Agile Project Management

With the basis originating in the twelve core principles of the Agile Manifesto, agile
project management is an iterative process focused on the continuous monitoring and
improvement of deliverables. At its core, high quality deliverables are a result of providing
customer value, team interactions and adapting to current business circumstances. Unlike
Waterfall project management, agile methodology doesn’t follow a sequential stage-by-stage
approach. Phases of the project are completed in parallel to each other by various team
members in an organization. This approach can find and rectify any errors in the project
without having to restart.

Agile project management provides more flexibility in error detection throughout

project stages, resulting in consistently fewer errors than Waterfall, which can only test bugs
during developmental stages. In software development, agile approaches are typically used to
help businesses respond to unpredictability. Within the Software Development Life Cycle
(SDLC), team members are involved in the requirement, design, development and testing
phases. Most importantly, agile techniques involve the regular overview of task efficiency in
order for team members to adjust behaviors and procedures accordingly.

In the following section, this document describes the agile project management plan
that is part of the agile software development of EasyUML.
First Iteration:
The business analyst:

 Creates a short vision statement.

 Identifies an on-site customer who can be used to provide input and creates personas
for the system.
 Brainstorms scenarios with the customer.
 Prioritizes scenarios with the customer.
 Writes scenarios for the upcoming iteration.

The project manager:

 Gathers the developers together and obtains their estimates. The estimates are rough-
order-of-magnitude estimates.
 Checks if priorities change as a result of costs.
 Schedules scenarios for the upcoming iteration.

The architect:

 Divides scenarios into architecture tasks.

The developers:

 Divides scenarios into development tasks.

 Defines an appropriate build strategy (Continuous Integration if possible).

The tester:

 Divides scenario into test tasks.

During the Iteration:

The project manager:

 Guides the iteration.

 Guides the project.

The architect:

 Defines the solution architecture.

The developer:

 Implements a development task.

The tester:

 Tests a scenario.

After Iteration 0 – repeat the process but with the following actions:

The business analyst:

 Updates personas (where necessary).

 Adds any newly discovered scenarios.
 Reprioritizes scenarios (where necessary).
 Writes scenarios for the upcoming iteration.

The project manager:

 Estimates any new scenarios.

 Schedules scenarios for the upcoming iteration.

The architect:

 Divides the scenarios into architecture tasks.

The developer:

 Divides scenarios into development tasks.

 Updates the build process (Continuous Integration if possible).

The Tester:

 Divides the scenarios into test tasks.

In our case the following diagram can simply illustrate the entire process:
 In the end, the team has the following members:

 1 Business analyst – will permanently stay in touch with the client/market

 1 Project Manager - will coordinate the entire team
 1 Software Architect – will design the application architecture
 2 developers that will divide their work as follows:
o Developer 1: implement the GUI
o Developer 2: implement the functionality of the project
 1 Tester - will test the application.