Monday, April 24, 2017

Agile Project Management

The book, Agile Project Management (APM) by Jim Highsmith, was one of the first attempts to broaden Agile techniques into a cohesive whole.
APM introduced phases for Agile projects that aligned with the PMP phases applied by the Project Management Institute.
APM also modified the traditional “Iron Triangle” to emphasize Value and Quality, and created the “Agile Triangle.”
The primary focus is to deliver value and quality within the constraints of cost, schedule, and scope. APM also states that while value is extrinsic and can be seen through the delivery of features, quality is intrinsic. Quality is defined as part of the requirement and later built into the solution by the team.

Feature Driven Development

Feature Driven Development or FDD is an iterative and incremental approach to software development that was developed in the 1990s by Jeff DeLuca and Peter Coad. Features are small pieces of client-valued functions expressed in the form given.

Through decomposition, domain models are broken down into subject areas, which are then expressed as business activities. The team using FDD method would first develop a prototype of the product, and then build a list of features to be developed. Next, they would plan on how the product would be developed using iterative and incremental approach. Each step in a business activity is a feature.

FDD popularized the cumulative flow diagram and parking lot diagrams, which are useful for tracking and monitoring the delivery progress. Care needs to be taken to ensure that each feature does not take more than two weeks to complete; else they should be broken down into smaller pieces.



Lean Software Development

Tom and Mary Poppendieck introduced Lean software development to the Agile community. Lean software development adopts the principles and practices from Toyota Production system or TPS.
TPS was developed to address issues that affect manufacturing processes, like Muri (Overuse), Mura (irregularities), and Muda (waste).

Muri is to cause overburden, such as unnecessary stress on the employees and processes. This is caused by Mura and a host of other failures in the system, such as lack of training, unclear ways of working, and wrong tools.

Mura is the waste caused by unevenness or irregularity. Unrealistic demand results in unevenness in the processes, which leads to waste creation. Mura drives Muda.

Muda is any activity or process that does not add value. This can refer to waste of time, resources, and money.







Kanban

Kanban is a Japanese term for signal board. It was also developed in the Toyota Production System or TPS. Agile has adopted Kanban technique to reflect the throughput of a Sprint or iteration. It showcases the status of each user story within the sprint and helps gauge the cycle time and the throughput of the team. Kanban boards are also used in most Agile software products, which are useful for Agile distributed teams.

Most Kanban boards are located in the team room and have user story cards or post-it notes distributed across different categories. Use of Story cards or post-it notes helps everyone in the team to understand the complete scope of work to be done.

Kanban helps manage the throughput of a process by identifying bottlenecks, setting ‘Work In Progress’ limits, and displaying the status of the entire production system with one view.

The Kanban board showcases the various teams, which a user story has to pass through, to term a story as Release Ready. Also, notice that the WIP limits set at the top of the chart, which helps minimize the total amount of work done at any point in time.

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