Agile Project Management

Introduction

Agile Project Management is one of the revolutionary methods
introduced for the practice of project management. This is one of the
latest project management strategies that is mainly applied to project
management practice in software development. Therefore, it is best to
relate agile project management to the software development process when
understanding it.


From the inception of software development as a business, there have
been a number of processes following, such as the waterfall model. With
the advancement of software development, technologies and business
requirements, the traditional models are not robust enough to cater the
demands.


Therefore, more flexible software development models were required in
order to address the agility of the requirements. As a result of this,
the information technology community developed agile software
development models.


'Agile' is an umbrella term used for identifying various models used
for agile development, such as Scrum. Since agile development model is
different from conventional models, agile project management is a
specialized area in project management.

The Agile Process

It is required for one to have a good understanding of the agile
development process in order to understand agile project management.



There are many differences in agile development model when compared to traditional models:

• The agile model emphasizes on the fact that entire team should be
  a tightly integrated unit. This includes the developers, quality
  assurance, project management, and the customer.
• Frequent communication is one of the key factors that makes this
  integration possible. Therefore, daily meetings are held in order to
  determine the day's work and dependencies.
• Deliveries are short-term. Usually a delivery cycle ranges from one week to four weeks. These are commonly known as sprints.
• Agile project teams follow open communication techniques and
  tools which enable the team members (including the customer) to express
  their views and feedback openly and quickly. These comments are then
  taken into consideration when shaping the requirements and
  implementation of the software.

Agile Project Management