Agile Fundamentals

INDIVIDUALS & INTERACTIONS

Developing Soft Skills: Soft skills like attitude, community, trust, and morale have traditionally been left out of team-based design. Agile brings them to the force

Understanding Communication Barriers & Sharing Knowledge:

Projects can be impacted when organizations pay more attention to physical and cultural separation costs. When teams ignore tacit vs documented knowledge, they are not able to make conscious decisions about sharing information. This underscores the importance of a fundamental course in Agile methodologies, which equips teams with the necessary skills to navigate communication challenges and foster a culture of knowledge sharing.

Physical Work Environments & Collaboration Techniques:

Setting up workspaces that hinder rather than help the team is easy. Collaboration needs to be experienced, not just talked about

Techniques for Shared Understanding: 

The Agile community has adopted several tools and techniques to support shared understanding.

SHIFTS IN ROLE

The term “self-organizing” can create concern for individuals and organizations because it infers shifts in traditional power structures. Agile learners and organizations must define and align old and new role definitions.

VALUE-DRIVEN DEVELOPMENT

Incremental Development, Value-Based Work & Retaining Quality

One anchor of Agile development is incremental development. Many people, even understanding incremental development, need help to break work into small, value-centred work items and track their progress.  This is where Agile fundamentals training becomes invaluable. In incremental-iterative development, the expense of rework is simple to overlook.

Work-In-Progress (WIP)

Work-in-Progress (WIP), a term from lean manufacturing, seems a strange concept to introduce outside of manufacturing to many people, but WIP shows incremental development.

Continuous Integration, Cost & Benefit of Frequent Delivery

Continuous integration is a valuable goal in software development; non-software projects can still use the more general concepts of frequent integration. Delivering is not merely giving a demo; it includes costs and benefits.

CUSTOMER & USER INVOLVEMENT

Defining the Customer, User Involvement & Feedback

The literature and common usage can be confusing in defining the customer. Product/project success correlates with end-user involvement. Many teams need help getting end-users to participate in a project, which can fail even if the team practices every other Agile habit besides getting feedback from real users. Ongoing user feedback is essential for maximizing customer value.

PLANNING & ADAPTING

Planning, Estimation & Status 

A misconception of Agile development is that it involves no planning and promises. Agile teams understand the value of joint estimation during planning. A team and its sponsors need to know how the work is progressing.

PROCESS & PRODUCT ADAPTATION

A common mistake is to imagine that there is a single process that can fit all projects & situations; even a good process becomes mismatched to the team over time. Products need to be adapted based on learning and feedback. However, an unprepared team can need to react more vigorously to change requests.