Agile Methodology

[Ariel]

What Is Agile?

Agile methodology is an alternative to traditional project management, typically used in software development. It helps teams respond to unpredictability through incremental, iterative work cadences, known as sprints. Agile methodologies are an alternative to waterfall, or traditional sequential development.

Why Agile?

Agile development methodology provides opportunities to assess the direction of a project throughout the development lifecycle. This is achieved through regular cadences of work, known as sprints or iterations, at the end of which teams must present a potentially shippable product increment. By focusing on the repetition of abbreviated work cycles as well as the functional product they yield, agile methodology is described as “iterative” and “incremental.” In waterfall, development teams only have one chance to get each aspect of a project right. In an agile paradigm, every aspect of development — requirements, design, etc. — is continually revisited throughout the lifecycle. When a team stops and re-evaluates the direction of a project every two weeks, there’s always time to steer it in another direction.

The results of this “inspect-and-adapt” approach to development greatly reduce both development costs and time to market. Because teams can develop software at the same time they’re gathering requirements, the phenomenon known as “analysis paralysis” is less likely to impede a team from making progress. And because a team’s work cycle is limited to two weeks, it gives stakeholders recurring opportunities to calibrate releases for success in the real world. Agile development methodology helps companies build the right product. Instead of committing to market a piece of software that hasn’t even been written yet, agile empowers teams to continuously replan their release to optimize its value throughout development, allowing them to be as competitive as possible in the marketplace. Development using an agile methodology preserves a product’s critical market relevance and ensures a team’s work doesn’t wind up on a shelf, never released.

taken from agilemethodology.org

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Agile principles

The Agile Manifesto is based on twelve principles:[15]

Customer satisfaction by early and continuous delivery of valuable software
Welcome changing requirements, even in late development
Working software is delivered frequently (weeks rather than months)
Close, daily cooperation between business people and developers
Projects are built around motivated individuals, who should be trusted
Face-to-face conversation is the best form of communication (co-location)
Working software is the principal measure of progress
Sustainable development, able to maintain a constant pace
Continuous attention to technical excellence and good design
Simplicity—the art of maximizing the amount of work not done—is essential
Best architectures, requirements, and designs emerge from self-organizing teams
Regularly, the team reflects on how to become more effective, and adjusts accordingly

Relationship to DevOps

Because both DevOps and Agile principles embody many Lean philosophies, including collaboration and communication, their meanings are often conflated; in reality they are two different concepts. Organizations that adopted agile development began to see a higher quantities of releases; with this, Continuous delivery and DevOps were born. [19] Agile represents a change in thinking, whereas DevOps implements actual organizational cultural change. One DevOps goal is to establish an environment where releasing more reliable applications faster and more frequently can occur. [20] DevOps practitioners are utilizing resources such as application release automation and Infrastructure as code tools to help advance these goals and adopt software development best practices, including agile principles. [21]
Iterative, incremental and evolutionary

Most agile development methods break the tasks into small increments with minimal planning and do not directly involve long-term planning. Iterations are short time frames (timeboxes) that typically last from one to four weeks. Each iteration involves a cross-functional team working in all functions: planning, requirements analysis, design, coding, unit testing, and acceptance testing. At the end of the iteration a working product is demonstrated to stakeholders. This minimizes overall risk and allows the project to adapt to changes quickly.[22] An iteration might not add enough functionality to warrant a market release, but the goal is to have an available release (with minimal bugs) at the end of each iteration.[23] Multiple iterations might be required to release a product or new features.

Working software is the primary measure of progress.
Efficient and face-to-face communication

No matter what development disciplines are required, each agile team should include a customer representative (product owner in scrum). This person is appointed by stakeholders to act on their behalf[24] and makes a personal commitment to being available for developers to answer mid-iteration questions. At the end of each iteration, stakeholders and the customer representative review progress and re-evaluate priorities with a view to optimizing the return on investment (ROI) and ensuring alignment with customer needs and company goals.

