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The term ‘Agile’ as it applies in the context of projects was first used in 2001 in the title of the “Manifesto for Agile Software Development”. The authors of the manifesto are proponents of software development practices focused on addressing the issues of poor quality in the Rapid Application Development (RAD) approach to building software that became popular in the latter part 1980s. In the manifesto they enshrined a disciplined, business-focused and people-centric way of working that would help make this a reality. Agile, then, is not a method in its own right, rather it is a lose ‘family’ of methods that all follow the values and principles expressed in the Agile Manifesto. Three of the most impactful of these are Scrum, eXtreme Programming (XP) and DSDM, the latest version of which is called Atern.
DSDM is the method of choice for larger, more complex organisations with a need for formality around projects (especially with regards to Project Management and Governance) but who also desire the improvements in productivity and quality that come from the Agile way of working. Unlike the other approaches that were created by individuals and small teams of practitioners, DSDM was the result of collaboration between a significant number of blue-chip companies in the UK in the mid 1990s. The not-for-profit DSDM Consortium was set up to manage the development of the method and is still the guardian of the method.
Scrum is important because it is, by far the most popular of the Agile methods world-wide. It is the simplest of three methods mentioned above which is something that is at once its greatest strength and its greatest weakness. It is ideally suited to small teams in simple organisations working on delivery of a single product because it is so beautifully simple in terms of process, practices, roles and work products. For the sake of simplicity, however, it does not really embrace the concept of ‘project’ as most organisations would recognise that term and is therefore challenging to scale to larger developments and more complex organisations.
XP is an Agile method that is heavily focused on the discipline and practices of software engineering and in that space is truly excellent . Like Scrum it does not really embrace the concept of project and is therefore challenging for many larger and more complex organisations to adopt without the need for creating a project-centric ‘wrapper’ around it. Many of the practices of XP such as Test Driven Development and Continuous Integration have now found their way into mainstream software development and are embraced by other Agile methods including Scrum and DSDM.
Agile Project Management is a method effectively “spun off” from DSDM Atern that focuses on the management of Agile projects and can be used to wrap Scrum and XP.
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