I recently attend an AGILE 101 meetup. The second exercise of the evening was to work out an agile life cycle. The goal for the coordinators appeared to be for the attendees to redraw the AGILE life cycle, which is about project management rather than agile thinking processes of analyst/designers/programmers/developers.
Is there a need to consider analyst/designers/programmers/developers' views of the development life cycle as part of their approach to what they do?
Agile followers are often against Project Management. This is because classical Project Management is very often anti-agile. However, without good project management even agile projects fail. Nevertheless, the style of project management has to be adapted to agile projects. In planning, for example, we cannot plan everything beforehand. Rather, try roll-wave planning in which the whole project is planned at a high level and the plan is updated as we go along.
I would argue that the agile life cycle is not another method of project management but that doesn't mean there is no project management. The agile life cycle with its practices, values, and iterations is about a way of completing the work. Using a bulldozer to move soil isn't seen as project management by civil engineers. However, identifying the task and adding it to the work schedule is project management.
Things like post it notes of user stories on a white board that show tasks in waiting, tasks, being worked on, and completed are about project management. Iteration and release planning are about project management.
Dear Ilona,
A good question. From my experience, there is no difference between the "classic" and the agile life cycle. The difference is, actually, in the way methods are selected and applied in the software projects. In the context of process design and process improvement, we often see clients demanding more agility. However, often the "old" process framework is good enough - it just needs some add-ons in the particular methods and a bit more guidance regarding the process tailoring. The good thing is that most of the stuff is already in the mindset of the companies (usually reflected by the differences between defined and actual process), and, thus, respective changes are usually well accepted by (almost) all stakeholders. Nevertheless, we could also find something interesting: As soon as companies going for comprehensive tool support, especially in the context of global software development, processes and practices become more "classic" (cf. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/262158689_Experiences_from_the_Design_of_an_Artifact_Model_for_Distributed_Agile_Project_Management).
Summarized: Personally, I don't see much difference. As often, it is in the eyes of the beholder. From a pragmatic point of view, life cycle is always somewhat directed, and, thus, the life cycle is neither "classic" nor agile. I think the clue is the way, how companies (and team) implement their processes in projects (for this, see the really good book by Münch et al.: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/258865356_Software_Process_Definition_and_Management?ev=prf_pub)
Conference Paper Experiences from the Design of an Artifact Model for Distrib...
Book Software Process Definition and Management
Hi Ilona,
Agile is not a project management approach, it is a practice philosophy as it may entail multiple methodologies (XP/Scrum etc). In Agile, documentation is minimal, programming is given more priority and iterations are rushed through. While other project management approaches (Spiral) offer iterative approach to project management, they don't have detailed area of focus that Agile has (waterfalls like PMBoK are dinosaurs). It is good for development of software that is required to evolve but be in use over each working release, so this approach depends on the goals of the development initiative.
PMBoK or CMM (though this is more of a benchmark) can be used in conjunction with Agile mediated by an MDA approach, but to truly use Agile, you need very very experienced practitioners who organize micro-level development goals well, allocate resources for each individual iteration and can work with minimal documentation and an equally spread weight of responsibility. Basically very experienced developers prefer Agile.
It is not a project management approach. It is more aligned towards development philosophy.
AGILE is a philosophy, which may help you to do better project management, whether it's software development or anything else.
AGILE is more than a philosophy, is a method of development. Originally with had the full development life cycle that was/is very rigid. Once a project was approved and given a go ahead, no modifications were allowed until the project was completed; and that could be in two or three years time. Agile is different, were short cycles are part of the process and deliveries are completed on a regular basis of smaller portions of the project. I found this image a couple of week ego about the differences between the two methodologies, Waterfall and AGILE.
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