Are you interested in Agile but not sure where to start?
Do you want better ways to work and want to know about best practices?
As an introduction to the XSCALE pattern languages, Introduction to Agile also provides the key terminology and concepts that lead toward a mastery of team performance, business agility and product management excellence.
Introduction to Agile is about the five questions …
- What do we mean by “Agile” and what is (and isn’t) it?
- What are the benefits of moving to a more agile way of thinking and acting?
- What are the main agile methodologies and what do they offer?
- How can Scrum and Kanban help teams be more effective?
- How to effectively address the issue of Technical Debt?
… that will kick-start your Agile journey.
The Introduction to Agile course is a 1 day condensed, pragmatic, experience-based introduction into the history and practice of “Agile” which can be taken as a standalone course and which also leads into our other XSCALE Certification courses.
Why learn about Agile ?
We are uncovering better ways of delivering business value by doing so and helping others do so. – The Manifesto for Agile Organization
Put simply, “Agile” is a philosophy about managing and accepting change and finding ways to create value sooner and minimise waste. That’s why at finaplana AG, we say Agile is “Quicker, Cheaper and Better”.
Accurate estimates, stable plans, and predictions are often hard to get in early stages, and confidence in them is likely to be low. Our goal is to reduce the “leap-of-faith” that is needed before value can be obtained.
For example, compared to traditional software engineering, agile software development mainly targets complex systems and product development with dynamic, non-deterministic and non-linear characteristics.
Requirements and design are held to be emergent. Detailed up-front specifications create a lot of waste due to changes in scope and requirements and a need for ongoing rework. These basic arguments and previous industry experiences, learned from years of successes and failures, have helped shape agile development’s favor of adaptive, iterative and evolutionary development.
Introduction to Agile is aimed at anyone who is relatively new to the concepts and terminology of “Agile” principles, practices or methodologies and is interested to understand why and how an Agile way of working can improve individual, team and organizational performance and levels of satisfaction.
Introduction to Agile starts with a brief description of the history and development of “Agile” and explains what it means (and doesn’t mean).
Directed by the goals set by participants in each individual session, the course then explains the fundamental principles and terminology before introducing some of the key Agile methodologies and explaining what they provide as well as some potential traps to look out for during adoption.
The Introduction to Agile course is a condensed, pragmatic, experience-based introduction into the history and practice of “Agile” which can be taken as a standalone course and which also leads into three other industry standard XSCALE Agile Certification courses.
- The history of “Agile”
- Why and how Agile is “Quicker, Cheaper and Better”
- The benefits of Agile adoption
- Agile fundamentals – Squads, Sprints and Stories
- The fundamental Agile ceremonies – standups, planning games, reviews and retros
- An introduction to key Agile methods: XP, Kanban, Scrum and Scrumban
- How Scrum and Kanban help teams be more effective
- How and why Technical debt happens, why it is a problem and what to do about it
- Behaviour Driven Design & development (BDD)
- Continuous integration, delivery and deployment
- XSCALE Principles