I've created a PowerPoint presentation about 10 Key Principles of Agile Software Development.

Please use or adapt it for your own presentations.

Notice the notes on each slide from my blog. They're not intended to be a script, but hopefully they're still helpful.

I've given away about 2000 copies of this presentation now, with very positive feedback. However the free period is now up; I'm now selling it for just £10. That's only the price of a light lunch and just think of the work it will save you!

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See also:
10 Key Principles of Agile Software Development
10 Good Reasons to do Agile Software Development
'Implementing Scrum' PowerPoint Presentation

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Agile development relies on close cooperation and collaboration between all team members and stakeholders.

Agile development principles include keeping requirements and documentation lightweight, and acknowledging that change is a normal and acceptable reality in software development.

This makes close collaboration particularly important to clarify requirements just-in-time and to keep all team members (including the product owner) 'on the same page' throughout the development.

You certainly can't do away with a big spec up-front *and* not have close collaboration. You need one of them that's for sure. And for so many situations the latter can be more effective and is so much more rewarding for all involved!

In situations where there is or has been tension between the development team and business people, bringing everyone close in an agile development approach is akin to a boxer keeping close to his opponent, so he can't throw the big punch! :-)

But unlike boxing, the project/product team is working towards a shared goal, creating better teamwork, fostering team spirit, and building stronger, more cooperative relationships.

There are many reasons to consider the adoption of agile development, and in the near future I'm going to outline "10 good reasons to go agile" and explain some of the key business benefits of an agile approach.

If business engagement is an issue for you, that's one good reason to go agile you shouldn't ignore.

See also:
10 Key Principles of Agile Software Development
Active user involvement is imperative
Agile requirements are barely sufficient

For further discussion on this or any other agile development topic, go to the 'all about agile' forum at http://www.groups.google.com/group/allaboutagile

For more agile principles, see below...

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In agile development, testing is integrated throughout the lifecycle; testing the software continuously throughout its development.

Agile development does not have a separate test phase as such. Developers are much more heavily engaged in testing, writing automated repeatable unit tests to validate their code.

Apart from being geared towards better quality software, this is also important to support the principle of small, iterative, incremental releases.

With automated repeatable unit tests, testing can be done as part of the build, ensuring that all features are working correctly each time the build is produced. And builds should be regular, at least daily, so integration is done as you go too.

The purpose of these principles is to keep the software in releasable condition throughout the development, so it can be shipped whenever it's appropriate.

The XP (eXtreme Programming) agile methodology goes further still. XP recommends test driven development, writing tests before writing the software.

But testing shouldn't only be done by developers throughout the development. There is still a very important role for professional testers, as we all know "developers can't test for toffee!" :-)

The role of a tester can change considerably in agile development, into a role more akin to quality assurance than purely testing. There are considerable advantages having testers involved from the outset.

This is compounded further by the lightweight approach to requirements in agile development, and the emphasis on conversation and collaboration to clarify requirements more than the traditional approach of specifications and documentation.

Although requirements can be clarified in some detail in agile development (as long as they are done just-in-time and not all up-front), it is quite possible for this to result in some ambiguity and/or some cases where not all team members have the same understanding of the requirements.

So what does this mean for an agile tester? A common concern from testers moving to an agile development approach - particularly from those moving from a much more formal environment - is that they don't know precisely what they're testing for. They don't have a detailed spec to test against, so how can they possibly test it?

Even in a more traditional development environment, I always argued that testers could test that software meets a spec, and yet the product could still be poor quality, maybe because the requirement was poorly specified or because it was clearly written but just not a very good idea in the first place! A spec does not necessarily make the product good!

In agile development, there's a belief that sometimes - maybe even often - these things are only really evident when the software can be seen running. By delivering small incremental releases and by measuring progress only by working software, the acid test is seeing the software and only then can you really judge for sure whether or not it's good quality.

Agile testing therefore calls for more judgement from a tester, the application of more expertise about what's good and what's not, the ability to be more flexible and having the confidence to work more from your own knowledge of what good looks like. It's certainly not just a case of following a test script, making sure the software does what it says in the spec.

And for these reasons, agile testing is not for dummies!


For further discussion on this or other agile topics, go to the 'all about agile' forum at http://groups.google.com/group/allaboutagile.

For further reading about agile development principles, see below...

