Last several years the term “Agile” become popular not only among IT or fintech companies but also in different industries – telco (telecommunication) companies, banking, retail, many others for sure – even production. The first time when I have the chance to get acquainted with “Agile” was my 3m QA course a year ago. Since then, I have read several articles and posts about Agile and the most popular agile Methods/ Practices – Scrum and Kanban. I am sure that most of you have heard or will read/ learn in the future.
But let me tell you more about it 🙂
Agile as a mindset, described in The Agile Manifesto in 2001 with 4 values (people over processes, results over documentation, collaboration over the contract, responsiveness over plan following) and defined by 12 principles (satisfy customer, welcome changing requirements, deliver solutions frequently, business and developers together, motivated individuals, direct conversation, progress = working solution, self-organized teams) and manifested by the unlimited number of practices (Scrum, Kanban, Lean, XP, FDD – feature-driven development, Crystal, Spotify, SAFe – scaled agile framework).
Kanban is a scheduling system, literally means “signboard” with signal cards that should trigger an action, main motto – “Stop Starting and Start Finishing!”, part of the Lean methodology that organizes processes and workflow, people are self-organized and count on gradual improvements. General practices in Kanban – visualize the workflow, Limit WIP (work in progress), Manage Flow, explicit Process policies (Definition of Done), Feedback loops (Review, Retrospective, and Daily meetings).
Scrum as a learning framework and approach to creating product/service with 3 main roles (Product Owner, Scrum Master, and Team), 5 events (Sprint, Sprint Planning, Daily Scrum, Sprint Review, Retrospective), and 3 artifacts (Product Backlog, Sprint Backlog, Product Incremental)
But among the most popular Agile methodologies is another that attracts my attention – XP – Extreme Programing and here below what interesting I discover. Before reading www.extremeprogramming.org I only knew that there is a “parallel coding” in XP (two developers are writing code for solving one and the same issue) but it is not exactly (I missed the keyword together). These are my takeaways about XP – specific features:
- First Project in XP – started in March 1996
- Focus on customer satisfaction as every agile framework
- Deliver the software that you need now, instead to deliver everything you possibly want in the future
- Respond to changing customer requirements, even at late stage
- Managers, customers and developers are all equal partners in team
- Extract from the Rules of the XP:
- Planning – user stories are written instead of big business requirements, project split in small releases and iterations
- Managing – open work space and daily stand ups, move people around and cross training
- Designing rules – simplicity, CRC (Class, Responsibilities, Collaboration) cards for design sessions
- Coding – customer is always available, code the unit tests first, all code is paired programmed by two developers on one computer, integrate often
- Test – all code must have unit tests.
- Values of XP – Simplicity, Communication, Feedback, Respect, Courage
- Scrum vs. XP
Sources:
Extreme Programming – A gentle introduction, Agile Manifesto, White papers for Scrum and Scrum vs Kanban
With Scrum tending to have so many processes, is it really agile?
Agile manifesto states – processes over people
A question arises – is scrum really agile?
Because for sure, some companies tend to put so much importance on processes, it’s no longer following the manifesto.
*it states people over processes; I can’t edit the comment 🙂