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We’re looking at the Agile and Lean frameworks from the Agile Practice Guide from the Project Management Institute and Agile Alliance.

We’re looking at this because as you go along your Agile journey, you’ll find many core methods, and people may call themselves an Agile team and use only one or two of these methods. That’s often fine as long as we’ve got the core Agile practices as part of that – things such as the whole team approach, daily doing stand-ups, retrospectives.  Many teams will have some of these core methods and sometimes even some of these auxiliary methods that they’re practicing as an Agile team or an Agile company.

This one we’re going to look at is the Agile auxiliary methods of Agile Unified Process, DSDM or Dynamic Systems Delivery Method, and Behavior-Driven Development.

Check out the video and article below, now!

Dynamic Systems Delivery Method

Dynamic Systems Delivery Method or DSDM was designed to add more rigor to the rising iterative methods of the 1990s. It’s most known for its emphasis on constraint-driven delivery, which sets Cost, Quality and Time in the beginning and then uses formalized prioritization of scope to meet those constraints. In other words, it’s meeting up with the Agile approach of having fixed time, where we’ve got our fixed time boxes of two to four weeks depending on what your team has arranged or has agreed on and then a set time frame for delivering the product. The cost might be fixed as well, and the quality – we always want high quality and that needs to be fixed within an Agile team. However, we can adjust the scope as we go along. And as we iterate with our product, yes, sometimes that product will change and the requirements might change when a customer sees it and just has a little bit of feedback based on what we’ve been developing.

Eight principles guide the use of DSDM. We focus on the business need, and there are many different ways of doing this within Agile. The product owner represents the customer, and we’ve got reviews of the product every two to four weeks so the customer can see, feel and touch it and make sure that we’re on the right track.

We’ve got delivering on time, collaboration, never compromising quality, and building incrementally from firm foundations. We’re making sure that we understand what the main feature and the main product is going to be, as part of our feature-driven development (that you might recognise) and then building incrementally – building those features out from those firm foundations.

We’ve got developing iteratively. So making sure our customer can see it by performing those reviews at the end of our iteration. This means a customer can see what’s going on and make sure that we’re on the right track and adjust if necessary.

We’ve got communicating continuously and early – that’s part of our daily stand-ups that you might recognize, and we’ve got demonstrating. control, using the appropriate techniques and prioritization of scope.

We’re making sure that the product owner is involved and making sure the customer is involved in prioritizing the scope that they want to see, and we develop what’s most valuable to them.

Next, we’ve got Agile Unified Process or AUP as well. The intent of AUP is to perform Iterative Cycles across seven key disciplines and incorporate the associated feedback before formal delivery. So someone using AUP will have these disciplines within a release:

We’ve got the model implementation, testing deployment, configuration management, project management, and the environment. All of these are the disciplines of AUP.

But the principles guiding those disciplines are: we want to make sure that the team understands and has clarity and knows what it’s doing. We want simplicity with what the team is doing- so we don’t want complex things just for the sake of doing that.  We want agility – so the ability to adjust and change quickly if needed. Focusing on high-value activities, of course we’ve seen that many times with the Product Owner getting involved prioritizing that backlog of the highest value activities for the customer. We’ve got tool independence, so things can function on their own if necessary – if one item goes down, it doesn’t bring the whole thing down. We’ve got tailoring to fit and situationally specific.

Lastly, we’ve also got Behavior-Driven Development as one of our auxiliary methods to Agile. This is another simple way of defining these stories or the features from the Customer’s point of view, and it’s a great way to define those when you’re performing collaborative user story creation. So when the whole team is getting together, creating that user story based on all the different inputs from the tester, the developer, the designer, the product owner, we make sure everyone has an input into that so that it’s a wholly created card from the customer’s point of view.

With BDD, we’ve got “Given” some initial context, “When” an event occurs, “Then” ensure some outcomes. So given this system is in this mode, when this happens then we want that to happen. And that’s just a nice way to describe it so everyone is on the same page.

Those are some more of the auxiliary methods of the Agile and lean frameworks.

– David McLachlan

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