Agile Teams

How do you feel when someone mentions “planning”? Do you look forward to the opportunity or does the thought of making a plan send you running for the hills?

Sprint planning is a crucial part of the agile sprint cycle. It helps you and your team align around common goals, and sets you up for a successful sprint. Even if planning isn’t one of your strengths, the good news is that you can practice and get better over time with the help of some good advice.

We’ve combined our best sprint planning tips into an ultimate guide to agile sprint planning, with everything you need to run efficient and effective planning meetings.

What is agile sprint planning?

Agile sprint planning is a key ceremony in the agile sprint cycle. It signifies and prepares the team for the start of the sprint. Without this planning, there is a very real risk that the team would lack focus and fail to align on what is most important.

Effective agile sprint planning has three key parts; a sprint goal, an understanding of team capacity, and a prioritized set of backlog items. Each element depends on the other for success.

The idea is to align your team around a goal for the next sprint by agreeing on a set of backlog items that are achievable within the sprint and contribute to reaching the sprint goal. Gaining focus and clarity on what you plan to achieve will help your team to work better together and to deliver on objectives.

It is best to start with an agreed sprint goal. You can then prioritize work on the specific set of backlog items that your team has the capacity to complete, and that will contribute to making your sprint goal a reality.

How sprint planning fits within the Scrum process

We’re big fans of the Scrum process, and it’s hugely popular with many software development teams. While agile sprint planning can take many forms within the different agile methodologies, for the purposes of this guide, we’ll focus on agile sprint planning within the Scrum framework.

If your team doesn’t follow Scrum don’t worry — you’ll still find value in our preparation tips, meeting guide, mistakes to avoid, and sprint planning resources.

💡 Learn more: What's the Difference Between Kanban vs. Scrum?

Scrum roles: The people

There are three main roles within a Scrum team.

1. Product Owner
2. Scrum Master
3. Development team

The Product Owner puts in the work upfront. They help prioritize the product backlog items and decide which should move to the sprint backlog. These important decisions guide the goals of the sprint and determine the tasks the team will tackle over the next sprint.

The Scrum Master acts as a guide, they lead meetings that help ensure that the Scrum framework is followed throughout the sprint to keep the team on track. The Scrum Master helps the team get the most out of the entire Scrum process and each individual Scrum ceremony.

The development team is made up of the various people who will complete the work agreed upon during sprint planning.

There are others that you might refer to during sprint planning, such as stakeholders, users, and customers. While these aren’t technically Scrum roles, they play a critical role in product development. Stakeholders should be brought into the process early and often, and customers should always be top-of-mind when making any development decisions. Some teams find User Personas to be a valuable way of keeping user value in focus.

Artifacts: What gets done

Artifacts are the things to get done — different breakdowns of what the team hopes to accomplish:

1. Product backlog
2. Sprint backlog
3. Increments

Product backlog items are the tasks the team believes they need to accomplish in order to complete a product or specific improvement of a product. It is the big master list of everything that the team thinks they need to accomplish. The product backlog is flexible and iterative, and it will evolve as the team learns more about the product, stakeholder feedback, and customer needs.

The sprint backlog is more focused than the product backlog. The product owner moves the most important backlog items from the product backlog to the sprint backlog at the beginning of each sprint based on current issues, priorities, and customer needs. The team aims to complete all of the sprint backlog items over the course of the sprint.

An increment is a concrete stepping stone toward reaching the Product Goal. An increment must be verified as usable in order to provide value, which means that any work completed cannot be considered part of an increment unless it meets the Definition of Done (an agreement among the team of what “done” means). This is a formal description of the state of the increment when it meets the quality standards required of a product. Once the work completed satisfies the agreed Definition of Done, you gain an increment.

Scrum ceremonies: Where Sprint Planning fits

There are a number of ceremonies in Scrum that occur each sprint. This is where sprint planning fits within the Scrum process.

1. Sprint planning
2. Daily scrum (or standup)
3. Sprint review
4. Sprint retrospective

💡 Learn more: Agile Ceremonies: Your Guide to the Four Stages

Sprint planning is the first Scrum ceremony — it prepares the team for the sprint. The planning session sets everything into motion, aligning the team on what’s most important for this sprint. This is when decisions are made and key backlog items are moved from the product backlog to the sprint backlog.

The second ceremony repeats every day of the sprint. Daily standups bring the team together to discuss progress and blockers that might be getting in the way. By getting the concerns out in the open early, the team can avoid the frustration of delays and ensure work continues to flow.

