Priyank Verma

Agile For Dummies

Here we go for the 2nd time. My 2nd book for 2015’s 10 book reading challenge is Agile For Dummies.

As I wrote in my previous post I am going to avoid fiction and love stories, but focus more on technical and personal improvement books.

By the time I wrote this post I was in Bangalore for software engineer internship at HealthGraph India. There we were using agile methodology (scrum) for our project. So I decided my next book will be to gain proper knowledge of Agile Development.

This book is nice if you have no prior knowledge of what agile is. If you are little familiar with it, this book will seem little slow.

Here are 10 fundamental take aways from the book about agile :

1. Need of Agile. Why choose Agile over conventional methods of development.?Simple answer. Agile is more flexible and adaptive to changes then any other development methodology.
2. Agile is theory based on divide and conquer. Scrum is practical implementation. It has its own components like sprints, backlogs etc to put Agile in practice.
3. Roles of scrum master, product owner and team members. How seasoned developers perform differently when compared to new programmers.
4. How to plan sprints? Set proper goals. Never under estimate or over estimate. Use product backlogs and sprint backlogs.
5. Every team member should be connected and should be preferably collocated.
6. Agile works great with teams of 7 to 12.
7. Teams should be given complete autonomy about their project.
8. Scrum meetings are important and everyone should attend them. 3 questions should be asked to everyone. What you did during last sprint? What you will do in this sprint? Are there any road blocks?
9. We used Trello. Book said CA Agile Vision.
10. Most importantly. Developers should be committed to project and ready to take ownership of their work.

It was a great reading. I learned a lot about how Agile works and what should be my roles to be a good team member. I try to deliver the same at my work.

I started 3 rd book. The passionate programmer. Will write about it soon. Best use of 2 hour bus travel time. 😀