Some people in China may not believe in Agile because of the level of staff and communication problems, but it has to be admitted that the use of Agile methods has changed the information technology industry abroad. According to foreign statistics, nearly 71% of organizations regularly use Agile methods to operate. Another study showed that agile projects had a 28% higher success rate than traditional projects. This also shows why agile is more popular in product development.
So what exactly is Agile?
By one definition, Agile is a project management approach consisting of small development cycles (sprints) that focus on continuous improvement of the product. A sprint is a predetermined time frame during which the team should complete a specific task. Each sprint usually ends with a review, where people review their performance and discuss ways to improve their work.
Agile advocates updating the product bit by bit through successive iterations. This is in contrast to the Waterfall approach, which uses a step-by-step technique for product development, agile focuses more on the flexibility brought by continuous updating throughout the process.
Agile, of course, is a general term for a number of frameworks and leading framework practices. You may have heard of some of the most famous Agile project management frameworks, such as Scrum, Kanban, Lean, and EXTREME Programming (XP).
That’s all we have to say about the concepts. Before sharing agile best practices, let’s take a look at some practices for effective agile project management.
Implement some agile project management practices
Iterative development With agile iterative development, larger projects are broken down into smaller pieces to be developed, tested, and iterated periodically. Through this practice, agile teams can learn about new features that need to be added to the final product and help develop the product more flexibly.
2. Daily Meetings Regular meetings are key to agile implementation. Meetings should be short and concise, and each member of the team should clearly state the progress of the task and what needs to be done. This is a good way to check your team’s productivity and see if there are obstacles in the way your product is developed.
3. Use professional Tools Using project management tools to implement Agile can help teams better structure workflows and improve team collaboration. For better document and meeting management, professional project management software can greatly reduce the workload of administrative tasks.
PingCode is a project management tool you can easily use. Is a comprehensive software package with many smart features that flexibly support the various agile project management scenarios you need.
Now, let’s look at some of the more popular agile practices.
Agile Best Practices: Scrum project management
Scrum is considered the dominant Agile framework, with statistics showing that 58% of organizations implement Scrum in product development and 18% use it in combination with other frameworks.
Some agile best practices implemented by Scrum:
1. Co-create product to-do lists and product visions
A product backlog is an ordered list of items that are added to product development. A good habit that Scrum implements is to work together to create a product backlog and a product vision that keeps the development team and stakeholders focused. This ensures mutual understanding and helps to better align the vision.
2. Sprint with burnout chart
A daily burn chart is a good way to monitor Sprint progress. Burnout charts graphically show the work completed and the total amount of work remaining. With this tool, the team can be notified of the progress of the project and informed of any delays that may occur. These charts also help to identify the risk of delay for undelivered work.
3. Develop guidelines for team communication
Continuous communication is key to the Scrum framework and can become a bottleneck if not addressed effectively. One effective way to ensure seamless communication is to develop a communication strategy for the team. This particular approach is really useful for remote teams because it makes team goals transparent.
4. Have a stand meeting
A standup is a short daily meeting of team members, also known as the Daily Scrum, that usually lasts up to 15 minutes. Hosting for a product or project can be a great way to monitor work progress and help everyone keep up to date with the project. The site also helps the team track the success or failure of product development.
Agile best Practices: Kanban project management
The Kanban method developed in Japan uses colored cards to control the demand and supply of materials in production lines. Later, it was used for other workflows, such as “not started,” “In progress,” and “Done,” in the form of cards for task to-do lists
To successfully implement Kanban, the following Agile best practices can be adopted:
1. Visualize the workflow
Visual workflows in the form of kanban and cards that show the progress status of each task are an easy way to track tasks and point out obstacles in the product development cycle. These cards can usually be dragged and dropped from one pane to another to show the progress of the task.
2. Limit work in progress
Fixed work in progress to limit the total number of cards in the activity pane to help the team understand what needs to be done in a given time. By limiting outstanding work, the problem of constantly reprioritizing tasks is solved and bottlenecks are identified more effectively.
3. Give constant feedback
Continuous feedback from team members is critical to understanding how the team is progressing throughout the process. Feedback helps identify obstacles that may occur during the product development cycle and reflects areas for improvement.
4. Focus on process
Following the flow of work projects helps the team keep an eye on the overall progress of their work so they know if they need to speed things up. This helps the team improve the speed and fluency of delivery.
The essence of lean project management is to apply lean production principles to the project management process. These principles focus primarily on eliminating waste and areas that do not add value to work.
Some successful lean project management practices are as follows:
1. Identify the value of each task by carefully breaking down complex projects into smaller tasks and subtasks. This will provide a better understanding of the workflow and help identify some unnecessary tasks that need to be eliminated, thus adding more value to the workflow.
2. Reduce waste From a project management perspective, reducing waste means eliminating tasks, meetings, or documents that do not add value to the overall product development. This elimination provides clear direction for team members and contributes to the actual value-added process.
Continuous improvement In order to successfully implement lean project management, continuous improvement will be required throughout the project development process. One way to achieve improvement is to clearly communicate requirements and guidelines to team members to achieve more with less waste.
Extreme programming (xp)
The Extreme Programming (XP) framework for Agile Project management is used to develop higher-quality software while increasing developer productivity and determining the best ways to collaborate on code.
Notable Agile best practices related to XP:
1. Planning All members of the game team should meet and participate in the planning process. There should be no ambiguity between team members on certain projects. Meetings can be held at regular intervals to update and monitor progress accordingly.
2. Test-driven development tests to check the functionality of individual pieces of code before the final code. This helps the programmer deal with situations where the code might fail. It also helps reduce defects and save time in developing software.
3. Minor Releases Based on a similar iteration principle, this concept focuses on minor releases throughout the product development lifecycle. This practice helps the entire team understand product trends and identify potential breakdowns during the product development cycle.
4. Simple Design Simple design of software takes less writing time and requires minimal effort to solve problems. It also helps reduce the overall cost of developing the product and paves the way for team members to find easier ways to get work done.
So, as you can see, these Agile best practices are basically multiple choices. The secret to adopting “best” practices is to better understand your business and team needs, and then use the project management tool PingCode to address those needs accordingly
It was written by Fred Wilson
Translation | Mr Zhang