The final two ceremonies happen at the end of the sprint. For the sprint review, the team comes together to determine the success of the sprint based on the “Done” work completed. It’s also a chance to bring in stakeholders to gather feedback on what's been accomplished so far. The sprint review ensures customer insights are always top-of-mind, stakeholders continually see progress, and guarantees the product never strays too far from what the stakeholders are looking for.

The sprint retrospective gathers critical insights from team members about how the sprint went. What went well, what didn’t go so well, and what could be improved upon for next time? These valuable insights are what makes Scrum agile — the team is always thinking critically about the process and looking for ways to improve the work and how they work together.

We’ll talk about these ceremonies in more detail below when we discuss what happens after the sprint planning meeting.

The benefits of agile sprint planning

Agile sprint planning is a powerful meeting that should not be overlooked or underestimated. It is an opportunity to:

• Bring the whole team together and align around common goals
• Set context by starting the sprint with clear priorities
• Identify potential roadblocks before they occur
• Bring stakeholder feedback into the planning process
• Learn from previous sprints by considering sprint review and retrospective insights
• Consider team capacity and adjust accordingly to ensure that goals are achievable and that the team isn’t overcommitted in the upcoming sprint
• Account and plan for dependencies that may impact the flow of work.

How to prepare for a sprint planning meeting

We know we said that a sprint begins with sprint planning, but there are actually a few important steps you must take in order to prepare for the planning session. Unfortunately, you do need to do a little planning for the planning meeting.

Backlog refinement

Backlog grooming or refinement keeps your backlog healthy, up-to-date, and ready for sprint planning. A refined backlog will help ensure your team’s planning time is used efficiently and effectively since you won't have to waste time adding details to the backlog that could have been completed in advance before everyone came together.

The product manager should groom the backlog a few days before the sprint planning meeting to make sure it’s ready.

Tips for maintaining a healthy backlog:

• Ensure stories are in order of priority
• Prioritize items that bring the customer the most value
• Add detail to the highest-priority backlog items
• Split any user stories that are too big
• Delete any user stories that aren’t relevant anymore
• Create new user stories based on new or clearer needs
• Add items based on new stakeholder feedback
• Make adjustments based on bug fixes
• Assign more accurate estimates

💡 Learn more: Essential Checklist for Effective Backlog Refinement (and What To Avoid)

Be consistent

A consistent meeting time that’s scheduled well in advance will ensure that the entire Scrum team keeps the time slot open. Book your sprint planning meeting on the same day and at the same time every sprint so that no one forgets or double books.

Sprint planning is not a meeting to be shuffled around, delayed, or ignored — sprint planning meetings are essential to the success of every sprint. Ask your team about a specific, recurring time to meet, and ensure it works for everyone.

How to run a sprint planning meeting

While the agile method is flexible and collaborative, it isn’t chaotic; everything needs to begin with a plan.

1. Stick to a set sprint planning meeting duration

As with any kind of meeting, the team can be easily sidetracked without a timebox. After all, talking about the work that needs to be completed is often easier than actually completing it. It’s the Scrum Master’s job to keep the team on track and make sure the time limit isn’t exceeded.

Go into the sprint planning meeting well-prepared; a clear agenda and a well-refined backlog mean your team can get straight to planning.

Set a realistic timebox for the meeting and stick to it. We recommend that you avoid scheduling more than 2-3 hours for a sprint planning meeting, but as you become more skilled in sprint planning, you’ll better understand the length of time that works for you and your team.

2. Use estimates to make realistic decisions

You want your team to be as productive as possible, but overloading them can actually hinder productivity and focus. Unreasonable expectations are demotivating and overcommitted team members are more likely to make mistakes.

You need to understand the effort and time it will take to complete the goals you set out to accomplish for each sprint. Agile estimation techniques and story points provide a better understanding of team capacity, individual capacity, and what a reasonable workload looks like. Reasonable and realistic goals will help your team stay motivated and support a consistent flow of work.

3. Define clear goals and outcomes

What does the team aim to accomplish between now and the end of the sprint? Set clearly defined goals and outcomes that everyone understands. Do your goals align with what you learned from past sprints? Do they align with customer needs? Does everyone agree on what the next sprint will (roughly) look like?

Don’t assume that everyone is on the same page. Ask questions and encourage your team to speak up if anything is unclear. It’s better to clear up discrepancies or misunderstandings now rather than once the work begins.

