Agile Foundations Closeout

We have covered so much together. I'm so excited to be at this point with you. Here we are. We covered all of our lessons for this class. Good job. Oh my gosh. Good job. Give yourselves a hand. We covered quite a bit of stuff. Let me just recap it. I'm going to go really fast. Remember, all the way back to our first lesson, the very first things we talked about, we covered the origins of Agile, what Agile is and what Agile isn't. We reflected a bit on the Agile history and where it began, the lean manufacturing principles. As we talked about those, I introduced you to the Agile Manifesto and the 12 principles behind the Agile Manifesto. Remember, Agile is a mindset. It's a way of thinking. So I gave you examples of the Agile mindset and we talked about how do we establish that. And we did the exercise with Kayla where we talked about building a skateboard and minimum viable products. And then we had an opportunity to reflect on all of that and focus on the mindset. And then we talked about Agile beyond software development. And then in our second section, I introduced you to the scrum 353 as that sort of vehicle that brought us all the way to where we are today. We did a deep dive on the three roles of Scrum master, product owner and developers that make up that Scrum team. I talked to you about what high performing teams are, what makes teams awesome, and really developing the soft skills needed to be a part of an Agile team, how agility brings those skills to the forefront. We talked about the Scrum event of the Sprint. What is the Sprint itself? That time boxed Sprint cycle. I talked about the first artifact of the product backlog and how it is the wish list of all the things that we want to build for our product. I spent a bunch of time around shared understanding. We talked about communication barriers, sharing knowledge, physical work environments and collaboration techniques and what empowered teams mean. And then in our third section, I turned the corner with us and we talked about, okay, so that's good mindset, that's good team building stuff. Okay, what are the nuts and bolts? Like, how do we get started? And I introduce you to Sprint Zero. As a part of Sprint Zero, we talked about release planning, defining our customer. Remember the difference between user and customer? We did some backlog refinement. I talked all about user stories. Man, we went deep on user stories. Not only that, but understanding what epics are and features are and tasks and the breakdown of each of those things from epics to features to stories to tasks. You'll remember we talked about how epics are the largest piece of work, how features fit within usually a release cycle, stories fit within sprints and tasks fit within days. We talked about definition of ready and the definition of done. I talked about getting our product owners involved, getting our users involved and asking do they really like it? How do we get that user feedback? I then turn the corner with you and we talked about estimation techniques like affinity estimation and planning Poker. I talked to you about Velocity and how that helps us with understanding our capacity for sprint planning, where we build our Sprint backlog. And then I also walked us through an exercise where we did some tasking or detailing of stories. In the fourth section it was all about running the sprint. I introduced you to the concepts of flow and work in process and work in process limits or work in progress and work in progress limits. I talked about Kanban and how it's separate from Scrum but is an agile discipline of making work visible and understanding flow in your system and finding your constraints. I talk about task switching and the effects and costs of switching tasks which breaks up that flow. We talked about the daily standup as another one of our ceremonies. I introduced you to burndown charts. You had an activity, an opportunity to create your own burn down chart. Get your hands on there and learn how to do burn down and burn up charts. I talked about continuous integration and the cost and benefit of frequent delivery. So continuous integration, continuous delivery. I also talked about built in quality and how quality is not a department, it's a discipline on the teams and the team owns quality. I talked about the Sprint review and the increment. That's the piece that we deliver at the Sprint review. And I also introduced you officially to the final ceremony, the Sprint Retro. And then lastly, you did a review of the three five three and you're ready for the final exam. Don't be nervous like I've given you all of the tools you'll need to pass the exam. As I mentioned in the opening, I've set the table. You've engaged well, you've interacted well and you have the knowledge to go pass this test. So take a deep breath, find a quiet place, don't be distracted, don't try to read email and take the quiz at the same time. Read the question in its entirety, Answer the question to the best of your ability and you're going to do great. You're going to do great. Now go crush that final examination.