agile project management

agile project management

The Evolution and Best Practices of Agile Project Management

1. Introduction to Agile Project Management

Agile project management is the most easy and practical approach. It greatly helps in solving complex market needs and rapidly changing requirements. It also provides an excellent balance between costs while maximizing product quality. Trusting people and giving them the freedom to work in their own way, adaptive planning, and immediate feedback become the building blocks of an agile approach that makes agile project management so powerful and effective. Participants will also learn about the key roles of an agile project management team and about agile management tools. Side notes provide an easy point of reference, while interactive discussion questions can be found at the end of each chapter.

Introduction This introductory chapter provides an overview of the concept of agile project management, a highly practical and accessible approach to creating new products and services. Agile project management uses an iterative or phased approach to producing stable and consistent products. It requires adaptive planning and is essentially value-driven. Agile methods are based on the iterative development philosophy and the development of small, doable tasks. Each iteration is formally time-boxed, and the development teams are optimized to produce high-quality products within that time box.

2. Key Principles and Values of Agile

At present, many research papers focus on the organization of the offer which is currently the product. Only a few discuss the release of the product. Agile values and principles involve practices that can help to reach each intended result. The best practices have been taken into account by many agile methodologies and frameworks. Due to the rapid evolution of web development frameworks and new methodologies coming up, some best practices sometimes change. And what can we say about the teams in the offer and in the release of the product? What are the differences in the methodologies and techniques chosen, code reviews, retrospectives, backlog, and refactoring? Many questions remain and need to be resolved. In this context, this work aims to identify the best practices provided by the values and principles of agile methodologies and present a mapping of these best practices with the methodologies through a systematic mapping. The results of this work serve as a guide for companies looking to adopt the agile process, prioritizing methodologies that maximize the practices addressed in this work.

The Agile Manifesto has no formal authority, in that it does not provide detailed instructions on how software should be developed. Instead, it serves as a philosophical foundation for the agile movement embodied by the actual behavior, policies, beliefs, and principles of its proponents. Today, firms that support and promote agile development practices adhere to the principles of the Manifesto. Still, the Manifesto and the Principles for Software Development immediately attracted suspicion from the formal software engineering establishment, and agile methods have long been criticized on the grounds of ‘lack of discipline’. As a result, an increasing number of companies embarking on agile projects have avoided committing to the Manifesto but have still sidestepped detailed rituals and procedures of traditional processes.

Agile development relies on core values and practices which have been distilled into a number of manifestos and rules. The Agile Manifesto and Principles for Software Development is the acknowledged founding document of the agile movement. Written and endorsed in 2001 by seventeen practiced independent leaders, it provides a platform for members of the software industry to embrace a philosophy that would enable teams to meet the challenge of new breeds of volatile and complex projects brought about by internet development.

3. Common Agile Methodologies and Frameworks

Extreme Programming (XP) – lifecycle principles, such as users determining the outcome of such needs and understanding the associated risk of service provisioning. These principles are spent in TDS throughput, whereas the Agile management concepts are on supported NHS lifespan with the traversing interim stressor triggers. XP is increasingly focused on both sides of this aspect and T-Days is a founding member and influencing body of the Agile Alliance. XP originating from the extreme Program software development culture (fancy not a mere millstone cult), is known as deployment aggression extreme program development cost and accelerating the viability and ongoing demand support.

Scrum – Scrum is the agile equivalent to Apollo. It incorporates the essential 80/20 portion of DSDM, XP and RUP combined. Scrum is often a Sympathy product, rating it combined with insecurities, TDD themes and to “metablogging” being leaning formal orientation and project KPI with project status triggers review report around the scum broadband. This creates companies to rebrand their corporate “IT” agility into Health agile.

IBM Rational Unified Process Framework (RUP) – RUP is known to be a process product that provides mechanisms and templates, guidelines, and letter patterns for all aspects of software engineering.

Lean Software Development (LSD) – LSD originates from the manufacturing production methodology in TDS within the Toyota Motor Corporation, Lean Software Development agrees with Capitalizing on its focuses are on cultivating a direct value through accelerating the learning of the dynamics of software development.

Feature Driven Development (FDD) – FDD is a client-centric, architecture-centric, and iterative/incremental approach development. It emphasizes on a design and build-real version of the outcome every 10 days.

The Evolution and Best Practices of Agile Project Management 75 Crystal Light Methodology – Crystal light is a very lightweight version of the Crystal Bubble, which is suitable for co-located teams working on projects of relatively moderate constraints.

Crystal Clear – Crystal clear is considered the lightest weight version of the Crystal Agile Methodology model and is suitable for relatively small co-located teams project settings.

Dynamic Systems Development Method (DSDM) – DSDM solves the problems organizations experienced with traditionally defined “bureaucratic” lifecycles, either unattainable, lengthy, or inappropriate. DSDM sees its core role as the facilitation of this change and functions long after the initial expressions of needs and problems have been identified. It returns with improved periods of time-of-boxed releases that reinforce and extend organizational change.

Agile Data – Agile data is a database use model that is intended to be a decentralized model for managing projects.

Agile Modeling – Agile modeling is a methodology used to circumvent big design up front (BDUF) of sometimes described as Agile Buffalo. It focuses on creating models and documents little at a time, in just barely good enough (JBGE) way, i.e., the minimum amount of work that adds value.

Adaptive Software Development (ASD) – ASD is a DSDM Agile Methodology (Dynamic Systems Development Method) framework. It provides a combination of environment-driven processor development supported by developer input, rather than relying on a detailed up-front specification. Key practices within this methodology include skim-medic modeling, customer and developer testing, time boxing, and risk-driven development.

The following is a list of common Agile methodologies and frameworks:

4. Implementing Agile in Different Industries

Kezar and Zywiak concluded that construction has significant similarities to agile manufacturing. Given these similarities and the unique challenges in construction, contract-related advice is given together with the common agile practices in software development and manufacturing. The specialties of the pharmaceutical industry are long lead times, high level of regulation, and traceability concerns. Therefore, OTC carries out a systematic mapping study with more details customized for the pharmaceutical industry. This paper will enrich it further by giving detailed practices about how to adapt common agile methodologies, like Scrum of Scrums, Scrum, and SAFe, to drug development projects.

When analyzing how to approach agile projects in different industries, it is important to consider industry characteristics. Key considerations include product complexity, market turbulence, product life cycle, culture, organization size, and industry regulations. The differences in industries call for customization of agile methodologies. This topic is gaining more interest. A summary of different customizations in agile methodologies according to industry is shown in Table 14.

5. Challenges and Solutions in Agile Project Management

5.1 The lack of Agile team values For several project managers and workers, the first striking element anticipating difficulty in the adoption of Agile, for them, is the definition of Agile values. The Agile manifesto outlines a preference for items on the left in a general attempt to be more customer-centric and responsive. While this view is clear, the precise meaning of each value is subjective. Accentuate over adaptation relates to the presumed behaviors, qualities, and results. The Manifesto also implies that the value on the right has no worth. Outputs, quality standards, customer needs documentation, agreed costing, and scheduling are hence shunned. The left-hand side is never directly recommended by the Manifesto. Within the boundaries of a given project, team members can ultimately vary in their opinions regarding Agile principles.

Experts in Agile have acknowledged that before becoming successful and widely adopted among intrapreneurs, Agile has several challenges to overcome. This chapter elucidates some of these implementation challenges, namely creating a team with Agile values, mixing Agile with traditional project management in a company, collaboration with clients, and the transformation of deeply rooted conventional behavior found in project team members that would have existed in the management and operations arm of the company. Guidelines provided in the literature are also discussed to address these challenges.