What are agile practices?

You've heard the buzzwords and everyone around you seems to be "doing agile". But just what are agile practices and where do they come from? And what makes them work so well? We'll review a brief history of agile and provide some concrete numbers of how agile practices stack up with other software development methodologies. We'll briefly cover the varieties of agile practices and introduce you to the Agile Manifesto.

The Scrum Framework

The Scrum framework is the guiding set of patterns and practices for many agile teams. It helps enable a collaborative environment that readily accepts change as the norm in complex software development projects. It provides the basis for the iterative and incremental delivery of high quality, valuable working software to customers very quickly. We'll take a look at what Scrum is and how it works.

Scrum Roles

Scrum is lite on roles, but big on responsibility and commitment. There are three basic roles in Scrum: The Product Owner, The ScrumMaster, and The Team. We'll cover the roles and responsibilities of each; from the vision and direction set forth by the Product Owner to the servant leadership of the ScrumMaster and the unprecedented commitment of the Team.

Agile Planning and Estimating

Estimating and planning are essential to the success of any project. Agile projects are no exception. But planning looks very different in agile projects than it does in traditional waterfall type projects. We'll review how to create effective backlogs with user stories. We'll discuss the different planning horizons in agile projects including iteration planning, release planning, and product planning. We'll also cover how to estimate using story points and other agile estimating methods.

Scrum in Action

So, you've planned your release and iterations and it's time to get to work. What does Scrum look like on the ground and in action? We'll run through the basics of the iteration and work through several exercises to give you a real view into how it feels to be on a Scrum team. Through simulated iterations, you'll learn how to conduct planning sessions, find out what the daily stand up is all about, understand how to track your team's progress using burndown charts, conduct frequent product reviews with your customers and stakeholders, and how to run effective team retrospectives that provide continuous improvement to your agile practices and your products.

How to Scale Scrum

But I'm in a big organization, how does Scrum work for us? You may be asking that question, or you may be wondering how Scrum works with distributed teams. We'll review the basic concepts of Scrum's scalability. We'll also cover the challenges facing large Scrum teams and distributed teams and provide insights and solutions from our own experiences.

Agile Tooling

Tooling is not a primary focus in agile practices, but we have found that it definitely makes things easier. We'll review some of the tools available for managing agile projects. We'll also share our agile project management solution with you. We'll show you what we use and how we use...and we'll do it by giving you visibility into some of our current working projects.

Quotes from recent attendees

"This was a great course. I felt like I won the lottery being the only student currently on an Agile team. Our instructor used examples I mentioned to illustrate his points--I gained a terrific amount of insight to take back to the team. Chris is upbeat and tells it like it is. The "this has worked for us--this didn't" information really showed me that our learning curve here is to be expected. Also, Chris's willingness to be open about places his team had to stumble along the way really added to his credibility." - Jill Burgchardt, Vistronix, Inc.