Setting sprint goals effectively involves following the SMART framework, a well-regarded strategy in project management and goal-setting across various industries. The acronym SMART stands for:

• Specific: Clearly define what you aim to achieve. Avoid vague goals by pinpointing precise outcomes.
• Measurable: Establish criteria for measuring progress. This helps in tracking accomplishments and identifying areas that need adjustment.
• Achievable: Aim for goals that are challenging yet attainable with the resources at hand. Overambitious targets can demoralize a team if not realistic.
• Relevant: Ensure that each goal aligns with the broader objectives of the project. Irrelevant tasks can divert energy from what's truly important.
• Time-bound: Set a clear deadline to maintain urgency and focus. Sprint goals must coincide with the sprint’s limited timeline to ensure timely completion.

In practice, applying the SMART framework to sprint goals means your team is synchronized and focused on priorities that drive the project forward efficiently. By keeping goals relevant and achievable within the sprint's timeframe, you avoid misallocation of efforts and ensure progress is aligned with overall project ambitions.

Post your sprint goal somewhere that is easily accessible so that the team can refer back to it throughout the sprint.

💡 Learn more: How to Make the Most of Your Sprint Goals

4. Decide what it means to be ‘done’

What does “done” mean for any given backlog item, increment, product issue, or product as a whole? The team and your stakeholders need to agree on what done looks like in order to set realistic goals that meet the expectations of everyone involved.

As you set goals and choose which backlog items to complete for the next sprint, be clear about what it means to meet and complete the goals you want to accomplish.

5. Align sprint goals with product goals

Sprint goals should always align with your broader product goals. Your sprint may take a specific direction depending on current product issues, bug fixes, or customer concerns, but it’s important to keep an eye on the big picture.

Choose backlog items with care — make sure they relate to the larger product goal and that each works in sync to move development forward. Overlooking product goals in sprint planning could mean that each sprint looks more like a random selection of to-do lists that don’t connect back to customer needs, relate to product goals, or help you reach important increments. The result will feel like a lack of progress, which risks disengaging the team and other important stakeholders, like your users.

What happens next?

Now that the planning is done, you’re ready to implement your plan and complete the work. But that doesn’t mean that team members go off and work in isolation.

Daily scrum (or stand-up)

The daily scrum or stand-up is an opportunity for a collaborative agile team to maintain progress. It should be a quick check-in at the start of each day.

The team will discuss what has been done in the past 24 hours, any roadblocks they might have hit, and what the team hopes to accomplish the next day.

This critical check-in helps the team stay on the same page, helps to ensure the continued flow of work, and keeps the team on track to achieve sprint goals.

Sprint review

A sprint review meeting takes place at the end of a sprint. It's a chance for the team to review all of the “Done” issues for that period. The sprint review determines whether or not the goal for the sprint was achieved.

It’s a chance to demonstrate shippable working product increments to the team, and also an opportunity to bring in stakeholder feedback. This feedback gives you valuable insights to assess if you’re on the right track, or need to make changes in the next sprint. The sprint review is also excellent preparation for the next backlog grooming and sprint planning session.

💡 Learn more: Introduction to Sprint Reviews

Sprint retrospective

While the sprint review looks at what was accomplished and how to move forward, the retrospective examines your processes and how the team is working together.

What did you learn during the previous sprint? While retrospectives can take many forms, the goal is to discover what worked well, what didn't go so well, and what could be improved upon next time. Your team will use the insights gathered in the retrospective to improve how you work together and deliver value to customers in the future.

💡 Learn more: 5 Steps to Holding Effective Sprint Retrospectives

Agile sprint planning mistakes

It’s easy to fall into bad habits, especially as deadlines and product launch dates approach. Avoid these common agile planning mistakes to ensure your team is always making the most of the agile methodology and the Scrum process.

Unrealistic expectations

Choosing unattainable goals sets your whole team up for failure. Failing to meet your sprint goals sprint after sprint is damaging for team motivation and morale.

Use estimates to set reasonable goals as best you can. Consider team capacity, factoring in your past knowledge of how long tasks take to complete, how the team works, and potential roadblocks that could arise along the way.

Lack of context

Your team will benefit from an understanding of how the issues they’re working on fit into the bigger picture.

Depending on the tool you’re using to plan and manage your work, it can be difficult to see the contextual detail needed to plan and work with clarity. The more items you have, the more difficult and overwhelming it will be to organize and prioritize. Use tools that allow you to add context, depth, and customer insights with clean functionality to adapt your plan to the needs of your team and stakeholders.

Neglecting your backlog

We mentioned this point when we talked about what you need to do to prepare for sprint planning. It’s worth mentioning again because it’s a common mistake.