In agile software development, an information radiator is a (normally large) physical display located prominently in an office, where passers-by can see it. It presents an up-to-date summary of the status of a software project or other product.[25][26] The name was coined by Alistair Cockburn, and described in his 2002 book Agile Software Development.[26] A build light indicator may be used to inform a team about the current status of their project.
Very short feedback loop and adaptation cycle

A common characteristic in agile is the daily "stand-up", also known as the daily scrum. In a brief session, team members report to each other what they did the previous day toward their team's sprint goal, what they intend to do today toward their team's sprint goal, and any roadblocks or impediments they can see to their team's sprint goal.[27]
Quality focus

Specific tools and techniques, such as continuous integration, automated unit testing, pair programming, test-driven development, design patterns, domain-driven design, code refactoring and other techniques are often used to improve quality and enhance project agility.[28]

Applications outside software development
Agile Brazil 2014 conference

Agile methods have been extensively used for development of software products and some of them use certain characteristics of software, such as object technologies.[104] However, these techniques can be applied to the development of non-software products, such as computers, motor vehicles,[105] medical devices, food, clothing, and music;[106] see Flexible product development. Some of the wider principles of agile have also found application in general management[107] (e.g., strategy, governance, risk, finance) under the terms business agility or Agile Business Management.

Under an Agile Business Management model, agile techniques, practices, principles and values are expressed across five domains.[108]

Integrated customer engagement - to embed customers within any delivery process to share accountability for product/service delivery.
Facilitation-based management - adopting agile management models, like the role of Scrum Master, to facilitate the day-to-day operation of teams.
Agile work practices - adopting specific iterative and incremental work practices such as Scrum, Kanban, Test-Driven Development or Feature-Driven Development across all business functions (from Sales, Human Resources, Finance[109] and Marketing).
An enabling organisational structure - with a focus on staff engagement, personal autonomy and outcomes based governance.
An education model the blends agile practices and philosophies to create micro-schools that emphasize collaborative culture creation and self-directed learning.

Agile development paradigms can be used in other areas of life such as raising children. Its success in child development might be founded on some basic management principles; communication, adaptation and awareness. Bruce Feiler has claimed that the basic Agile Development paradigms can be applied to household management and raising children. In his TED Talk, "Agile programming -- for your family", these paradigms brought significant changes to his household environment, such as the kids doing dishes, taking out the trash, and decreasing his children's emotional outbreaks, which inadvertently increased their emotional stability.

taken from Wikipedia

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so do you guys want to adopt this methodology to our project?
we can give goals for every 3 weeks to each member in the team, data can be done at the same time with some cheap made sprites and then we can re work on them just so the data can be ready at the same time and if we would need any change in the data for example as for more frames in some attack this can be done later but just edit what we already got

please tell me your thoughts ^_^

[Memento]

Before anything, I think we should rate our own level of motivation, from 1 (no motivation at all) to 10 (I want to do EVERYTHING). 6 being (I'm okay with doing some stuff for the mod).

Without motivation, not any structure is going to work, except when we'd get paid for it or we'd be forced to do it by some dictator

[Simoneon]

I WAS ELECTED BY THE MAJORITY TO BE YOUR DICKTATOR, PLEASE BOW. AND NOW I FORCE YOU TO FINISH THIS MOD UPON MY SUPERVISION. WE WILL START WITH RELEASING THE DEMO. PLEASE, THANK YOU, YOU'RE WELCOME.

Silverthorn edited this post 04-27-2016 07:38 PM because:

Do not disappoint me.

[Jahvansi]

didnt read this thing yet, is it a program/website?sounds good

anyway ,motivation is 7 yey
when the dictator says so why not >-<

[Memento]

For me it's a 6 at the moment, which is actually pretty good, as it was around 1-3/10 for months

However, I will only continue this mod if we get a second person to lead this project. Simoneon? :')


Edit: @Simoneon haha no man, I was just kidding. Nobody wants to be lead by a dictator

Simoneon edited this post 04-10-2016 08:08 AM because:

oh sh*t, you're serious? all I can do is just tell you to do things and that's it :// how is that "leading"?