Agile Principles and Agile Project Management

We follow these Agile Principles:

• Our highest priority is to satisfy the Customer through the early and continuous delivery of valuable software.
• Welcome changing Requirements, even late in Development.  Agile processes harness change for the Customers competitive advantage.
• Deliver working software frequently, from a couple of weeks to a couple of months, with a preference to the shorter timescale.
• Business people and developers must work together daily throughout the Project.
• Build Projects around motivated individuals.  Give them the environment and support they need, and trust them to get the job done.

• The most efficient and effective method of conveying information to and within a Development Team is a face-to-face conversation.
• Working software is the primary measure of progress.
• Agile processes promote sustainable development.  The sponsors, developers, and Users should be able to maintain a constant pace indefinitely.
• Continuous attention to technical excellence and good design enhances agility
• Simplicity – the art of maximizing the amount of work done is essential.
• The best architectures, Requirements, and design emerge from self-organizing teams.
• At regular intervals, the team reflect on how to become more effective, the tunes and adjusts its behavior accordingly.

Agile Principles Copyright

©Agile Manifesto Copyright 2001: Kent Beck, Mike Beedle, Arie van Bennekum, Alistair Cockburn, Ward Cunningham, Martin Fowler, James Grenning, Jim Highsmith, Andrew Hunt, Ron Jeffries, Jon Kern, Brian Marick, Robert C. Martin, Steve Mellor, Ken Schwaber, Jeff Sutherland, Dave Thomas.  This declaration may be freely copied in any form, but only in its entirety through this notice.

Delivering Value

By delivering incrementally, realizing value can be achieved earlier while identifying and dealing with risk can occur sooner. According to the Agile principles, these increments must also include the highest business value items in order to maximize the delivered value. The continuous delivery of value increases customer satisfaction as well as increasing the return on investment. Maximising and also maintaining product value requires the product remaining maintainable, as a product that has become difficult to support consequently becomes resistant to change.  Therefore maintaining product flexibility enables it to adapt quickly to change and promotes continuous improvement.  Since maximizing the delivered value involves maximizing the amount of work done, simplifying processes and tasks can, therefore, increase work done.  Additionally simplifying processes minimizes wasted effort and removes problems before they occur.

Self Organising Teams in Agile 

Firstly, self-organizing development teams can take advantage of the development teams cross-functional knowledge and experience.  Self-organizing teams own the developed solution and they are responsible for organizing themselves as well as their work.  Self-organizing teams promote commitment from each individual, therefore extracting the best from each team member.  The development team take on ownership of the developed solution and furthermore it is the development team that commits to the sprint deliverable. It is the development team that determines the tasks to complete to meet their sprint goals, rather than the project manager in a more traditional command and control project.  Self-organizing teams may be difficult for the more reserved individuals because all team members must actively participate. 

Retrospectives

The Sprint Retrospective promotes focusing on lessons learned while also discussing methods for applying these lessons to the next sprint.  The scrum master, the product owner and also the development team attend the sprint retrospective and have the goal of continuously improving the processes. The sprint retrospective results are unique for each scrum team and improving processes should refer to individual scrum teams in order to increase team morale, improve efficiency and increase work done.

Our Favourite Agile Books