Agile Project Quotes & Sayings

In fact, in an agile project, technical excellence is measured by both capacity to deliver customer value today and create an adaptable product for tomorrow. — Jim Highsmith

Agile Project Management -like its lean development counterparts- streamlines the development process, concentrating on value-adding activities and eliminating overhead and compliance activities. — Jim Highsmith

The Standish Group is an Information Technology organization that assesses risk, cost, return, and value of software projects. Since 1994, they have published the Chaos report that studies software failures and successes. The latest Chaos report recommends agile processes as one of the ten project success factors. (The Standish Group International Inc. 2012) — Gloria J. Miller

Interestingly, Agile's scrum-team approach has its own way of aggregating some execution risk. For example, in a traditional "single task owner" approach, the risk of execution is not aggregated at all, leaving that task owner to add a lot of task-level buffer to self-insure and deliver on his commitment. In contrast, a 5-person scrum team aggregates the risk that any single individual will make slow progress, as the other four team members can often make up the deficit.

But why aggregate only up to the scrum-team level? Taking a lesson from the insurance industry, the more that risk can be aggregated, the easier it is to manage. Applied to projects, this will nearly always mean that it's better to aggregate risk at the project level. As a result, an Agile project can improve speed by avoiding sprint-level commitments. — Michael Hannan

In an agile project the team takes care of the tasks and the project leader takes care of the team. — Jim Highsmith

Traditional waterfall methods deliver value at the end of the project, often months or years after the project begins. Agile projects can deliver value quickly and incrementally during the life of the project. Capturing value early and often can significantly improve a project's return on investment, and utilizing iterative, feature-based delivery is the cornerstone practice in making that happen. — Jim Highsmith

Self-organizing teams form the core of APM. They blend freedom and responsibility, flexibility and structure. In the face of inconsistency and ambiguity, the teams strive to consistently deliver on the product vision within the project constraints. Accomplishing this requires teams with a self-organizing structure and self-disciplined individual team members. Building this kind of team is the core of an agile project leader's job. — Jim Highsmith

Focusing on skills, communications, and community allows the project to be more effective and more agile than focusing on processes and plans. — Alistair Cockburn

Agile Project Management focuses on selecting the right skills for project team members and molding them into productive teams. — Jim Highsmith

Many of the high-return projects are high risk, which is why I suggest you forget the idea of looking at risk at all. Manage the risk by using an incremental or, even better, agile approach to the project. Start with your organization's context of what moves the organization ahead instead of risk. — Anonymous

Worse yet is the rejection of upfront requirements. The basic observation is correct: requirements will change, and are hard anyway to capture at the beginning. In no way, however, does it imply the dramatic conclusion that upfront requirements are useless! What it does imply is that requirements should be subject to change, like all other artifacts on the software process.

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The agile advice here is irresponsible and serious software projects should ignore it.The sound practice is to start collecting requirements at the beginning, produce a provisional version prior to engaging in design, and treat the requirements as a living product that undergoes constant adaptation throughout the project. — Bertrand Meyer

Agile Project Management is an execution-biased model, not a planning-and-control-biased model. — Jim Highsmith

The essence of Agile movement, whether in new product development, new service offerings, software applications, or project management, rests on two foundational goals: delivering valuable products to customers and creating working environments in which people look forward to coming to work each day. — Jim Highsmith

The Agile Project Management principles and framework encourage learning and adapting as an integral part of delivering value to customers. — Jim Highsmith

A traditional project manager focuses on following the plan with minimal changes, whereas an agile leader focuses on adapting successfully to inevitable changes. — Jim Highsmith

team factors for agile project success: the dedicated team and the cross-functional team. — Mark C. Layton

The first agile principle in this example is that the team must have the necessary skills to complete the project. Agile is not a silver bullet! If a team does not have the required skills, even agile cannot help it successfully complete projects. The second agile principle here is that the team must be self-organized, highly-trusted, and accountable. — John Stenbeck

Agile project leaders help their team balance at the edge of chaos - some structure, but not too much; adequate documentation, but not too much; some up-front architecture work, but not too much. Finding these balance points is the "art" of agile leadership. — Jim Highsmith

Most literature on the subject of agile methodology... is written from the viewpoint of software developers and programmers, and tends to place its main emphasis on programming techniques and agile project management - testing is usually only mentioned in the guise of unit testing and its associated tools. ...However, unit tests alone are not sufficient and broader-based testing is critical to the success of agile development processes. — Tilo Linz