If you’re looking for a couple hours of agile video to watch, a way to help you go to sleep at night, or just from free agile training, then I present to you the following videos.
Our development team at AgilityFeat is spread out around Central America. When we bring on a new team member, we don’t always have the luxury of training them on how we do things in-person. But we also know that agile methods are still gaining ground in Latin America, and implementations of “agile” vary widely. A lot of times a development company here says they are agile purely for marketing purposes. For that matter, sometimes clients don’t even realize what they are asking for when they look to hire agile development teams!
If you want to use these videos as a substitute for sending someone to a expensive Certified Scrum Master course, then be my guest. But be aware that you’re missing out on more than a certificate suitable for framing. The huge value of any agile training with an experienced practitioner is that you get to ask lots of questions, and you can learn more about how best to apply agile methods to your specific circumstances.
While no training or video can substitute for the experience of working on an agile team, I hope you’ll find these videos helpful in explaining the basic concepts, and giving you a starting point. It’s around 2.5 hours of total video, so fix a cup of coffee and enjoy!
#1 Agile Principles
Explains the basic concepts behind agile methods, and why they are better than traditional “waterfall” methods.
Video 1: Agile Principles from Arin Sime on Vimeo.
#2 Scrum Overview
An overview of the Scrum process. Each step of the process will be described in more depth in the subsequent videos.
Video 2: Scrum Intro from Arin Sime on Vimeo.
#3 Building a Backlog
Covers best practices for writing user stories and creating a Backlog, which is your running list of features to be developed.
Video 3: Building A Backlog from Arin Sime on Vimeo.
#4 Agile Estimation
Explains why you are bad as estimation (yes, I am talking to you), and how agile methods attempt to combat the inherent problems with software estimation.
Video 4: Agile Estimation from Arin Sime on Vimeo.
#5 Planning Your Iteration
The Scrum planning process, and how to use Velocity to measure when enough is enough.
Video 5: Planning Your Iteration from Arin Sime on Vimeo.
#6 Daily Standups
How to lead efficient daily standups in a Scrum team. Example remote standup on Skype is included.
Video 6: Daily Scrum from Arin Sime on Vimeo.
#7 Demos
The Do’s and Don’ts of agile demos.
Video 7: Demos from Arin Sime on Vimeo.
#8 Retrospectives
Often overlooked by agile teams, retrospectives are a crucial way to keep strong communication within your team and make sure they are focused on continuous improvement.
Video 8: Retrospectives from Arin Sime on Vimeo.
Your Final Exam
You’re still awake? Great. Agile processes are really much more engaging then my mellow voice in those videos might lead you to believe.
We really value the short iterations and frequent customer feedback of agile processes. We work hard to integrate iterative design and UX processes without compromising agile principles. Therefore it’s important that we give our new team members some idea of what agile is all about before they start working with our clients. This gives everyone a base level of knowledge before they start on projects.
I hope these videos give you a little insight into agile processes, if you have any questions about how we do distributed development at AgilityFeat, drop me a line at Arin@AgilityFeat.com.