When you go into a sprint planning meeting without a well-managed backlog, you lack the clarity you need to plan effectively. Your time is valuable, and so is the time of your team, so it should be treated with care and used effectively.

A well-managed backlog is DEEP:

• Detailed appropriately
• Estimated
• Emergent
• Prioritized

💡 Learn more: The 4 Characteristics of a Good Product Backlog

Not allowing the plan to adapt

When you plan your sprint, you’ll do everything you can to prioritize the most important tasks for the length of the sprint. It’s important to try to stick to the plan as best you can, but you also need to adapt as you acquire new information.

Be ready to make changes on the fly should you hit roadblocks or acquire new information about customer needs, concerns, or product issues.

Failing to understand stakeholders

You need to understand the goals and priorities of stakeholders to be successful. Just because you’re happy with what you’ve accomplished doesn't mean your stakeholders will too.

Ensure your stakeholders are brought into your process early and often and help them understand how you work to provide them value. Gather feedback from stakeholders regularly to ensure your goals are aligned. A good time for this is during the sprint review. Just make sure those insights are transferred over to your next planning meeting.

Not choosing tools with a customer-centric approach

Successful product development delivers what the customer needs and wants. To build for your customers, it helps to use tools for planning and work management that makes it easy to keep them top-of-mind. Incorporating user story maps and customer personas into your planning helps you and your team prioritize the work that will deliver the most value first.

💡 Learn more: 10 tips for more effective user personas

Failing to incorporate retrospective insights into planning

Retrospectives are the best thing you can do to help your team work better together. During a retrospective, you're asking your team to be open and honest about how things went over the course of the sprint so that you can learn from each other.

Failing to learn from those insights means that the collective time spent in the retrospective has been wasted, and the feedback that your team has shared is devalued.

Incorporating the learnings you gain from a retrospective into your next planning session and into the next sprint, will support your team to improve every time, helping them gain work satisfaction and deliver better outcomes.

Virtual vs. in-person sprint planning

The advantages of remote work also bring challenges for collaborative planning. No matter the way your team chooses to meet, whether virtually, in person, or a combination of both, it’s important that you choose tools that meet the needs of your team.

Tips for virtual sprint planning:

• Be really prepared - communicate plans clearly ahead of time, so that everyone has clear expectations.
• Use a video conferencing tool that allows for breakout sessions
• Set up the interactive online resources you plan to use and include links in the meeting request.
• Online discussions don’t start as naturally as they would in person, so share discussion topics ahead of time, and consider preparing some ice-breakers.
• Ensure that you’ve accounted for time differences for teams that span time zones.
• Tech issues arise no matter how much advanced planning and testing you do. Always expect the unexpected.

Tips for in-person sprint planning:

• Book a meeting room with plenty of space for your team, and consider separate spaces for breakout sessions.
• Ensure that your meeting room will accommodate a shared view of your sprint plan - do you need a wall for sticky notes, or a screen to share a digital tool?
• If some of your team members work remotely, it’s difficult to involve them in the same way, so consider how this might work for your team. They won’t be able to read a whiteboard or sticky notes as easily, so a digital solution may be best.
• If you choose to plan your sprint ‘on the wall’, be sure to nominate someone to transcribe your plan into your work management tool at the end of the planning meeting.

No matter where your planning takes place, always remember to prepare your backlog ahead of time so that you can have focused and informed discussions during sprint planning.

Additional agile resources

We’re continually adding to our content library, which is filled with resources, how-to guides, product updates, and more.

📚 Add these to your list:

• Easy Agile Podcast Ep.20: The importance of the Team Retrospective
• Easy Agile Podcast Ep.18 Top qualities of an agile leader and team
• Easy Agile Podcast Ep.16 Enabling high performing agile teams with Adaptavist
• Being agile vs doing agile
• The Ultimate Guide to User Story Mapping
• The Ultimate Guide to Buyer Personas
• The Ultimate Guide to PI Planning [2022 SAFe Edition]

Using Easy Agile to improve sprint planning

Make your sprint planning smooth and effective with Easy Agile TeamRhythm. Transform your flat product backlog into a dynamic, flexible, and visual representation of the work to be done. Seamlessly integrated with Jira, with TeamRhythm you can:

• View your Jira stories, tasks, and bugs in context, aligned beneath their epics on the story map
• Drag and drop Jira issues from the backlog into a sprint
• Create new issues right on the story map
• Estimate issues on the story map, and gauge capacity with story point totals in each sprint swimlane
• Publish the sprint goal on each sprint swimlane, so it’s always top of mind
• Use filters to focus on the stories and issues that are most important now
• Group epics by a third level of hierarchy, to easily see how the work in focus contributes to the bigger picture

Easy Agile TeamRhythm also supports team retrospectives, with flexible and intuitive retrospectives boards created for every sprint. You can add retrospective items right from the sprint swimlane, so you don’t forget any important points. And you can turn retrospective action items into Jira issues that can be scheduled for future sprints, so you’re always getting better at what you do, and delivering for your customers.

