anticipate a possible reaction: the list below is definitely incomplete. Perhaps it may seem controversial. Here are only the best practices project managers need to be familiar with.

1. Top Agile
Practices
Prabhakaran M

2. CONTENTS
02
Standup Meeting
Retrospective
meeting
360 Degree
feedback04
01
03 Feedback on tasks
Planning Poker
05

3. Standup Meeting
1. Agile teams run standup meetings every day, always at the same time, most often at the beginning of the
day.
1. Scrum Master (meeting host) asks three questions that each member of the meeting must answer. They
may sound different, but the essence should remain the same:
— What did you do yesterday?
— What do you plan to do today?
— Do you have any obstacles?
The standup meeting is time-boxed to 5- 15 minutes. All the discussions longer than a minute or where only
a few members are needed should be scheduled as a separate meeting. Daily standup should be quick to
inform everyone on the team's progress and potential obstacles.
Overall, standup meetings have three purposes: focus, accountability, motivation. When done right, it's a
great practice that improves a team's productivity.

4. Retrospective
Meeting

5. Retrospective Meeting
A retrospective is a meeting held by a software development team at the end of a project sprint or process to
discuss success and failure and future improvements after each iteration.
The team’s goal is to have something of business value to show by the end of each sprint.
A sprint is a Scrum term defined as the time required to perform a logical series of prioritized tasks, in a project.
The sprint is a fixed period of time, and there can be many sprints in a given project. For example, a one-year
project may have twelve sprints of one month each. Sprints are commonly thirty days long, but they can be longer
or shorter.
These retrospectives enable the team to make small improvements regularly, and apply them in a controlled and
immediate manner.
The goal of retrospectives is helping teams to improve their working culture.

6. Retrospective meeting
Activities which we
shouldnt be doing
Activities which we
should continue doing
What should we start
doing

7. Feedback
on Tasks
When the task is done, there is one
more thing experienced managers do
about it.
Their goal is to gather feedback on
that particular task: was that
engaging, challenging or boring?
When people work too much on boring
tasks, they become demotivated.

8. Feedback on tasks
Task Feedback is a reaction of a manager (or a task owner) to a task performance and connected results. This reaction is explained and
communicated to employees (task executors) to make them understand what they have done correctly (or exceptionally well) and what
they mismanaged to do (what was done incorrectly to certain degree), so they can rectify their errors.
Task feedbacks can be different by their type and character:
● formal or informal;
● positive or negative;
● constructive or destructive;
● organized or chaotic, etc;
The purpose of any feedback is to ground application of certain follow-up activities that follow after the feedback: that could be positive
actions such as giving a reward, promising a new opportunity or a promotion, etc, or negative ones such as putting an employee on a
probationary term, or even firing.
Examples of positive task feedbacks (if a task is done well):
● Thanks and praise;
● Suggestions for even better performance;
Examples of negative task feedbacks (if a task is handled not well enough):
● Criticism (constructive or destructive);
● Instructions on how to rectify errors;

9. 360 Degree Feedback Report
360 Degree Feedback is a system or process in which
employees receive confidential, anonymous feedback from
the people who work around them. This typically includes
the employee’s manager, peers, and direct reports.

10. 360 Degree Feedback report
360-degree feedback is an Agile process of evaluating team-members when everyone provides
feedback about each person. It helps to track the motivation and satisfaction levels of every individual in
the company.
The 360-degree survey may consist of 5-15 questions about every person on self-awareness, drive for
results, leadership, communication, teamwork.
Usually, it's done once a quarter and then the results are compared to the previous 360-degree feedback
of a certain person.
They keep records of all the 360 reviews in the company and run the processes consistently each
quarter. Sometimes it's done by the HR manager, but more often we see Product/Project managers
running this process on their Scrum teams.

11. Planning Poker
QA Tester
Developer
Product
Owner
Planning Poker is an agile estimating and planning technique that is
consensus based. To start a poker planning session, the product owner or
customer reads an agile user story or describes a feature to the estimators.

12. Planning Poker
Each estimator is holding a deck of Planning Poker cards with values of
Fibonacci sequence (0, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, 55, etc). The values
represent the number of story points, ideal days, or other units in which
the team estimates.
The estimators discuss the feature, asking questions of the product
owner as needed. When the feature has been fully discussed, each
estimator privately selects one card to represent his or her estimate. All
cards are then revealed at the same time.
If all estimators selected the same value, that becomes the estimate. If
not, the estimators discuss their estimates. The high and low estimators
should especially share their reasons. After further discussion, each
estimator reselects an estimate card, and all cards are again revealed at
the same time.
The poker planning process is repeated until consensus is
achieved or until the estimators decide that agile estimating
and planning of a particular item needs to be deferred until
additional information can be acquired.

13. Thanks
QaEngineers.se
Any
Questions?