Contrast Agile & Waterfall Development Methods
Agile software development methods represent a departure from traditional waterfall approaches in significant but meaningful ways. Yet there are long standing and highly successful approaches from industry that historically support concepts of agility going back at least thirty years. Capturing a clear understanding of these common sense concepts, you will be able to capitalize on them, gaining the cooperation and acceptance of stakeholders who must approve and participate in your team's success.
Where Agile Methods Can Help the Organization
There are significant benefits available when utilizing an Agile approach that can address the risks, unknowns, and uncertainties that affect nearly all software development projects. These complexities can best be addressed with a flexible and adaptable model that turns traditional problems into advantages and provides the tools to change the way work is done through addressing organizational issues head on. In this course you will experience, through hands-on exercises, how Agile addresses these traditional project challenges and finally resolve these ever-present constraints. Learn to overcome these hurdles and interweave your traditional practices with Agile practices to develop the best software for your organization and your customer.
Plan Your Agile Transition Strategy
After considering all of the ways in which the Agile methods will affect your organization and considering the benefits and challenges associated with each, you will be ready to plan your Agile adoption strategy. Which steps should you take first? Who will need to be involved? How will you capitalize on the benefits you will experience? In this course you will gain all the tools, skills and knowledge to return to your office and successfully implement an Agile transition strategy that best fits your environment.
Easy to Implement Training
Each concept and technique covered in this course is discussed not only in theory, but will also cover how the information works in practice. Each section will encompass the most important information that you need to know in order to be prepared to put this knowledge to use, and then will be followed with hands-on exercises to demonstrate precisely how to implement it. Each of the sections will also include a discussion around best practices for transitioning, and implementation to help participants avoid the pitfalls commonly encountered when making the change to an Agile approach.
Date: 12/16/2024 - 12/18/2024 (Monday - Wednesday) | 12:00 PM - 4:30 PM (EST)
Location: ONLINE (Virtual Classroom Live)
Delivery Format: VIRTUAL CLASSROOM LIVE
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1. Introduction to Agility
Agility is comprised of a unique set of principles and values that must be understood and embraced before the organization can employ Agile practices. In this section, we will survey the essence of Agility.
Exercise
Identify the problems that you are experiencing with software projects in your organization. You will use this list throughout the course to evaluate the benefits of Agility. Compare notes with other students.
Exercise
Identify the Agile concepts that have already gained acceptance in your organization. Compare notes with other students.
2. Us vs. Them Teams
The heart of every project is the team. Yet in traditional approaches, the team often operates as a collection of competing individuals, rather than as a unit. Even worse, many organizations have divided responsibilities in ways that pit different groups against each other, when the project desperately needs cooperation.
Agility means establishing a single team for each project, and ensuring that it comprises all of the necessary people. Agile practices ensure that all team members are constantly collaborating and driving the project toward success.
Case Studies
We will discuss the unique needs and situations of one of the three Case Study organizations, and determine how to make the transition from us-vs.-them teams to Agile Teams.
Exercise
Determine how to introduce the Agile teaming on projects in your organization. Identify the benefits you would realize and the challenges you would face. Compare notes with other students.
3. My Project Plan, Right or Wrong
Traditional approaches are often referred to as “plan-based” because of the importance they put on up-front planning and then controlling the project so it conforms to the plan. Of course, some organizations go to the other extreme, paying little attention to their plans after the project starts, or even foregoing planning altogether.
Agility means planning just enough, doing that planning when it is needed, and accepting the fact that reality often works out differently from our plans. Agile projects value achieving the project goals; the plan is merely a tool to help them do that.
Case Studies
We will discuss the unique needs and situations of one of the three Case Study organizations, and determine how to make the transition from the plan-based approach to Agile planning.
Exercise
Determine how to introduce the Agile planning on projects in your organization. Identify the benefits you would realize and the challenges you would face. Compare notes with other students.
4. The Insidious Creeping Scope
Traditional approaches usually begin with an important (and sometimes long and drawn out) Requirements phase during which all of the product requirements are elicited, analyzed and documented. Everyone in the project commits to the resulting specification, and then significant effort is expended in Change Control. Conformance to the Requirements Specification becomes the measure of project success. (Until the customer complains!)