Thanks for reading our ultimate agile sprint planning guide! If you have any questions about this guide, our other content, or our products, reach out to our team at any time. We love hearing from you.

We’ll continue to update this guide as we gain more agile planning insights, techniques, tools, and best practices.

Do you know the difference between agile vs. waterfall, and have you considered which is best for your business?

Don’t go chasing waterfalls — unless you’re seeking a project management methodology. 😁 The waterfall method is a common framework teams have utilized for years. But it isn’t the only way of doing things, and it may not be the best way, depending on the needs of your team.

In this post, we’ll cover the differences between agile and waterfall methodologies, including the pros and cons of each. We’ll also share a potential alternative called the hybrid method, which can provide the best of both worlds for certain teams.

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Agile vs. waterfall

When it comes to agile vs. waterfall, these methodologies don’t share a lot in common. In many ways, agile is the answer to the limitations of the commonly used waterfall method. However, there are definitely still pros and cons to each framework.

Let’s dig into both of these methodologies in more detail.

The waterfall methodology

We’ll start off with the waterfall approach since it’s a little easier to explain. While the idea of a waterfall may sound majestic and bold, the waterfall method is fairly traditional and straightforward.

The waterfall model is used to describe traditional project management, where a project plan is laid out by a project manager before work begins. Project requirements and tasks are planned in advance and given to the team, who then work on one task and then the next until project delivery.

Tasks are completed in the order they were laid out in the original plan. The sequential order of tasks cascading from one to the next is what gives waterfall project management its name.

Waterfall is a widely used project management methodology, but it does have its limitations. The strict approach helps teams know what to expect through every step of a project, but it isn’t very adaptable, and it can lack input from the team as a whole.

This lack of flexibility has hindered modern teams. It makes it more difficult to switch gears if and when you need to. A predetermined plan doesn't leave much room for change, and it misses out on adapting to invaluable feedback from both stakeholders and customers.

Waterfall Pros

• Clear goals and objectives are provided at the outset.
• There’s a straightforward structure that’s repeated project after project.
• It’s easy for team members to understand what’s expected of them.
• There’s less general pressure on employees.
• It’s easier to learn the ropes, especially for new employees.
• Information is easily passed on to all team members.
• Success is measured by the completion of tasks, which provides faster gratification.
• Budgets can be more accurately predicted.
• The end result of a project is decided from the beginning, so the journey is clear for everyone involved.
• Most planning is led by one person.

Waterfall Cons

• The process is not as flexible as agile approaches.
• It’s difficult to foresee roadblocks and dependencies that could delay work.
• Work is not always evenly spread out across the team.
• Project overload is possible.
• Short-lived teams may ignore conflict for the sake of getting to the end of the project.
• It’s difficult to change directions or the scope of deliverables once a project begins.
• There’s less customer involvement throughout project or product development.
• Stakeholders may not see progress until the end of a project or until a final product is complete.
• There isn't an early testing phase to ensure a project or product is on the right track.

The agile methodology

Agile is an iterative approach that puts emphasis on testing and adapting. It uses early feedback and stakeholder involvement to determine the best possible path forward. There’s still a plan with agile, but it isn't rigid or strict, and it leaves plenty of room to adapt and grow along the way.

Easy Agile Roadmaps: The simplest and most flexible roadmapping tool for Jira

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The plan evolves as new information is acquired to ensure the end result meets customer and stakeholder needs. Adaptability plays a big role in agile practices, and that’s what has drawn so many teams to the methodology. The ability to adapt in the face of change is a sought-after strength today, given the pace at which change is occurring across technology, the economy, global markets, and more.

Agile Pros

• The entire team is involved in the planning.
• Feedback is central to the process.
• Customers and stakeholders are involved.
• The customer journey is top of mind when a decision is made.
• The team can adapt as new information is acquired.
• Changes can be made along the way to avoid roadblocks or stalled work.
• Each team member's capacity (workload) is continually assessed to prevent burnout.
• Long-standing teams continue to learn how to work together.
• Processes are continually improved upon throughout every phase of the project/product.
• All voices on a team, no matter the role, are heard when it comes time to gather retrospective feedback.