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Pareto's law is more commonly known as the 80/20 rule. The theory is about the law of distribution and how many things have a similar distribution curve. This means that *typically* 80% of your results may actually come from only 20% of your efforts!

Pareto's law can be seen in many situations - not literally 80/20 but certainly the principle that the majority of your results will often come from the minority of your efforts.

So the really smart people are the people who can see (up-front without the benefit of hind-sight) *which* 20% to focus on. In agile development, we should try to apply the 80/20 rule, seeking to focus on the important 20% of effort that gets the majority of the results.

If the quality of your application isn't life-threatening, if you have control over the scope, and if speed-to-market is of primary importance, why not seek to deliver the important 80% of your product in just 20% of the time? In fact, in that particular scenario, you could ask why you would ever bother doing the last 20%?

Now that doesn't mean your product should be fundamentally flawed, a bad user experience, or full of faults. It just means that developing some features, or the richness of some features, is going the extra mile and has a diminishing return that may not be worthwhile.

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In agile development, "done" should really mean "DONE!".

Features developed within an iteration (Sprint in Scrum), should be 100% complete by the end of the Sprint.

Too often in software development, "done" doesn't really mean "DONE!". It doesn't mean tested. It doesn't necessarily mean styled. And it certainly doesn't usually mean accepted by the product owner. It just means developed.

In an ideal situation, each iteration or Sprint should lead to a release of the product. Certainly that's the case on BAU (Business As Usual) changes to existing products. On projects it's not feasible to do a release after every Sprint, however completing each feature in turn enables a very precise view of progress and how far complete the overall project really is or isn't.

So, in agile development, make sure that each feature is fully developed, tested, styled, and accepted by the product owner before counting it as "DONE!". And if there's any doubt about what activities should or shouldn't be completed within the Sprint for each feature, "DONE!" should mean shippable.

The feature may rely on other features being completed before the product could really be shipped. But the feature on its own merit should be shippable. So if you're ever unsure if a feature is 'done enough', ask one simple question: "Is this feature ready to be shipped?".

It's also important to really complete each feature before moving on to the next...

Of course multiple features can be developed in parallel in a team situation. But within the work of each developer, do not move on to a new feature until the last one is shippable. This is important to ensure the overall product is in a shippable state at the end of the Sprint, not in a state where multiple features are 90% complete or untested, as is more usual in traditional development projects.

In agile development, "done" really should mean "DONE!".

See also:
10 Key Principles of Agile Software Development
Time waits for no man!
How d'you eat an elephant?
Fast but not so furious!

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Agile software development is all about frequent delivery of products. In a truly agile world, gone are the days of the 12 month project. In an agile world, a 3-6 month project is strategic!

In that scenario, 30 days is a lifetime!

Competitors won't wait. Speed-to-market is a significant competitive edge. The value of first-mover advantage is potentially enormous. Whilst it's not always the case, research shows that those first to market 80% of the time win; and end up clear market leaders.

So how frequent is *frequent enough*?

Think carefully about your own situation. Think about the two extremes I've described above. Think about what's right for you; your organisation; your product; your market; your customers. Think about what's right for *you*, in your *particular situation*. There is no right or wrong answer. Only what works for you, and what doesn't.

What is fairly important is to make this a positive decision to decide what's appropriate for you. And then to stick, if you can, to a regular release cycle. A regular release cycle allows you to plan. It allows your infrastructure and ops teams to plan. It allows your business colleagues to plan. It allows your launch events, marketing campaigns, etc to be planned. And because agile development works to a fixed timescale, these plans are assured.

A regular release cycle also allows you to learn more effectively. Your estimating might be good, it might be bad. Hopefully it's at least consistent. If you estimate features at a granular level (ideally less than 1 day) and track your velocity (how much of your estimate you actually delivered in each Sprint), in time you'll begin to understand your *normal* delivery rate. And when you understand this we'll, you'll be surprised how predictable you can be.

And let's face it, managing expectations is really all about predictability. If people know what to expect, they're generally happy. If they don't, they're not happy. Maybe even furious!

So, in agile development, focus on frequent delivery of products. And perhaps even more importantly, focus on consistent delivery of products.

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One bite at a time! Likewise, agile software development projects are delivered in small bite-sized pieces, delivering small, incremental *releases* and iterating.