Agility means documenting requirements just enough, eliciting more detailed information when it is needed, and accepting the fact that thing will change before the project is over. Agile projects value delivering what the customer needs; the requirements are merely a tool to help them do that.
Case Studies
We will discuss the unique needs and situations of one of the three Case Study organizations, and determine how to make the transition from up-front requirements to Agile requirements.
Exercise
Determine how to introduce the Agile requirements on projects in your organization. Identify the benefits you would realize and the challenges you would face. Compare notes with other students.
5. Where's the Quality?
Traditional projects are often quality-challenged. The testing phase at the end of the project seems to be never-ending, and in spite of all that time and effort, a defective product is delivered. This results in high support costs, unhappy customers and out of control costs.
Agility means keeping the focus on quality from the very beginning of the project, testing continuously and ensuring that every piece of code is technically excellent. And because testing is not saved for the end, quality surprises are eliminated. Agility means producing production-ready software regularly throughout the project!
Case Studies
We will discuss the unique needs and situations of one of the three Case Study organizations, and determine how to make the transition from traditional quality practices to Agile quality practices.
Exercise
Determine how to introduce the Agile quality practices on projects in your organization. Identify the benefits you would realize and the challenges you would face. Compare notes with other students.
6. Course Wrap-Up
There is too much to Agility for you to adopt all at once, so you will need an action plan. In this section, you will review what we have covered in the course and prepare a viable action plan for your organization to become more Agile.
Exercise
Prioritize the Agile concepts that you could introduce in your organization. For the three highest-priority concepts, create an action plan to make those things a reality on your projects. Compare notes with other students.
Exercise 1: What are the biggest project issues you and your organization face? You will compile a list of what is broken and use this list as a touchstone for the exercises that follow.
Exercise 2: What aspects of agility have you already incorporated into your organization? Review you current processes, even if they are described with other names, and identify ways in which your organization has embraced any of these concepts.
Exercise 3: Explore how adaptive planning can benefit the organization. Where can this help the highly regulated business, government organizations, methodology centric organizations?
Exercise 4: Explore the benefits of progressive elaboration of requirements. Discover how prioritization of the feature set can deliver the highest business value to the customer.
Exercise 5: Explore how adaptability defuses the scope-creep issue. As users prioritize needs and features, changes in scope are assimilated into the project based on prioritized need. Reviewing the case studies, select several that would receive benefit from implementing adaptable change.
Exercise 6: Explore the triple constraints of project management in terms of quality. Identify the top elements that contribute to customer satisfaction. How does your customer define quality?
Exercise 7: Several organizations that employ the concept of self-organizing teams will be explored. How does this drive greater ownership of the project deliverables on the part of the performing organization? In what situations is a C & C model effective and where does it fail?
Exercise 8: Certain development environments function very well using a waterfall approach. What kind of project organization, product cycle, and methodology is used for a well-executed waterfall approach? Several case studies will be reviewed and the results analyzed.
Exercise 9: You will use a Excel "case studiesspreadsheet to review agile techniques and define which techniques can be implemented immediately, in one to four months, or which may be problematic at any phase.
Exercise 10: Identify the issues in your organization that lead to excessive rework, waste, service after service, scrap, or any situation that costs the organization wasted time and wasted dollars. Address these issues on the agile "Techniquesspreadsheet. Use the "cost of quality" spreadsheet to quantify the loss in dollars.
Exercise 11: Define the areas where your organization may put up resistance to implementing agile process. Identify where the resistance is due to fear, misunderstanding, lack of training, or some other issue. You will explore avenues of resolution and methods to help your organization harvest the benefits of agile implementations.
Exercise 12: Prioritize the Agile concepts that you could introduce in your organization. For the three highest-priority concepts, create an action plan to make those things a reality on your projects. Compare notes with other participants.
This course is valuable for anyone who is contemplating making their software projects more agile.
This class is for you if you are a:
