Agile basics: How to start an Agile project

As a manager and a software engineer, I understand that there is always some customer changes [CR] that should be taken on consideration during the course of the software development process. Also, I know that any customer would like to be involved in the project development process and monitor the progress. That’s why the use of agile-based methodologies take place. In this article, I am going to explain Agile basics.

Agile Basics

According to Wells (2013) Agile methodologies are goals-based and promise to ‘empowers the developers to confidently respond to changing customer requirements, even late in the life cycle.’ (Wells, 2013). In a project management environment, it is all about delivering a quality product/service while meeting the estimated deadlines and cost.

The core idea of agile-based project management methodologies – such as eXtreme Programming (XP) –  is to have work items – or User Stories – collected and prioritized according to its value/priority to the customer and placed into a table called Product Backlog. Work items are the components of the project that should be delivered incrementally until the project is completed, e.g. A login page, product details page, etc … .

I’ve got all work items covered, what’s next?

Next, the project timeline will be  divided into a series of 1 or 2 weeks periods,  also known as Sprints or Iterations. By the end of every iteration, a team meeting is held with the customer – A.K.A Product Owner – to check the deliverables from the ended iteration, and define what to be done in the next one. If this is the first time to hear about agile-based methodologies, the official extreme programming website provides a sophisticated details regarding XP processes as one of the most powerful and fully engineered agile-based methodologies.

In Short, agile-based methodologies encourages customer engagement with projects, and promises both managers and customers that they will get the maximum value out of every programming iteration.

At Egyis, we adapt Agile in our projects. If you have a software project and wish to have a professional project management service, contact us and we will be glad to help.