In more traditional software development projects, the (simplified) lifecycle is Analyse, Develop, Test - first gathering all known requirements for the whole product, then developing all elements of the software, then testing that the entire product is fit for release.
In agile software development, the cycle is Analyse, Develop, Test; Analyse, Develop, Test; and so on... doing each step for each feature, one feature at a time.

Advantages of this iterative approach to software development include:

• Reduced risk: clear visibility of what's completed to date throughout a project
  
• Increased value: delivering some benefits early; being able to release the product whenever it's deemed good enough, rather than having to wait for all intended features to be ready
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• More flexibility/agility: can choose to change direction or adapt the next iterations based on actually seeing and using the software
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• Better cost management: if, like all-too-many software development projects, you run over budget, some value can still be realised; you don't have to scrap the whole thing if you run short of funds

For this approach to be practical, each feature must be fully developed, to the extent that it's ready to be shipped, before moving on.

Another practicality is to make sure features are developed in *priority* order, not necessarily in a logical order by function. Otherwise you could run out of time, having built some of the less important features - as in agile software development, the timescales are fixed.

Building the features of the software ”broad but shallow” is also advisable for the same reason. Only when you've completed all your must-have features, move on to the should-haves, and only then move on to the could-haves. Otherwise you can get into a situation where your earlier features are functionally rich, whereas later features of the software are increasingly less sophisticated as time runs out.

Try to keep your product backlog or feature list expressed in terms of use cases, user stories, or features - not technical tasks. Ideally each item on the list should always be something of value to the user, and always deliverables rather than activities so you can 'kick the tyres' and judge their completeness, quality and readiness for release.

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Agile Development teams capture requirements at a high level and on a piecemeal basis, just-in-time for each feature to be developed.

Agile requirements are ideally visual and should be barely sufficient, i.e. the absolute minimum required to enable development and testing to proceed with reasonable efficiency. The rationale for this is to minimise the time spent on anything that doesn’t actually form part of the end product.

Agile Development can be mistaken by some as meaning there’s no process; you just make things up as you go along – in other words, JFDI! That approach is not so much Agile but Fragile!

Although Agile Development is much more flexible than more traditional development methodologies, Agile Development does nevertheless have quite a bit of rigour and is based on the fairly structured approach of lean manufacturing as pioneered by Toyota.

I personally believe Agile Development teams can build better products if they have a reasonably clear idea of the overall requirements before setting out on development, so that incorrect design decisions don’t lead the team down dead ends and also so a sensible investment case can be made to get the project funded.

However any requirements captured at the outset should be captured at a high level and in a visual format, perhaps for example as a storyboard of the user interface. At this stage, requirements should be understood enough to determine the outline scope of the product and produce high level budgetary estimates and no more.

Ideally, Agile Development teams capture these high level requirements in workshops, working together in a highly collaborative way so that all team members understand the requirements as well as each other. It is not necessarily the remit of one person, like the Business Analyst in more traditional projects, to gather the requirements independently and write them all down; it’s a joint activity of the team that allows everyone to contribute, challenge and understand what’s needed. And just as importantly, why.

XP (eXtreme Programming) breaks requirements down into small bite-size pieces called User Stories. These are fundamentally similar to Use Cases but are lightweight and more simplistic in their nature.

An Agile Development team (including a key user or product owner from the business) visualises requirements in whiteboarding sessions and creates storyboards (sequences of screen shots, visuals, sketches or wireframes) to show roughly how the solution will look and how the user’s interaction will flow in the solution. There is no lengthy requirements document or specification unless there is an area of complexity that really warrants it. Otherwise the storyboards are just annotated and only where necessary.

A common approach amongst Agile Development teams is to represent each requirement, use case or user story, on a card and use a T-card system to allow stories to be moved around easily as the user/business representative on the project adjusts priorities.

Requirements are broken down into very small pieces in order to achieve this; and actually the fact it’s going on a card forces it to be broken down small. The advantage this has over lengthy documentation is that it's extremely visual and tangible; you can stand around the T-card system and whiteboard discussing progress, issues and priorities.

The timeframe of an Agile Development is fixed, whereas the features are variable. Should it be necessary to change priority or add new requirements into the project, the user/business representative physically has to remove a comparable amount of work from scope before they can place the new card into the project.

This is a big contrast to a common situation where the business owner sends numerous new and changed requirements by email and/or verbally, somehow expecting the new and existing features to still be delivered in the original timeframes. Traditional project teams that don't control changes can end up with the dreaded scope creep, one of the most common reasons for software development projects to fail.