Agile Cons

• Agile techniques and terminology can be tough to grasp.
• It can take teams a while to learn proper agile methods.
• Agile teams may not get the support they require from management and business owners.
• Not all team members may buy into the agile framework, presenting a disconnect across the team.
• A lack of documentation can make the details unclear.
• Budgets can become unpredictable if it turns out the project/product needs to go in another direction.
• The scope of a project/product can continue to grow (scope creep).
• The many agile meetings take up a lot of time.
• It’s harder to find new employees who are experienced with agile methods.

Agile is a broad term that covers a number of different frameworks that utilize agile practices. Lean, DevOps, Kanban, and Scrum are all various forms of agile that fulfill different needs.

For example, the Scrum framework involves repeating sprints that are commonly used by agile software development teams. If you haven’t heard of Scrum before, this might be a lot to take in. 🤯

A Scrum takes two weeks, beginning with sprint planning, when the product owner makes prioritization decisions about which backlog items (tasks) should be accomplished in the upcoming sprint. From there, the team works on the specified tasks, guided by a Scrum Master who leads daily standup meetings to keep everyone informed of project/product progress. Lastly, a sprint review and sprint retrospective occur at the end of the sprint to ensure the team continually evolves and improves.

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Interested in learning about other popular agile methodologies? There are so many to choose from! We covered 8 popular development methodologies in a previous post.

The hybrid methodology

Does the choice need to be agile vs. waterfall? You might be thinking, can’t we put all of these benefits together? The hybrid agile approach can offer the best of both words for some teams.

A hybrid model blends the valuable techniques provided by both waterfall and agile frameworks. For example, you might begin with a set of agile sprints for prototyping and gathering feedback, followed by a single plan of action associated with non-agile techniques. It can be the best of both worlds, and it can serve as a stepping stone while a team attempts to make a complete agile transformation.

A hybrid approach often comes into play with agile project management and other non-traditional agile uses. Agile was originally designed for software development, but teams in all sorts of industries continually adopt aspects of agile. The agile methods observed by software developers don’t always work for other types of teams. Agile can be a difficult transition to make, especially when teams are used to things being done another way.

An approach that meets your needs

When choosing which approach is best for your team, business, or enterprise, take time to consider the needs of the team as well as your customers and stakeholders. Agile may be a tough transition to make, but if you believe the benefits will enhance your processes and help your business long-term, it might be time to make the switch. A hybrid approach can help you get there gradually without as many disruptions to your current processes.

Easy Agile is passionate about helping teams work better using  agile tools designed for Jira. If you want to learn more about agile and other methodologies, follow the Easy Agile blog. It’s filled with how-to guides, tips, and strategies — and if reading content isn’t for you, we have a podcast too! 📢

Businesses of the future need to make smart decisions with agility, and today’s customers expect a value-driven approach that considers their needs every step of the way. The agile methodology offers businesses of all sizes a new way of working that focuses on adaptability, collaboration, and continuous improvement. More and more businesses are looking to make an agile transformation, but no organizational change is ever easy.

Learn more about the benefits of transitioning to an agile methodology, the challenges involved in making the switch, and what makes a successful agile transformation.

An intro to the agile methodology

The agile process is very different from traditional project management, which commonly utilizes a rigid waterfall approach. Project goals and guidelines are laid out at the beginning of a project based on the information a project manager currently has. The team sticks to the plan until the project is complete, finishing one task after the next in sequential order, like a waterfall.

Agile, on the other hand, allows for flexibility and adaptability so that any plan can grow and evolve as you acquire new information. The agile methodology first gained traction in the software development industry because it provided a dynamic approach for solving complex and ever-changing problems.

Today, the principles of agile have spread across all sorts of industries and businesses of all sizes. As the world changes at a faster pace than ever before, businesses need solutions that can adapt. Making an agile transformation improves business agility with systems and processes that ensure continuous improvement.

Another key aspect of agile is it always seeks new information. As opposed to waiting until the final project or product is complete, stakeholders and customers can give feedback every step of the way. This allows teams to make decisions based on customer needs, and it ensures customer value is continually delivered.

Some of the many benefits of agile include:

• Eliminating wasteful procedures
• Breaking free from workplace silos
• Encouraging collaboration and participation
• Involving stakeholders and customers throughout the process
• Identifying and accounting for roadblocks before they occur
• Accurately managing each team member’s workload (capacity)
• Understanding the customer’s perspective
• Using better decision-making practices
• Adapting to new information
• Continually improving internal processes

➡️ Learn more in our Agile Beginner's Guide.

