Agile

Agile essentials

• Agile is the ability to create and respond to change, it is a way of dealing with, and ultimately succeeding in, an uncertain and turbulent environment.
• Agile represents the adaptiveness and response to change which is so important to the chosen approach.
• Agile is a mindset.

• Individuals and interactions over processes and tools
• Working software over comprehensive documentation
• Customer collaboration over contract negotiation
• Responding to change over following a plan

1. Our highest priority is to satisfy the customer through early and continuous delivery of valuable software.
2. Welcome changing requirements, even late in development. Agile processes harness change for the customer’s competitive advantage.
3. Deliver working software frequently, from a couple of weeks to a couple of months, with a Preference to the shorter timescale.
4. Business people and developers must work together daily throughout the project.
5. Build projects around motivated individuals. Give them the environment and support they need, and trust them to get the job done.
6. The most efficient and effective method of conveying information to and within a development team is face-to-face Conversation.
7. Working software is the primary measure of Progress.
8. Agile processes promote sustainable development. The sponsors, developers, and users should be able to maintain a constant pace indefinitely.
9. Continuous attention to technical excellence and good design enhances agility.
10. Simplicity-the art of maximizing the amount of work not done-is essential.
11. The best architectures, requirements, and designs emerge from self-organizing teams.
12. At regular intervals, the team reflects on how to become more effective, then tunes and adjusts its behavior accordingly.

Transparency

• Commitment
• Trust
• Open
• Courage
• Respect

To continuously inspect & adapt

1. Roles and responsibilities
   • PO
   • Development team
   • Agile / scrum master
2. Scrum working framework
   • Scrum essential concepts
     • Product vision
     • User story
     • Product backlog
     • Incremental
     • Acceptance criteria
     • Definition of done
   • Scrum events (planning, stand-up, review, retrospective)
   • The Scrum board
3. Agile team development

1. Domain know how
   • Broad technical understanding
   • Understand the application area
   • Understands customer needs
2. Understand the consequences of business and technical decisions
3. As leader (team towards vision) / motivator
4. Decision making
   • Empowered to decide
   • Can say no
5. Prioritizing
6. Delegation
   • Trustful
   • Respectful
7. Communication / negotiation
8. Delegation
   • Trustful
   • Respectful
9. Consistency
10. Transparency
11. Budget management
12. Take pressure

• PO represents the product
• responsible for economic success of the project (controls the budget)
• gives direction and creates alignment
• problem validation of product needs
• interface to customer and stakeholders
• voice of the customer and stakeholders
• organizes customer feedback
• provide feedback to the teams
• protect the product release planning
• define and update product roadmap
• plan product releases
• manage Requirements / User Stories
• defines product attributes & features
• writes user stories
• manages and prioritizes product backlog
• define constraints to increase focus
• risk management on product level
• accepts or rejects work results

• Technical Skills (are nice-to-have, but not necessarily required):
• understands basic fundamentals of iterative development
• understands other processes and methodologies and can speak intelligently about them and leverage other techniques to provide value to a team/enterprise
• understands basic fundamentals of software/hardware/system/mechanics development processes and procedures
• understands technical details of the product
• understands the value of commitments to delivery made by a development team
• understands incremental delivery and the value of metrics
• understands backlog tracking, burn-down metrics, velocity, and task definition
• is familiar with common Agile practices, service-oriented environments, and better development practices

• Coach and mentor for the team (developers and PO)
• Helps to identify and remove impediments
• Scrum process authority: ensures that scrum values, practices, and rules are enacted and enforced
• May organize meetings (during scrum start-up)
• Moderator
• Ensures that the team is able to work effectively
• Situationally awareness: must be the first to notice differences and issues as they arise and elevate them to management
• Enthusiastic: be high-energy
• Conflict resolution: be able to facilitate discussion and facilitate alternatives or different approaches
• empowerment：be able to lead a team to self-organization
• Transparency: desire to bring disclosure and transparency to the business about development and grow business trust.

• self-organizing, empowered and autonomous
• cross-functional
• necessary skills to deliver a product increment
• Team Size 6±3
• Ideally full-time and collocated
• selects the requirements to be transformed into a deliverable product increment and commits to the sprint goal
• is collectively responsible for delivering the commitment at the end of the sprint
• team take the full responsibility for the sprint results and delivery
• Commitment of delivery
• Pre-condition: team members must perform on sprint level with realistic effort estimations and task planning
• agile development teams working cross-functional
• mandatory: active transfer of knowledge/know how between team members

Scrum is the very 1st step in Agile:

• Apply and adapt the scrum method.
• Described how first-class and innovative products are developed in cross-function teams with an 'all-simultaneous approach'

Scrum is a tool since 1986.

Scrum is an iterative, incremental approach to control risk and optimize predictability. There are THREE PILLARS that uphold the Scrum framework:

• 3 Roles
  1. Product owner
  2. Scrum master
  3. Development team
• Delivery
  1. Product increment
• Documents
  1. Product vision
  2. Product backlog
  3. Sprint backlog
• Sprint
  1. And iteration with a fixed duration
• 4 Meetings
  1. Sprint planning
  2. Daily scrum
  3. Sprint review
  4. Sprint retrospective

describes a scenario in terms of who, what and why

• ‘As a …’ (role: who wants something) ‚
• ‘I want …’ (what: business requirement) ‚
• ‘because …’ (why: benefit, business value).

A user story represents a feature to implement. In fact, we recommend to build your product backlog from user stories

Product backlog (工作包，待办事项) is a list of requirements and deliverables Anyone can contribute but only the Product Owner controls the product backlog (prioritization)

Product backlog overview

• refer to a set of predefined requirements that must be met to mark a user story complete.
• Acceptance criteria are also sometimes called the “definition of done” because they determine the scope and requirements that must be executed by developers to consider the user story finished.

• Defines when tasks / product backlog items (e.g. stories) and the product increment are considered done
• DoD should be defined collaboratively by Product Owner, Scrum Master and team prior the first sprint.
• Keep it Simple (as possible) – nobody will use a big set of checklists !!!

• Sprint planning: have a realistic plan that works (2-4 hors)

1. The team has committed to implement a number of product backlog items based on its expectations what can be done: commitment based planning
2. The product owner knows what to expect as new functionality
3. The team knows what to deliver next

• Daily scrum (standup meeting), 15minutes

1. What have I done since yesterday?
2. What am I planning to work today?
3. What is in my way or prevents me from being productive?

• Sprint review: have the goal to release of sprint results (product increment)

1. The development team present the sprint results
2. Making the project status transparent (product demo)
3. The product owner accepts or rejects results and gives feedback to the team
4. Other stakeholders can add opinions
5. Inspect and adapt at the sprint level (empirical management)

• Sprint retrospective: have the purpose to facilitate team learning
  1. Share lessons learned

1. Generate common insights
2. Bring improvements back into the team’s work
3. What worked well, what should be improved, what should we try
4. Uncover conflicts
5. Correct dysfunctional behavior