Agile teams, by contrast, accept change; in fact they expect it. But they manage change by fixing the timescales and trading-off features.

Cards can of course be backed up by documentation as appropriate, but always the principle of agile development is to document the bare minimum amount of information that will allow a feature to be developed, and always broken down into very small units.

Using the Scrum agile management practice, requirements (or features or stories, whatever language you prefer to use) are broken down into tasks of no more than 16 hours (i.e. 2 working days) and preferably no more than 8 hours, so progress can be measured objectively on a daily basis.

One thing I think should certainly be adopted from PRINCE2, the very non-agile project management methodology, is the idea of making sure all items are deliverables rather than activities or tasks. You can see a deliverable and “kick the tyres”, in order to judge its quality and completeness. A task you cannot.

See also:
10 Key Principles of Agile Development
What are User Stories
Writing Good User Stories

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In Agile Development, requirements evolve, but timescales are fixed.

This is in stark contrast to a traditional development project, where one of the earliest goals is to capture all known requirements and baseline the scope so that any other changes are subject to change control.

Traditionally, users are educated that it’s much more expensive to change or add requirements during or after the software is built. Some organisations quote some impressive statistics designed to frighten users into freezing the scope. The result: It becomes imperative to include everything they can think of – in fact everything they ever dreamed of! And what’s more, it’s all important for the first release, because we all know Phase 2’s are invariably hard to get approved once 80% of the benefits have been realised from Phase 1.

Ironically, users may actually use only a tiny proportion of any software product, perhaps as low as 20% or less, yet many projects start life with a bloated scope. In part, this is because no-one is really sure at the outset which 20% of the product their users will actually use. Equally, even if the requirements are carefully analysed and prioritised, it is impossible to think of everything, things change, and things are understood differently by different people.

Agile Development works on a completely different premise. Agile Development works on the premise that requirements emerge and evolve, and that however much analysis and design you do, this will always be the case because you cannot really know for sure what you want until you see and use the software. And in the time you would have spent analysing and reviewing requirements and designing a solution, external conditions could also have changed.

So if you believe that point – that no-one can really know what the right solution is at the outset when the requirements are written – it’s inherently difficult, perhaps even practically impossible, to build the right solution using a traditional approach to software development.

Traditional projects fight change, with change control processes designed to minimise and resist change wherever possible. By contrast, Agile Development projects accept change; in fact they expect it. Because the only thing that’s certain in life is change.

There are different mechanisms in Agile Development to handle this reality. In Agile Development projects, requirements are allowed to evolve, but the timescale is fixed. So to include a new requirement, or to change a requirement, the user or product owner must remove a comparable amount of work from the project in order to accommodate the change.

This ensures the team can remain focused on the agreed timescale, and allows the product to evolve into the right solution. It does, however, also pre-suppose that there’s enough non-mandatory features included in the original timeframes to allow these trade-off decisions to occur without fundamentally compromising the end product.

So what does the business expect from its development teams? Deliver the agreed business requirements, on time and within budget, and of course to an acceptable quality. All software development professionals will be well aware that you cannot realistically fix all of these factors and expect to meet expectations. Something must be variable in order for the project to succeed. In Agile Development, it is always the scope (or features of the product) that are variable, not the cost and timescale.

Although the scope of an Agile Development project is variable, it is acknowledged that only a fraction of any product is really used by its users and therefore that not all features of a product are really essential. For this philosophy to work, it’s imperative to start development (dependencies permitting) with the core, highest priority features, making sure they are delivered in the earliest iterations.

Unlike most traditional software development projects, the result is that the business has a fixed budget, based on the resources it can afford to invest in the project, and can make plans based on a launch date that is certain.

See also:
10 Key Principles of Agile Development

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An Agile Development project team must include all the necessary team members to make decisions, and make them on a timely basis.

Active user involvement is one of the key principles to enable this, so the user or user representative from the business must be closely involved on a daily basis.

The project team must be empowered to make decisions in order to ensure that it is their responsibility to deliver the product and that they have complete ownership. Any interference with the project team is disruptive and reduces their motivation to deliver.

The team must establish and clarify the requirements together, prioritise them together, agree to the tasks required to deliver them together, and estimate the effort involved together.

