Agile project management is designed to develop software quickly so its suitability can be inspected and adapted, rapidly. The goal is to reduce requirements and functionality risk in particularly uncertain environments. Agile project management, and especially scrum practices, have shown themselves able to increase success rates for software development projects. Once considered revolutionary, agile project management is now becoming a generally accepted approach to building software.
Future in the Past – Part 1: Brief History of Agile
How did agile software engineering practices evolve? What were the initial software engineering practices, what were they based on, and what were the challenges that brought about the development of aging practices?This article will provide a brief introduction of how agile came to be developed. Note that agile methodologies are tools, like for example, writing. One doesn’t [Continue Reading]
Second Stride – Getting Started with Agile Requirements
So, you have defined your product vision. You have gained approval to proceed with refining what the product should be. In other words, you will be determining what the requirements should be. In scrum terms that means creating the Product Backlog. Officially, the Product Backlog is a prioritized list of all the known requirements, desires, wishes, or glimmers to be included in [Continue Reading]
Seeing the Future – Scrum Product Vision Creation
To quote Ken Schwaber: "The minimum plan necessary to start a Scrum project consists of a vision and a Product Backlog. The vision describes why the project is being undertaken and what the desired end state is." (Schwaber 2004, p. 68). This is great, it seems so simple, a vision of what you want to build and a list of stuff that is needed to achieve that vision. Of course, [Continue Reading]
How Do I Know What I Know – Project Assumptions Management
Just the other day I was asked my opinion on RAID logs. I had to admit that “RAID” was a project management acronym I had not heard of. Checking the PMBOK Guide turned up nothing. I did find entries on some of the big PM sites via search. The thing is a Risk, Assumption, Issue, and Dependency log, for those of you hadn’t heard of a RAID log either. Apparently, some [Continue Reading]
