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Customer and Management Practices
You can divide agile practices roughly into 1) customer and management practices,
which address agile requirements analysis, planning and project management, and 2) programmer
practices, which address how to work with the code in an agile way. Most of the agile methods
focus primarily on customer and management practices.
Planning and Managing the Project
Though specific practices may vary between the different agile methods, there are many common
practices and principles. The most basic management practice common to all agile methods is
to iterate early and regularly. Agile projects have releases of some length, and iterations of
some length. These releases and iterations must be planned. An agile team begins a project by
identifying and prioritizing a superset of features. It then plans a release (roughly) and the
first iteration. From then on, iteration by iteration, the team uses continuous planning to refine
the scope of that release plan as new information is discovered and requirements change. The iteration
plans should also get more and more accurate and precise as the team refines and normalizes its
velocity (the measured work it accomplishes per unit time). So the management practices give
managers and the entire team a better and better sense for exactly which features will be delivered
by the deadline. We've covered a few of these customer and management practices in articles listed
in the menu to the left. A separate menu to the lower left covers Programmer Practices. |
