What is Agile? From QCon Confenece, March 2008

I went along with Charlie to the Agile Lane at the QCon Conference, in Westminster. Two very good speakers stood out and I've written up some notes on their take on agile working practices, below.



Roman Pichler

Historically:

Traditional Management style is Command and Control.

Where you have the Manager and the Subordinate.

The main problem here is that the manager becomes removed from the value stream.

New Perspective:

In Agile the triangle is inverted and we see bottom up.

And the six important things are:

Servant Leadership

Empirical Management

Empowerment

Quality First

Continuous Improvement

Standardisation

Transition to scrum, you must focus on:

Customer Needs

Removing Over-burden

Promoting team-work, creativity and collaboration

Clear the way of impediments

Rachel Davies:

Talked about agile practices as a mash-up of:

Scrum

XP

DSDM

Crystal

Lean

Some key attributes of agile:

Velocity

Test-Driven Development

User Stories

Agile Mash-ups

Retrospectives

Companies using agile usually a mixture of:




Components of scrum:

Sprint Review

Scrum

Product Increment

Sprint retrospective

Sprint burn down

Sprint goal

Prioritised backlog

Components of XP:

Index cards

Code Test

Programming on Pairs

Sit together

On site customer

Good things to introduce:

Retrospectives

Pre-planning

Planning

Development Sprint

Demo

Start Again...

Project boards with:

Stories

Tasks

In Progress

IN QA

Done