Summary
Agile teams work together as a team but include roles filled by specific individuals. First is the product owner, who is responsible for the product vision and for prioritizing features the team will work on. Next is the customer, who is the person paying for the project or purchasing the software once it’s available. Users, developers, and managers are other roles on an agile project.
Agile teams work in short, timeboxed iterations that deliver a working product by the end of each iteration. The features developed in these iterations are selected based on the priority to the business. This ensures that the most important features are developed first. User stories are a common way for agile teams to express user needs. Agile teams understand that a plan can rapidly become out of date. Because of this, they adapt their plans as appropriate.
Projects should be viewed as rapidly and reliably generating a flow of useful new capabilities and new knowledge, rather than as just the execution of a series of steps. Projects generate two types of new knowledge: knowledge about the product and knowledge about the project. Each is useful in refining a product plan toward achieving the most value for the organization.
Agile teams use three levels of planning: release planning, iteration planning, and daily planning. The release plan looks ahead for the duration of the release—typically, three to six months. An iteration plan looks ahead only the duration of one iteration—typically, two to four weeks. A daily plan is the result of team member commitments made to each other in a daily stand-up meeting.
Understanding the product owner’s conditions of satisfaction is critical in both release and iteration planning. During release planning, the whole team identifies a way of meeting the conditions of satisfaction for the release, which include scope, schedule, and resources. To achieve this, the product owner may need to relax one or more of her conditions of satisfaction. A similar process occurs during iteration planning, when the conditions of satisfaction are the new features that will be implemented and the high-level test cases that demonstrate the features were implemented correctly.