Agile Fundamentals Training

Agile Fundamentals Training Outline

• Introduction to Agile Values and Principles

  • Articulating Agile values and principles
  • Understanding the principles of Lean Thinking
  • Comparing Agile with traditional, master plan methods

• Agile Approaches Compared

  Scrum

  • Recognizing Scrum as a framework for self-managing teams
  • Locating Scrum in empirical process control theory
  • Revealing the mandatory roles, artifacts and events of the Scrum framework

  Kanban

  • Identifying the link between Kanban and Lean’s focus on the removal of waste from the workflow
  • Seeing Kanban as a change management approach rather than as a method
  • Visualizing the workflow by designing a Kanban Board

  eXtreme Programming (XP)

  • Explaining the core values of XP
  • Engineering software with XP’s core practices
  • Running a software development project using the XP process

  Comparing and contrasting Scrum and XP with Kanban

  • Internalizing the differences between Scrum Boards and Kanban Boards
  • Time-boxing with Scrum and XP
  • Understanding why Scrum requires cross-functional teams while Kanban is neutral

• Value Driven Delivery

  Focusing on business value

  • Delivering business-valued functionality as a priority
  • Explicitly focusing on business value and product quality
  • Evolving requirements and solutions together throughout development

  Iterative and Incremental Delivery

  • Delivering “early and often” for Return on Investment and feedback
  • Comparing Scrum and Kanban as “pull” systems
  • Classifying different types of requirement for value-driven planning

• Fostering Self-Management within the Development Team

  Mapping Roles and Responsibilities

  • Contrasting the Agile “Feature team” model with traditional “Component teams”
  • Shifting roles and responsibilities towards a self-managing team
  • Leading teams rather than managing tasks

  Transitioning to self-management

  • Facilitating cross-functionality and team learning
  • Empowering the team to control their own development process
  • Navigating conflict so that it drives team behaviors in a positive direction

  Growing Agile teams

  • Developing genuinely collaborative behaviors
  • Acquiring soft skills for servant leadership
  • Adapting coaching styles to the experience and maturity of the Agile team

• Customer and User Involvement

  Defining customers and Other Stakeholders

  • Regarding customers as individuals or groups who extract or generate business value
  • Viewing other stakeholders as people or groups who exert oversight or impose constraints
  • Prioritizing customers as the most important and relevant stakeholders

  Involving Users

  • Understanding the different ways Scrum and XP teams interface with customers
  • Writing user stories to drive conversations with different classes of customer
  • Splitting user stories so that they fit into inspect-and-adapt cycles

• Planning, Monitoring and Adapting with Agile

  Planning for business value

  • Envisioning products to establish the “big picture”
  • Planning at release, iteration and daily levels
  • Coordinating work through information radiators

  Monitoring Progress

  • Estimating effort with relative sizing units (e.g., story points)
  • Tracking progress by measuring velocity and/or cycle time
  • Holding reviews and retrospectives to adapt product and process

  Removing Impediments

  • Recognizing impediments as opportunities for continuous improvement
  • Driving down technical debt with test automation, Test-Driven Development (TDD) and Continuous Integration