Agile Fundamentals : Including Scrum and Kanban

Explore the waterfall and the V-model software development processes, examining their history, descriptions, advantages, and disadvantages.

Trace Winston Royce's 1970 description of the waterfall model and its stages—requirements specification, detailed design, construction, testing, installation, and maintenance. Contrast it with the interactive model that allows feedback.

Explore when waterfall suits a project—well-documented, fixed requirements, stable product definition, understood technologies, short duration, and full team availability—while acknowledging that changing requirements often shift toward agile.

Explore the waterfall model's staged deliveries and clear department roles, then weigh the risks of limited reflection and late working software when requirements change.

Explains the v-model as a disciplined, non-linear extension of the waterfall, with a corresponding testing phase for each development stage that creates a v-shaped cycle.

Explore how the V-model aligns verification and validation with parallel testing across requirements analysis, system and architectural design, module design, coding, to unit, integration, system, and acceptance testing.

Explore the v-model's resemblance to waterfall, emphasizing well-documented requirements, stable product definitions, and tight coding deadlines, while noting its suitability for short projects and risk of changing requirements.

Contrast the waterfall and extended v-model, where progress depends on completed deliverables, and late working software increases change costs, with agile approaches that deliver working software earlier.

Trace the agile manifesto's origins and its four core values: individuals and interactions over processes and tools, working software over documentation, customer collaboration over contract negotiation, and change over plan.

Discover the agile manifesto's 12 principles - regular delivery of valuable software, customer satisfaction, and sustainable design excellence - driven by self-organizing teams, servant leadership, and frequent, collaborative iterations.

Explore agile methodologies such as Scrum, XP, Crystal, DSDM, FDD, Lean, and Kanban, and how they support iterative, incremental delivery.

Explore how agile teams function as cross-functional units led by a product owner with a single voice, a Scrum Master and agile coach guiding developers, testers, and designers to deliver.

Discover how agile delivers value sooner through incremental development versus waterfall, and review the Agile Manifesto’s values, principles, XP, Scrum, lean, Kanban, and agile team roles.

Master common misconceptions about agile software development and learn how to prevent destructive myths during an agile transformation, while spotting typical mistakes by new teams.

Expose common agile misconceptions, clarify that agile emphasizes values and pragmatic processes (scrum, extreme programming, lean, kanban), delivering value through iterative planning, responding to change, and appropriate documentation.

Confront common agile misconceptions and prevent mistakes as teams transition to agile, and preview the advantages, disadvantages, and methodologies of agile development.

Explore the advantages and disadvantages of agile software development and understand how large, established companies may face challenges. Assess whether agile is right for your team.

Agile delivers customer satisfaction through rapid, continuous delivery of useful software, emphasizing people and interactions over processes and tools while embracing change and real customer feedback to improve quality.

Examine the disadvantages of agile, including difficulty estimating total effort, potential scope creep, intense user involvement, less upfront predictability, and the costs of continuous testing and a sustainable team pace.

Assess your department's readiness for agile, identifying challenges like deadlines, budgets, and knowledge silos to determine where agile delivers the most value amid changing requirements.

Explore why agile isn't a quick fix, as upfront training, knowledge sharing, and automated testing environments drive long-term cost savings through higher quality, usability, and better business alignment.

Assess organizational readiness for agile by trialing projects, empowering self-organizing teams, and replacing documentation with face to face communication to deliver tangible outcomes.

Assess agile by weighing customer-focused benefits—rapid delivery, collaboration, technical excellence, and adaptation—against challenges like scope creep and time demands, and determine when agile suits teams, with XP previewed.

Drive quality and responsiveness through frequent releases in short cycles, pair programming, extensive code reviews, and unit testing of all code.

Explore extreme programming as a software development discipline that shortens cycles to adapt to changing requirements, emphasizing coding, testing, listening, and designing with values such as communication and simplicity.

Describe extreme programming's four activities: coding, testing, listening, and designing—and emphasize coding as the driving force, with unit tests, test-driven development, acceptance tests, user stories, and decoupled system design.

Explore how extreme programming centers on five values: communication, simplicity, feedback, courage, and respect, to align developers and customers through clear dialogue and rapid feedback.

Explore extreme programming's 12 practices across groups - fine scale feedback, continuous process, shade understanding, and programmer welfare - highlighting pair programming, planning game, test driven development, and continuous integration.

Explore the 1999 XP rules for planning, managing, designing, coding, and testing. Learn to write user stories, plan releases and iterations, and create automated exceptions tests.

Learn to boost team communication and velocity in agile development through open spaces, pair programming, daily stand-ups, whiteboards, and charts, while customers select stories equal to velocity.

Keep the design simple, replacing complex code with simpler solutions using CRC cards and the system metaphor to align team understanding and reduce risk through spike solutions and refactoring.

Explore extreme programming practices, including customer collaboration, coding standards, test-first development, pair programming, and continuous integration to ensure high-quality, maintainable software.

Build a robust dotnet unit testing strategy by choosing a framework, writing tests before code, and incrementally expanding a non-trivial class test suite with automated acceptance and CI checks.

Visualize extreme programming stages from user stories and acceptance tests to architectural spike, time-boxed spike application, release planning, iterations, and small releases delivering working software.

Explore extreme programming, Ken Beck's agile method that delivers high quality software through frequent releases, short cycles, and embracing changing requirements to maximize customer value.