Agile transformation challenges

While the benefits of agile are abundantly clear, any large organizational change is difficult to achieve. Understand what challenges you will face throughout an agile transformation so that you can best prepare leadership, team members, and stakeholders.

It takes time and patience to learn agile principles

Establishing an agile organization doesn’t happen overnight. Understand that your transformation journey will take time, dedication, and patience. It’s a monumental change that you can’t rush or push onto team members without proper education, training, and support.

Plan the rollout in stages so that there’s as little disruption to business as possible. Take the time to teach agile principles to each section of the organization. Agile and all of its practices can be tough to wrap your head around for those who are unfamiliar with it. No matter how big or small your organization is, it’s crucial that everyone understands what changes are being made, the benefits, and what steps need to be taken to adopt an agile mindset.

Change can cause reluctance and push back

People are often reluctant to change, and in some cases, change can cause fear, stress, and anxiety.

Agile requires buy-in from everyone, but with such a deep and large-scale change, many people within your organization may be reluctant to make the switch. It’s natural for people to be wary of change even though change is all around us every day. Everyone experiences different levels of excitement, hesitation, and animosity when it comes to change, so ensure you give people space to adapt to your new way of doing things.

If you are getting push back, speak to people or have team leaders schedule one-on-one chats to address concerns. Understand that change is very difficult for people to work through, and dealing with change can sometimes be similar to the grief process. The stages of the change curve involve shock and denial, anger, bargaining and blame, and confusion, all before finally arriving at acceptance.

Give your organization time to adjust while underlining the benefits of agile, how it will improve the way they work, and how leadership and business owners will support the team. The success of your agile transformation relies on everyone embracing agile adoption, no matter their role.

Cross-organizational responsibility

With an agile process, everyone is responsible for ensuring things run smoothly and targets are met. There may be team leaders, but everyone is a key piece of the puzzle. This may not be what teams in your organization are used to, as often there’s a top-down, hierarchical approach to leadership in traditional management. Higher-ups may feel they're losing power while other team members will need to be more involved than they used to be.

Under agile, traditional organizational structures evolve into a much more collaborative process. It’s not just one person in charge who’s on the line if something is stalled or doesn’t work out. Everyone in the entire organization is an integral part of the agile process. Everyone needs to be accountable for learning agile principles, participating in the transition, and offering feedback. Active participation from all business roles needs to continue in order to fully access the benefits of agile.

Agile is difficult to scale across large enterprises

Implementing an agile framework across a small business or startup is much simpler to do. For starters, the fewer people you have to train, the less it will cost and the faster the agile transformation can happen. Smaller teams are better able to adapt and work with one another to adjust to changes. Startups are also naturally more agile and often consist of younger team members who are more ready and willing to adapt.

The larger the company or enterprise, the more difficult it is to implement any change, let alone a complete business overhaul and mindset adjustment. It will take a lot longer, and there’s way more that can go wrong, but that doesn’t mean these efforts aren’t worth it. It’s even more important in large enterprises not to lose sight of your customer needs, and there are plenty of opportunities to optimize your systems.

The good news is there are systems designed to help enterprises adopt agile practices. SAFe, the Scaled Agile Framework, was designed to help scale lean and agile practices across larger organizations.

➡️ Easy Agile is a proud Scaled Agile Platform Partner. Easy Agile Programs for Jira will streamline your process and empower your team to implement the Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe).

Need to educate stakeholders and get them on board

Stakeholders are an essential part of the agile process. In an agile transformation, your stakeholders and customers are used to the status quo. They may be completely unfamiliar with agile, and it’s up to you to get them up to speed and convince them of the benefits and the increased customer satisfaction agile will provide.

Ensure you schedule time into your transition to answer any questions stakeholders may have. In order for agile teams to be successful, you need to involve stakeholders and customers who will provide you with invaluable feedback. This feedback will improve your processes, ensure you produce a top-notch product (or project), and make sure value is continually delivered.

Work better with agile

Agile practices are no longer reserved for product development. They are widely adopted and utilized across businesses of all shapes and sizes because business owners and managers understand the power of agile.

Despite the challenges, an agile transformation is well worth the investment. It will take time and cost you money upfront to make the change, but as 2020-2021 proved, businesses survive best when their systems are flexible and adaptable. Applied correctly, agile helps your team internalize this mindset and practice it in daily work.

Easy Agile builds Jira plugins that prioritize the customer in every step of the development process, making the lives of Scrum Masters, product owners, agile coaches, leadership teams, and devops that much easier.

