Agile development

[MoelyCrio]

Just been offered a new role as a Business Analyst.

I've been in similar roles for a number of years, but always in more structured environments, particularly with fixed price contracts.

Agile is fairly new to me, and the new place use it quite a lot.

They're happy with my lack of Agile experience as I make up for it in other ways, but I would like to get a head start with some reading.

So, can people recommend and books/online resources that would be useful for someone in my position.

Any other tips/comments welcome too!

[mr_spock]

I'm sure there are books etc. I tend to think of it like this:

There are three aspects to any development project: scope/deliverables, time, resource/cost. You can fix two of these, but not all three (generally). Waterfall tries to fix all three, and regularly fails at least one. Agile fixes time and resource, but flexes the scope on each sprint (or dev cycle). Typical sprint durations in web projects are a month or 6 weeks. I'm not a big fan of Agile - I tend to prefer RAD, delivering prototypes against a scope of business goals rather than specific functionalities, but it really depends on the project and culture in the organisations.

[Autopilot]

I sat the Agile exams last year, it's pretty simple stuff. The hardest part of Agile is getting an organisation to adopt and fully support the methodology.

As irritating as this video is, it does illustrate Agile quite well - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4u5N00ApR_k

[aspender]

If they are doing things right, the organisation you are looking to join will be using a set of agile techniques that work for their size/deliverables and various other factors. Agile isn't a process - it is a set of tools (e.g. CI/devops type tools), techniques and process-like things which should be picked from according to your needs.

Your best bet is to try and get some more info on what they are actually doing. Scrum or Kanban, how they estimate, what level of 'ceremony' they have etc. A *lot* of places will say they are agile and all it amounts to is that they claim to do iterations but in reality deliver a product once a year and are really waterfall.

Otherwise, obvious starting places are:

Agile Manifesto: http://agilemanifesto.org,
Cockburn's book: http://www.amazon.co.uk/Agile-Software-Development...

Another good resource is a site that two of the best agile practicioners I've worked with maintain (along with the podcasts): http://itkanban.com

[Simbu]

mr_spock said:

I'm sure there are books etc. I tend to think of it like this:

There are three aspects to any development project: scope/deliverables, time, resource/cost. You can fix two of these, but not all three (generally). Waterfall tries to fix all three, and regularly fails at least one. Agile fixes time and resource, but flexes the scope on each sprint (or dev cycle). Typical sprint durations in web projects are a month or 6 weeks. I'm not a big fan of Agile - I tend to prefer RAD, delivering prototypes against a scope of business goals rather than specific functionalities, but it really depends on the project and culture in the organisations.

We do agile at work, we have 2 week sprints and if our product owner wants to change anything during this time, we agree to sacrifice something else in that sprint's work queue. The result is that we rarely get the 'scope creep' or last-minute shoehorning of extra work into a sprint.