Quick Agile Knowledge

Today’s typical Agile process, no matter what name you call it, takes the best from the buffet of Agile practices to create a typical process where:

1. Project needs or requirements are expressed in user stories placed in a backlog, and ideally written by Product owners (in Scrum), or customers (in XP) in collaboration with the development team. (Sometimes they magically appear.)
2. Developers give high-level estimates saying how long user stories will take to complete.
3. Product owners arrange user stories into incremental releases that take typically 6 weeks to 6 months.
4. Product owners choose the next stories, highest value first, for each development time-box. The stories chosen need to “fit” into the time-box based on how quickly the team can produce software.
5. At the end of each development time-box the team should have incrementally built some of the product. The team (proudly) demonstrates the finished product to product owners and other stakeholders.
6. The team adds up the development estimates for the user stories completed during the time-box. This is the velocity (from XP) that’ll be used to estimate the amount that can be completed in the next time-box.
7. The team holds a retrospective to evaluate how well they’ve done and what changes could be made to the process to allow things to go better, then the next time-boxed development cycle is planned.
8. Time-boxed development continues through to release — which is a short way of saying “rinse and repeat.”

There’s more common practices, such as daily standup meetings to synchronize the team, and burn-down charts to show development progress, but that’s enough to make my point: Today’s Agile process is a mash-up of a variety of good ideas from a variety of sources.