Agile

Agile software development is an approach to software development with emphasis on solutions evolving through the collaborative effort of self-organizing and cross-functional teams and their stakeholders.

Until recently, agile was seen solely as a set of management practices relevant to software development. That’s because agile’s initial advocates were software developers and its foundational document was the Manifesto for Software Development of 2001. But over the years, agile’s relevance has spread.

Agile project management for example is a methodology that is commonly used to deliver complex projects due to its adaptiveness. It emphasizes collaboration, flexibility, continuous improvement and high quality results.

There are various frameworks within agile project management that can be used to develop and deliver a product or service. While they each have their own set of characteristics and terminology, they share common principles and practices.

Two of the most popular ones that support the agile development life cycle are Scrum and Kanban.

Kanban is a popular framework used to implement agile software development. It requires real-time communication of capacity and full transparency of work. Work items are represented visually on a kanban board, allowing team members to see the state of every piece of work at any time.

Scrum is an agile framework that is also used to implement the ideas behind agile software development. It’s comprised of five values: commitment, courage, focus, openness and respect. Its goal is to develop, deliver, and sustain complex products through collaboration, accountability and iterative progress.

What distinguishes scrum from other agile methodologies are the roles, events, and artifacts that it is made up of, with which it uses to operate.

Then there is agile product management. In agile software development, product management is about guiding a product through multiple iterations. Since agile programs are more fluid than traditional approaches, agile product management is a more flexible approach.

One of the core concepts in agile is that the scope of a project is fluid, while resources stay the same. As such, in agile product management the team spends less time defining the product beforehand, and is open to changes along the way.

The product comes together one iteration at a time, allowing for customer data and team retrospectives to drive the next stage. Consequently, agile product management is more about guiding the dev team through cycles, while maintaining the product vision and integrating customer insight along the way.

Agile’s emergence as a huge global movement extending beyond software is driven by the discovery that the only way for organizations to cope with today’s turbulent customer-driven marketplace is to become agile.

Agile enables organizations to master continuous change. It permits firms to flourish in a world that is increasingly volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous.

The Agile Manifesto of 2001 reflected the views of visionary software developers who believed that uncovering better ways of developing software would require a reversal of some fundamental assumptions of 20th Century management. They valued individuals and interactions over processes and tools, working software over comprehensive documentation, customer collaboration over contract negotiation and responding to change over following a plan.

As software itself becomes a critical driver in almost all businesses, agile is now spreading to every kind of organization and every aspect of work.

Many feel that becoming an agile organization is an increasingly urgent necessity for companies in today’s digital economy, yet most companies have a deeply embedded command organization architecture and culture.

This reflects, first and foremost, the industrial economy mindsets and skills of their senior leaders, which is arguably the greatest obstacle to becoming an agile organization.

To make the transformation, experts in this area believe that senior leaders must learn and practice a holistic and complete set of new mindsets and skills, and apply them to design a wholly new, agile organization architecture and culture.

Tonex Agile Courses

Tonex Agile Courses are taught by excellent instructors who bring it all together through expert knowledge as well as real world experience.

Does your organization prefer to have an Agile Course tailored to your needs? At Tonex, we can do that. Just let us know how we can help.

For more information, questions, comments, contact us.