It may seem expedient to skip this level of team involvement at the beginning. It’s tempting to get a subset of the team to do this (maybe just the product owner and analyst), because it’s much more efficient. Somehow we’ve all been trained over the years that we must be 100% efficient (or more!) and having the whole team involved in these kick-off steps seems a very expensive way to do things.

However this is a key principle for me. It ensures the buy-in and commitment from the entire project team from the outset; something that later pays dividends. When challenges arise throughout the project, the team feels a real sense of ownership. And then it's doesn't seem so expensive.

See also:
10 Key Principles of Agile Development

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In my book, active user involvement is the first principle of Agile Development.

It's not always possible to have users directly involved in development projects, particularly if the Agile Development project is to build a product where the real end users will be external customers or consumers.

In this event it is imperative to have a senior and experienced user representative involved throughout.

Not convinced? Here's 16 reasons why!

• Requirements are clearly communicated and understood (at a high level) at the outset
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• Requirements are prioritised appropriately based on the needs of the user and market
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• Requirements can be clarified on a daily basis with the entire project team, rather than resorting to lengthy documents that aren't read or are misunderstood
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• Emerging requirements can be factored into the development schedule as appropriate with the impact and trade-off decisions clearly understood
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• The right product is delivered
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• As iterations of the product are delivered, that the product meets user expectations
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• The product is more intuitive and easy to use
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• The user/business is seen to be interested in the development on a daily basis
  
• The user/business sees the commitment of the team
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• Developers are accountable, sharing progress openly with the user/business every day
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• There is complete transparency as there is nothing to hide
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• The user/business shares responsibility for issues arising in development; it’s not a customer-supplier relationship but a joint team effort
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• Timely decisions can be made, about features, priorities, issues, and when the product is ready
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• Responsibility is shared; the team is responsible together for delivery of the product
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• Individuals are accountable, reporting for themselves in daily updates that involve the user/business
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• When the going gets tough, the whole team - business and technical - work together!

See also:
10 Key Principles of Agile Development

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Agile Software Development is one of the big buzzwords of the software development industry. But what exactly is it? Agile Development is a different way of managing software development projects. 10 Key Principles, and how Agile Development fundamentally differs from a more traditional Waterfall approach to software development, are as follows:

1. Active user involvement is imperative
2. The team must be empowered to make decisions
3. Requirements evolve but the timescale is fixed
4. Capture requirements at a high level; lightweight & visual
5. Develop small, incremental releases and iterate
6. Focus on frequent delivery of products
7. Complete each feature before moving on to the next
8. Apply the 80/20 rule
9. Testing is integrated throughout the project lifecycle – test early and often
10. A collaborative & cooperative approach between all stakeholders is essential

There are various methodologies and standards that address various aspects of software development, for instance PRINCE2 for Project Management, Use Cases/UML for Analysis and Design, ISEB for Testing. Although these are typically applied to Waterfall development projects, elements of these methods can also be applied in an Agile Development approach.

There are also methods that are specifically designed around Agile Development:

DSDM is probably the original Agile Development method. DSDM was around before the term Agile Development was even invented, but is absolutely based on all the principles we’ve come to know as Agile Development.

SCRUM is also an Agile Development method, which concentrates particularly on how to manage tasks within a team-based development environment.

XP (eXtreme Programming) is a more radical Agile methodology, focusing on the software development process and addressing the analysis, development and test phases with novel approaches aimed at making a substantial difference to the quality of the end product.

DSDM is probably the most complete Agile methodology, whereas SCRUM and XP are easier to implement and complementary because they tackle different aspects of development projects and are both founded on the same principles of Agile Development.

In reality, there is no magic bullet for software development. The real trick is to know lots of techniques from various Waterfall and Agile Development methods, and to select a mixture of the best approaches that are most appropriate for any given situation. To do this reliably with any degree of success really requires a lot of experience and skill.

In Agile Development projects, Project Management takes a slightly different form, relying more on the project manager's skills in communication, facilitation, coordination, and emphasising less on planning and control.

Agile Development can be a very exciting and invigorating approach, although some projects suit Agile Development more than others. The collaboration and visibility can provide a much richer and more rewarding experience for teams to develop great software products. Agile Development can be a lot more enjoyable than the staid Waterfall approach that requires lots more documentation and is less flexible by its nature. And when people enjoy their work, it’s amazing what they can achieve!

See also:
10 Key Principles - PowerPoint Presentation

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