Lesson 05: Agile Principles

PRINCE2^® 6th edition update:
1. "Benefits Review Plan" is now called "Benefits Management Approach"
2. all "_____ Management Strategy"'s are now called "_____ Management Approach".

Extras

Agile is Dead - A video from Dave Thomas (one of the contributors to the Agile Manifesto), which criticizes the new trend of scaling Agile.

Quiz

How can we satisfy the customer and gain its trust?
Why is it easier to accept changes in Agile?
What’s the maximum duration of iterations based on the Agile Principles?
Why is it helpful to have shorter iterations?
Why should the performing organization support the developers and trust them?
Each person in an Agile environment should know what others expect from them, and what they can expect from others.
What’s the best way of communication based on the Agile Principles?
Which of the following are better for tracking the performance of the project?

Lines of code created
Actual man-hours spent on the project

What does maintaining a constant pace mean?
Why should we have a constant pace?
Why is it easier for us to protect the level of quality in Agile?
What’s refactoring?
What’s technical debt?
One of the Agile Principles is “simplicity”. What does it mean?
What’s the benefit of the simplicity principle?
What is improved in retrospectives, the process, or the solution?
How many levels of retrospectives can we have in PRINCE2 Agile?
What’s the 9th Agile Principle? I’m kidding! You don’t have to memorize them. You just need to understand them.

One of the things that really help here is the continuous delivery of working software.
Because we’re not depended on the upfront specification and design, and the elements of scope are designed to be independent of each other, and therefore, changes usually do not require rework.
A couple of months. The maximum duration is one month in Scrum.
There will be more increments, and therefore more opportunities for adaptation. On the other hand, the scope of iterations are usually frozen to create a safe environment for developers, and long iterations would make it risky, as we won’t be flexible enough.
To create a self-organizing environment, in which people are doing their best for the project, and take ownership.
Well, the sentence is a way of explaining the Defined Roles and Responsibilities principle of PRINCE2, while it might not be easy to claim that it’s applicable to Agile. We expect people to share ownership instead of being focused on specific parts of the process.
Face-to-face conversations.
Neither! Both of them are activity based. Progress measurement should be outcome or output based. Working software is the main measure of progress.
Don’t do overtime work.
Higher quality, more creative and proactive environment with happier people that also enjoy life, etc.
Because the quality activities are not compressed at the end of the project, when time is limited and we have to rush. Testing is done continuously in Agile.
Improving the code without changing its external behavior.
When the code is not good enough (even though it’s working), and you know it will create problems in the future. You can pay this debt by refactoring.
It’s better to keep the solution simple, by dropping the fancy features.
The maintenance and training costs in operation would be lower. In other words, the Total Cost of Ownership for the whole product lifecycle would be lower.
The process: the way we work. The solution (software) is improved continuously, using refactoring.
We’ll talk about it in a future lesson :)

Lesson 05: Agile Principles

Extras

Quiz

Contact your trainer to ask questions