Agile Fundamentals (ICP) | 26-29 April 2021

Learning Outcomes

History & Mindset

• Many people entering the Agile world see the Agile Manifesto as the beginning of the world, where it was really the summing up of much previous work. 
• The 2001 Manifesto for Agile Software Development is still the anchor document for all forms of Agile development. 
• Agile is gaining increasing adoption throughout the organization. 
• Many people come to Agile looking for “the Agile process”. However, while some processes and methodologies may be more supportive or common in Agile organizations than others, the mindset must come first. 
• Experiencing the Agile mindset is the best way to establish it in a learner 
• The level of knowledge and experience held by individuals, teams and organizations can affect behaviors, processes and adoption. 

Individuals & Interactions

• Soft skills such as attitude, community, trust and morale have traditionally been left out of team-based design. Agile brings them to the fore. 
• Projects can be impacted when organizations underestimate the cost of physical and cultural separation. 
• When teams ignore tacit vs. documented knowledge, they are not able to make conscious decisions about sharing information. 
• It is easy to set up work spaces that hinder rather than help the team. 
• Collaboration needs to be experienced, not just talked about. 
• The Agile community has adopted several tools and techniques to support shared understanding. 
• The term “self-organizing” can create concern for individuals and organizations because it infers shifts in traditional power structures. Agile learners and organizations need to define and align old and new role definitions. 

Value-Driven Development

• One anchor of Agile development is incremental development.
• Many people, even understanding the idea of incremental development, can’t see how to break work into small, value-centered work items and track their progress.
• It is easy to lose sight of the cost of rework in incremental-iterative development.
• Work-in-Progress (WIP), a term from lean manufacturing, seems to many people a strange concept to introduce outside of manufacturing, but WIP shows up in incremental development.
• 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 as well as benefits.

Customer & User Involvement

• The literature and common usage can be confusing in defining the customer. 
• Product/project success correlates with end-user involvement. Many teams face resistance to getting end-users to participate in a project, which then can fail even if the team practiced every other Agile habit besides getting feedback from real users. 
• Ongoing user feedback is important for maximizing customer value. 
• An unprepared team can suffer from reacting too vigorously to change requests. 

Planning & Adapting

• A misconception of Agile development is that it involves no planning and no promises. 
• Agile teams understand the value of collaborative estimation during planning. 
• A team and its sponsors need to know how the work is progressing. 
• 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. 
• Reflection workshops are necessary for both product and process adjustment. Techniques for conducting reflection workshops are best learned experientially.

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