Agile concepts within Plangle
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This section is about the Agile concepts we support with our plugin.
Agile, Agile practices/tools, Scrum
In case if you were not familiar with the difference between these:
- Agile is a software development approach which means "nothing more" than following some principles described in Agile Manifesto.
- Agile practices and tools are those... well, practices and tools that support (fit well into) the Agile principles (like Stories, estimation Story Points, Continuous Integration, Pair Programming, or Automated testing, etc.)
- this is not a definitive set, if you invent a tool/practice in your own company which supports Agile principles, well, then there you go, you have an Agile practice, don't be shy, other Agile practices and tools are created by guys like you, who wanted to answer questions of the real world
- if you find an Agile practice written somewhere and it just does not fit for the way you work it does not necessarily mean that your way is not Agile. It just means what it means... it just does not fit your company/team/PM style
- these practices are NOT for Agile only and not even necessary invented for Agile (pair programming worked in the 80's as well)
- you can find a great deal of practices and tools in various books, and a great summary of the 11 best books in one. If you have time to read only one book about Agile you should read that one.
- Scrum is "just" a framework which helps you to keep the principles of Agile.
- It is VERY important to understand the framework nature of Scrum!
- Scrum is NOTHING more than a set of Roles, Artifacts and Events written here.
- Scrum does not talk about that you should estimate your Stories in Story Points, also does not talk about Continuous Integration or Pair Programming, or Automated testing, or how to estimate a project, these are all Agile practices.
- Scrum trainer companies usually sell Scrum as a complete solution, but actually it is NOT. It is JUST a framework.
In Scrum trainings the trainers fill the framework with best practices and tools and it is a GOOD thing because it is what a framework is for.
A framework is there to give you a frame which you can use and fill it with your solutions (Agile practices and tools). So trainers are not bad guys, but you have to understand that you are free to shamelessly add/replace tools and practices to your Scrum implementation. - Most of the guys who hate Scrum actually hate those practices and tools that their trainers tried to sell, not Scrum. Scrum is too little, you cannot hate the little ones.
With Plangle we commited ourselves to
- follow Agile principles so we won't accept feature requests which clearly go against these
- support any Agile practices and tools our customers use without claiming we would know better how you should work
- support the Scrum framework... well, there is not much to support here since as you've learned Scrum does not say too much and its sayings are not too relevant in our plugin.
We depend on JIRA Agile which is a very well built and widely used plugin, we re-use its settings and vocabulary but do not obey some of the artificial restrictions, like "Stories can not be estimated while they are in a Sprint"
How do we...?
It is important to highlight here that these are not how you should do things, it is how we do things and how they work for us. However if you are not completely satisfied with your agile tools/practices you may find good ideas here about how to control this chaos called "Software Development".
No, no matter what you have heard until now, Agile is NOT chaotic, Software Development is, Agile is about trying to control it, just like any other project management approaches.
The main point why we prefer Agile over any other methodologies is its dedication to measure progress based on real achievements and giving project forecasts based on real data.
UNDER DEVELOPMENT Start a project planning?
UNDER DEVELOPMENT Create Stories/Epics/Themes
UNDER DEVELOPMENT Estimate our Stories?
UNDER DEVELOPMENT Plan risks?
Give a sales quote
UNDER DEVELOPMENT Start our project?
UNDER DEVELOPMENT Plan our Sprints?
UNDER DEVELOPMENT Work within a Sprint?
UNDER DEVELOPMENT Demo our Sprints?
UNDER DEVELOPMENT Measure our progress?
UNDER DEVELOPMENT Do our Retrospectives?
UNDER DEVELOPMENT Plan our Releases?
UNDER DEVELOPMENT Handle Bugs?
UNDER DEVELOPMENT Handle Change Requests?
UNDER DEVELOPMENT Handle "Technical Stories"?
UNDER DEVELOPMENT Maintain our Stories and Backlog?
UNDER DEVELOPMENT Meet our deadlines?
Want to know more...?
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Disagree on how we do these things?
Well, they work for us, so they are not bad... however we are sure that your methods work as well, so let us know, maybe we can do better using your approach.
Or just comment on this page...
What do we think about...?
Our opinions about things that usually raise debate on forums, books, and actually everywhere.
UNDER DEVELOPMENT Estimating in Story Points vs. estimating in hours
UNDER DEVELOPMENT Using remaining hours as Story measurement units
UNDER DEVELOPMENT Agile vs. "Classic" (Waterfall)
UNDER DEVELOPMENT Scrum vs. Kanban vs. Lean vs. [your favourite agile-like stuff goes here]
UNDER DEVELOPMENT How much details a Story should contain
UNDER DEVELOPMENT Planning Poker and his friends
UNDER DEVELOPMENT Partially completed Stories
UNDER DEVELOPMENT Requirement Specifications
UNDER DEVELOPMENT Agile/Scrum can not meet deadlines
UNDER DEVELOPMENT Agile/Scrum can not give proper estimations about what and when will be ready
UNDER DEVELOPMENT Agile is Chaos
UNDER DEVELOPMENT Agile plans are jokes, MS Project are for serious Project Managers
UNDER DEVELOPMENT Scrum does not work
UNDER DEVELOPMENT Agile pitfalls
UNDER DEVELOPMENT Scrum pitfalls
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