Frequently Asked Questions: Agile

There has been rapid growth in adoption of Agile methodologies.  Several methods are now underpinned by international co-ordinating bodies which administer training and certification schemes.

The most widely recognised are DSDM and Scrum.

Download the Focus guide to Agile Project Management & Scrum to find out more.

In 2010 a new course and qualification, Certified Agile Project Management, was launched by APMG which is the accreditation body responsible for PRINCE2 and ITIL.

Also new is the Certified Agile Tester qualification from the International Software Quality Institute.

More information...

The MoSCoW Rules (or MoSCoW Method) form a pragmatic technique used within DSDM - Atern.  Requirements are prioritised as:

• Must Have
• Should Have
• Could Have
• Won’t Have this time

Agile has come to embody a range of project and software development techniques where speed and lightness of touch prevail.

Some of the principles behind the Agile Manifesto developed by proponents in 2001 are:

• Customer satisfaction by rapid, continuous delivery of useful software
• Working software is delivered frequently (weeks rather than months)
• Working software is the principal measure of progress
• Even late changes in requirements are welcomed
• Close, daily, cooperation between business people and developers
• Face-to-face conversation is the best form of communication
• Projects are built around motivated individuals, who should be trusted
• Continuous attention to technical excellence and good design
• Simplicity
• Self-organising teams
• Regular adaptation to changing circumstances

Although with its roots in IT projects, Agile methods are increasingly adopted for other project types. 

Dynamic Systems Development Method (DSDM) is a framework originally based upon Rapid Application Development (RAD). DSDM utilises continuous user involvement in an iterative development and incremental approach, which is responsive to changing requirements, to deliver software or other deliverables that satisfies the business requirements on time and on budget.

DSDM was developed in the United Kingdom in the 1990s by the DSDM Consortium of vendors and experts in the field of Information System (IS) development by combining their best-practice experiences. The DSDM Consortium is a non-profit, vendor independent organisation which owns and administers the framework.

In 2007 DSDM was updated as an agile project delivery framework available to all.  The latest release is branded Atern.  There is associated training and certification regulated by APMG. 

Atern’s eight Principles are:

•  Focus on the business need    
•  Deliver on time     
•  Collaborate 
•  Never compromise quality 
•  Develop iteratively 
•  Build incrementally from firm foundations 
•  Communicate continuously and clearly 
•  Demonstrate control 

More information...

Planning Poker is an Agile tool for estimating software development projects. It's a technique that minimises "anchoring" which arises when a group openly discusses items of risk or uncertainty. Numbered "estimate card" are played simultaneously by each team member such that it cannot be seen by the other players.

A study by K. Molokken-Ostvold and N.C. Haugen found that estimates obtained through the Planning Poker process were less optimistic and more accurate than estimates obtained through mechanical combination of individual estimates for the same tasks.

Scrum is a lightweight agile method for software development or project management, named after the scrum procedure in the sport of rugby.

Charateristics include:

• A living backlog of prioritized work to be done
• Completion of a largely fixed set of backlog items in a series of short iterations or sprints
• A brief daily meeting or scrum, at which progress is explained, upcoming work is described and impediments are raised
• A brief planning session in which the backlog items for the sprint will be defined
• A brief heartbeat retrospective, at which all team members reflect about the past sprint
• Scrum is facilitated by a ScrumMaster, but the team is self-organising

Scrum enables the creation of self-organising teams by encouraging verbal communication across all team members and across all disciplines that are involved in the project.

A key principle of Scrum is its recognition that fundamentally empirical challenges cannot be addressed successfully in a traditional "process control" manner. As such, Scrum adopts an empirical approach – accepting that the problem cannot be fully understood or defined, focusing instead on maximizing the team's ability to respond in an agile manner to emerging challenges.

Timeboxing is a very important aspect of all DSDM - Atern projects. It's also used in Scrum "Sprint" process.

It is an approach to working that is driven by deadlines. Without timeboxing, project teams may lose their focus and run out of control.

Timeboxing is a process by which defined objectives are reached at pre-determined and immovable dates through continuous prioritisation and flexing of requirements.

Newspaper editors work in this way all the time. They have a deadline and they have a fixed amount of space in which they can publish their articles. Everything may be planned out, but the world doesn’t stop happening just to meet newspaper deadlines. So sometimes late news arrives and when it does, space needs to be found for it. The only way to do this, if the new story is more important than anything already in the paper, is to shorten some existing articles or even to leave them out altogether.