AGILE METHODOLOGIES - FOCUS ON SCRUM

Define agile and its importance, compare to waterfall, review the agile manifesto with 12 principles and core values, and survey Kanban, Extreme Programming, Dynamic Systems Development Method, and peristyle family.

Explore agile definitions for managing complex software projects with high uncertainty through iterative, incremental deliveries, self-organizing cross-functional teams, and frequent customer collaboration that embraces change for maximum value.

Agile over Waterfall enables change throughout the project, delivers faster time to market through shorter planning and iterative development, and boosts customer satisfaction via ongoing feedback and self-organizing teams.

Understand the disadvantages of agile, including commitment challenges with unclear final deliverables, collaboration demands, and managing client feedback for virtual teams.

Explore how the Agile Manifesto defines better software development through agile core values and twelve principles, created in February 2001 by 17 practitioners including Jeff Sutherland and Ken Schrieber.

Agile principles center on customer satisfaction, welcoming change, delivering working software frequently, daily collaboration, motivated people, face-to-face communication, sustainable pace, and ongoing design excellence, simplicity, and self-organizing teams.

Prioritize individuals and interactions over processes and tools, software work over documentation, customer collaboration, and responding to change over following a plan.

Explore popular agile methodologies, with a focus on Scrum, and get brief overviews of Extreme Programming, DSDM, Crystal, feature driven development, disciplined agile delivery, and SAFe.

Adopt Kanban to visualize work flow with a board of columns like backlog, in progress, and done, supporting lean manufacturing and just-in-time delivery.

Extreme programming (xp) is a development discipline that embraces short cycles to reduce the cost of change and improve software quality, guided by communication, respect, simplicity, feedback, and courage.

Explore the Dynamic Systems Development Method, an agile framework for software and non-IT projects, that covers the full lifecycle with time boxing, MoSCoW prioritization, and iterative development.

Crystal family is an agile approach prioritizing people over processes, with four size-based methods—crystal clear method, crystal yellow method, crystal orange method, and crystal red method—tailored to project criticality.

Define agile, review its advantages and disadvantages, and summarize the agile manifesto with its twelve principles and core values, while comparing various methodologies and how teams blend them.

Explore the scrum definition and its application, trace its history, identify ideal use cases, and describe its three pillars and core values.

Define scrum as a lightweight, easy-to-understand yet hard-to-master framework, and show how its events and tools empower self-organizing teams to tackle complex problems and deliver high quality increments.

Trace the origins of scrum from Takeuchi and Nonaka's new product development ideas to the Harvard Business Review coinage, and note Sutherland and Schrieber's 1993 implementation and 1995 development.

Apply scrum to a completely new product with high complexity, prioritizing planning, time to market, and frequent customer interactions.

Explore scrum values that drive trust and success, including respect, courage, openness, transparency, and commitments, to openly address challenges, focus on incremental delivery, and meet sprint goals through self-organizing teams.

Define scrum, trace its history, and explore its applications while outlining the three pillars and the screen values teens should live by.

Cover section objectives, the product owner, the development team, and the differences between the scrum master and a project manager.

Outline the scrum team—product owner, development team, and scrum master—and how self-organizing, cross-functional groups drive flexibility. Deliver increments with frequent feedback and team-agreed increments yielding useful working product versions.

The product owner, a core scrum team member, prioritizes the backlog to maximize value, ensures the development team understands items, and keeps the backlog transparent and sprint goals clear.

Empower a cross-functional development team to self-organize, own the work for each increment, and maintain 3–9 members with no title-driven roles, accountable to sprint goals.

Act as a servant leader, coaching the team in scrum theory, practices, values, and rules, shielding them from irrelevant external interactions to deliver valuable products.

Explore how a Scrum master coaches a self-organizing team on agile and Scrum principles, while a project manager focuses on delivering on time, on budget, and within scope.

Identify key components of the team and individual roles, then compare the project manager role to another team role, noting their different focus and how they complement each other.

Explore the agile sprint cycle, covering iteration and increment concepts, sprint planning, daily standups or daily scrums, sprint reviews, and sprint retrospectives.

Explore the sprint as a time-boxed cycle of planning, daily standups, reviews, and retrospectives, delivering a usable increment while adapting to change and ensuring team empowerment.

Sprint planning selects sprint backlog items to achieve the sprint goal within a time-box, coordinating the dev team, product owner, and scrum master to deliver a defined increment.

Attend the daily stand up, a 15-minute time-boxed sprint event where the dev team inspects progress toward the sprint goal, self-organizes, and prepares the done increment.

Attend the sprint review to inspect the sprint increment, update the product backlog, and set the next focus and sprint goal with stakeholders, driving value and transparency.

Lead the sprint retrospective to review last sprint processes, relationships, tools and people; identify what went well and needs improvement, and craft the plan for the next sprint.

Define what a sprint is and examine the scrum events that constitute the sprint process, plus the scrum assistant role in each event.

Explore Scrum artifacts, including the product backlog and sprint backlog, and examine monetary tools; these artifacts maximize transparency and enable inspection, adaptation, and the three Scrum pillars.

Leverage the product backlog as a dynamic, single source of all known work, owned by the product owner and refined through scrum team collaboration for the next sprint.

Track the sprint backlog as a real-time view of the dev team's work, combining product backlog items with a plan to achieve the sprint goal and enable daily standups.

Explore monitoring tools like release and sprint burn down charts, burn up charts, and cumulative flow charts to track progress and lead time for informed sprint decisions.

Explore the product backlog, the sprint backlog, and monitoring tools that help the team track progress during the sprint and the project.

Discover what a user story is, how velocity is calculated, and the usefulness of a spike, then examine the definition of done, scrum of scrums, and scrumping.

Discover how user stories drive collaboration in scrum, including the three elements: card, communication, and confirmation, and how epics, job stories, and technical stories are split and sized with planning poker.

Calculate velocity from sized user stories in the sprint backlog to measure sprint capacity, gauge average velocity, and track it over time to support release planning and improve team output.

Spikes help teams explore uncertain stories and build knowledge without adding functionality, and teams should agree on whether to use a spike.

Define the definition of done as the team's accepted criteria a backlog item must meet, including acceptance criteria, peer programming or code review, testing, and updated documentation.

Learn how the scrum of scrums scales agile projects by coordinating multiple teams and managing overlaps and integration areas. Select technical representatives to voice shared blockers and keep time-boxed discussions.

Explore Scrumban, a pragmatic hybrid of Scrum and Kanban, combining structured planning with visual boards, work-in-progress limits, and daily standups to optimize throughput.

Learn to split and size user stories and calculate velocity. Understand spikes, the definition of done, and scaling Scrum with Kanban, while avoiding cross-team velocity comparisons.

Learn how to become certified in agile practice by exploring two certifications - certified chrome master and professional scroll master's applications - along with the certified pharmacist application and related certification guidance.

Compare two agile certifications: certified scrum master and professional scrum master. The CSM requires renewal every two years for a $100 fee; the PSM never expires.

Explore the CSM certification path: a 16-hour in-person course, a 50-question online exam, and 20 strong education units per year, with tracks to advanced and professional scrum master certifications.

Explore the PSM certification path: online exam with 80 questions in 60 minutes, 85% passing, no expiration or minimum training units, from PSM I to III.

Compare two agile certifications, the certified school master and professionals from master certifications, and review requirements to obtain and maintain them and paths beyond CSM and PSM.

Conclude your agile methodologies study with a focus on scrum, guided by key resources like scrum.org and Scrum Alliance.org, and embark on your journey into the world.