Agile Project Management – Part 2: Principles

Agile principles, alongside agile practices, form an important foundation of the Scrum method. They build on the overview of agile project management. We divide the principles into organizational and technical agile principles, which are essentially derived from the “Agile Manifesto”. The agile principles are derived from the agile values.

Organizational Principles

Self-Organizing Teams

Scrum calls for “self-organizing teams” and requires that traditional managers largely stay out of the development production cycle. The team is given as much autonomy as possible, and communication takes place on an equal footing. The expertise of team members is utilized, and their opinions, assessments, and input are taken seriously.

Change Is the Rule, Not the Exception

Scrum assumes that the customer often does not know, or cannot know, what they truly need. Therefore, it is assumed that the customer’s requirements and expectations will change over the course of the project. Requirements are only frozen for the duration of a “sprint,” i.e., for one development cycle.

The Customer Is Closely Involved in the Development Process

Customers are involved early in the development process. They are presented with completed solutions at short intervals. The customer can then quickly provide feedback on whether the solution meets their expectations.

Avoiding Overtime

Scrum aims to prevent the situation where a promised delivery date is met through overtime at the end of a project. Scrum’s proposed solution is straightforward: the deadline is kept, but the delivered scope of features is reduced if necessary. However, this solution is not always possible, especially when a certain set of functionality must be delivered by a specific date. Overtime often results from unforeseeable disruptions or from effort estimation errors. Experienced managers therefore plan with buffers rather than overtime.

Minimizing Development Effort

Scrum requires that only what is necessary is implemented, based on the assumption that users only utilize a fraction of the features a system provides. To keep development effort low, Scrum focuses on creating tests and software code and invests little time in working out requirements and design.

Technical Principles

Iterative Development in Short Cycles

Scrum divides the software production process into phases of equal length, roughly one to four weeks, called “sprints.” After each sprint, a working product increment should have been created that the customer can review and provide feedback on. This approach is intended to avoid misdevelopment and better meet customer expectations. During a cycle, requirements may not be changed.

Automated Tests Are a Key Element

Among the most important agile principles in Scrum are executable tests. The focus of testing is on so-called “unit tests,” which verify individual modules or classes. Regression tests are used to prevent bugs from being introduced into already working software modules when code is changed. No new software should be developed as long as existing tests still show errors.

Write Tests First

The idea is to create the corresponding test cases before developing a feature and to include them in the regression test suite. This approach encourages thinking about how to demonstrate that requirements have been implemented and thus supports the requirements engineering process. Writing tests first is therefore a helpful principle.

Scenario-Based Requirements

Scrum questions whether requirements can be compiled in advance on a larger scale. However, it is impossible to develop something without having documented what it should be. Therefore, in Scrum, requirements are documented in the form of “user stories” or “epics.” User stories are typically scenario descriptions. Describing requirements in the form of scenarios is particularly effective where a large part of the functionality is visible at the user interface. The scenario method has a significant advantage over other methods: it is easy to derive the corresponding test cases from the scenarios.

Agile Principles in Practice

Agile principles are supported in practice by appropriate project management tools and agile project management software as well as continuous integration tools. The first category includes, for example, the project management software Allegra, and the second includes Gitlab. The agility in the process unfortunately comes with some disadvantages. Agile project management has some problems with scaling, and some agile principles and values must be abandoned in favor of better scalability and a functioning project organization. The guiding principles laid out in the Agile Manifesto are therefore only adopted in many organizations to the extent that proves useful in practice.

Further Information

If you’re interested, you can learn here how your team organizes itself. Also read our articles on Scrum roles and Scrum artifacts as well as on the Kanban board and the comparison Agile vs. Waterfall.