Agile Project Management Methodology for Beginners: Scrum Project Management for Beginners

Each team member typically has a special area of expertise that he or she brings to the team. However, each specialist is expected to work outside of that specialty and contribute to the team effort, as well as collaborating freely at all times.

the product owner is the only person who can order work done or change the priority of work done. This division of authority allows the other players to focus on producing deliverables without concerning themselves with the variables of ROI.

- Kanban: a lean development process pioneered by Toyota in the 1940s to support just in time (JIT) manufacturing

Extreme Programming (XP): another well known variant of Agile, with special emphasis on customer involvement and satisfaction by making customer request for new features part of the development process

Agile methods are characterized by their iterative and incremental qualities, relying on short bursts of activity, stakeholder testing and feedback, and incorporation of that feedback to constantly improve the product.
- Scrum: the most popular and well known of the Agile methodologies, and the focus of this book

Customer collaboration over contract negotiation
Responding to change over following a plan

Individuals and interactions over processes and tools
Working software over comprehensive documentation

Agile became a movement in February 2001, at a meeting at the Snowbird Resort in Utah. There, 17 software developers got together and refined the underlying principles of lightweight methodology into the Agile Manifesto.

Long Product Development Cycles: predictive (plan-driven) development models dictated that a program couldn’t be released until all of its features were finished and bug-free. The desire to release quality products is admirable, but the size and scope of those products meant they would be obsolete long before their release date.

Belief in Static Customer Expectations: another issue was the belief that customer demand could be captured in snapshot form and would conveniently remain unchanged while the development team did its thing. This might have been true before the internet, but as soon as consumers started using the web, customer demand for features began to shift on a daily basis. The old development models were aiming for a target that had long since ceased to exist.