1.6: Overview of Agile Delivery Frameworks - Video Tutorials & Practice Problems

<v ->Nowadays, agile is no longer specific</v> to software delivery or IT management. Customer-centricity, self-organizing teams, iterative delivery with a short feedback loop hearing back from the customer are all essential in delivering value to any customer in any industry. Agile has been adopted by airlines, financial services companies, human capital divisions, leadership teams, and many others. When we talk about agile, we think about iterative delivery of value to customers. We think about the collaboration between business, engineering, and the customer. We think about a short feedback loop to learn directly from the customer and to continuously improve the products that we build or the services that we deliver. We think about teamwork based on optimizing end-to-end delivery flow while empowering people and teams. So, it's important to realize that agile project management is a different mindset. It's not a method. It is a framework, but most importantly, it brings in a mindset of collaboration, value delivery, and continuous improvement via short feedback loop. Agile is a framework. It is not a methodology. So it's referred to sometimes as an umbrella. It unites multiple methods and other frameworks because it is not prescriptive. It gives a lot of opportunities to choose exactly how to execute on iterative and incremental delivery. So let's take a look at those frameworks and methodologies. The most popular one, by far, is called Scrum. The term comes from rugby when all the teams come together to deliver a goal. Scrum is based on timeboxed iterations, usually those at two to four weeks. In those iterations, a team commits to delivering specific functionality, as we call, shippable increment, meaning that this is the feature or technical responsibility that can be delivered directly to the customer. Besides Scrum, a very popular framework is called Kanban. Kanban comes from Japanese and means visual card. It is based on lean principles of stop starting and starting to finish. It is based on the flow-based model. So if you think of the flow, there are specific phases. Let us see. We identify work to be done, and then we identify work in progress, and work that is completed. And then, each task is presented as a visual card on the board. All the cards are sequenced and prioritized. For each of the activities, let us say the number of items to do, we can limit to 10. We have three team members, so the number of items in progress is three, and done. We actually keep everything that is being done for the record. So once a team member is ready, this team member pulls this task in progress. And when they're done, they move it to done and record cycle time, which is time before it was created. Let us say it was created on the first of the month. Then, on the second, it was pulled in, and the work went on until the fifth, and then on the fifth it was delivered. So the cycle time, in this case, is five days. Very easy but very important metric because Kanban is based on the flow. And the measurement is the cycle time from the day the work was started to the time the work was complete. So that's Kanban. Another popular framework is XP programming. So XP stands for extreme programming, and it uses a lot of advanced software programming techniques, such as TDD, which is test-driven delivery where first, a test is created. And obviously, it does not pass because then the development is done and then it passes. It means that quality is write-in. You write test before you actually deliver the work. It has other useful techniques, such as pair programming, and pair programming means that two developers are working together on a single piece of code. It allows for quality, it allows for learning and collaboration, and also, always, there are at least two people who are aware exactly what happens within specific function. Besides that, there is something called Scrumban, and Scrumban is a combination of Scrum and Kanban. And it means that there is also based on short iterations called sprints, similar to Scrum, but also it optimizes for the flow, continuous flow, as... Kanban does it. So this is a hybrid framework. Besides that, there are multiple other frameworks, a lot of proprietary ones. One is Optum Scaled Agile Model, OSAM. One is rational methodology. Another one is feature-driven delivery. Multiple companies implement their own frameworks because, as we said, agile is a framework. It is not prescriptive. And then, different companies and teams can extend it and create their methodologies on the same set of values and principles. Besides all of those, there are scaled agile models, which means if it is not just one team or two, three teams, if it is the whole company, what are the checks and balances we have to have in place? How do we manage dependencies? How do we find objectives at the company-level? For that, there are different scaled agile models. The most popular, by far, is SAFe, Scaled Agile Framework. We will discuss those in lesson seven. Others include LeSS, which is Lightweight Scrum Model of Extending Scrum. It is Lightweight Scrum Development. Other models that exist here include multiple other proprietary models, such as Nexus and Scrum of Scrum, which means that Scrum is extended at the company level. If a team has Scrum, then company has Scrum of Scrums, and so forth. So this is Scrum and Scale. And one more is Disciplined Agile Delivery. That takes a lot of concepts from XP and... establishes those at the company-level. In this course, we will discuss agile frameworks through the prism of software delivery and IT services from two points of view. The first one is building the right product. Software product engineering principles and IT service delivery. How do we find out what product the customer needs, and how do we build it to serve the customer needs and solve customer problem? The second one is building the product right. How do we deliver the product fast and incrementally to provide value to the customer? Throughout lessons two through five, we will talk about building the right product and then move to building the product right.