We design agile apps for Jira with simple, collaborative, and flexible functionality. From team agility with Easy Agile TeamRhythm, to scaled agility with Easy Agile Programs, our apps can help your agile teams work better together, and deliver for your customers.

In an agile environment, there's no successful sprint or project without a ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ agile team. They have all it takes to achieve big goals within short time frames. How? Everyone in the team knows its power and how to use it. 🧙The end result is achieving big goals without burning out.

An agile team's structure is step one to succeeding at agile development. Take the example of fire brigades. Would a fire brigade put out fires if they didn't have the right members, lieutenant, or captain? The answer is short: nope. The team structure is quintessential.

Therefore, in an agile development process, each member should know what each role involves in the team. Today, we'll go over the roles in an agile team and a few characteristics of great agile teams. But first, we should talk a bit about what an agile team is.

What’s an agile team?

In each development cycle — or sprint — of an agile project, each agile team iterates the product according to customer feedback. That increases the speed of product development 🏃 and the efficiency of that process. And in each iteration, the team releases or launches either a new or improved product functionality.

Agile teams have similar characteristics. They should be:

• Small — 5-6 members
• Focused on hitting the target on time
• Coordinated in terms of task execution
• Conscious of the contribution from each role
• Flexible to allow members to be proactive and excel themselves
• Tolerant of changing customer needs

However, the structure of agile teams depends on the agile framework. For instance, you can have a Scrum team or a Kanban team. And whereas the Scrum-based roles are well-defined, Kanban-based teams are not.

At this point, we should discuss the structure of an agile team. Head over to the next section. 👇

The skeleton of an agile team

An agile team is composed of 3️⃣ main roles. Both teams' and companies' continuous improvement needs to have the right people playing the right role. Let's go over those roles one by one.

Product Owner

The Product Owner is the player with the deepest knowledge of the product. They eat, drink, and breathe the product.

They're the supreme advocates of the product. So, when something isn't right with the product, they should know that quickly. Plus, they know exactly how the product contributes to the company's vision and goals. 🎯

Their communication skills 🎙️ must be top-notch as most of their job requires:

• Triggering the team to engage with and undertake important product developments
• Intervening to adjust that process if and when necessary
• Changing plans if absolutely necessary
• Responding to variable customer needs

In a sprint, the goal is an increment of complete work. At the end of the day, the Product Owner defines and communicates the goals and quality expectations. 📣

The top priority of Product Owners is the customer and customer needs. In that sense, a Product Owner interfaces between the customer and the rest of the team. They also get customer feedback.

The Product Owner also creates and manages the product backlog. Additionally, they review deliverables before product release or launch. 🧐

Bear in mind: The Product Owner aims at maximizing product value. And the only way to achieve that is through teamwork.

Sometimes, in tiny companies, the Product Owner may be the CEO.

Some agile events are especially important for a Product Owner:

• Sprint planning. This agile ceremony’s goal is to prepare the iteration. It’s the right time and place for the Product Owner to present the product backlog to the Team Members and answer their questions.
• Sprint review. That’s the meeting to showcase work done throughout the iteration. The Product Owner gathers feedback from external stakeholders and internal staff and answers their questions. After the review, the Product Owner might adjust the product backlog and release complete product functionality.

Scrum Master

Whereas the Product Owner is product-focused, the Scrum Master is process-focused. They're concerned with:

• Ensuring that the team follows the best agile practices for the context they're working in
• Inspecting the work progress of Team Members daily to make sure they meet the deadlines
• Giving constructive feedback to Team Members on how they're performing
• Safeguarding the time of Team Members so they can dedicate themselves to what delivers the most value
• Getting customer feedback from the Product Owner
• Making sure that the Product Owner is clear about the goal and quality expectations
• Guiding the team throughout the sprint, clarifying any doubts about tasks and their execution
• Motivating Team Members
• Remove any blockage to a Team Members' success

The Scrum Master is also the one who manages the Scrum board. This board should be up-to-date and detailed at all times.

Managers with an extensive resume of successful product development projects are good candidates for Scrum Master. They know from experience where execution can go wrong and what to do to prevent or amend that. They're also great at assessing progress. 📈

Here's how the Scrum Master takes part in agile events:

• Sprint planning. The Scrum Master facilitates this ceremony and participates in effort or story point estimations.
• Daily stand-up. During this meeting, the Scrum Master focuses on clearing all the barriers in the way of the Team Member’s success. And if the development process should change, the Scrum Master will make sure that happens.
• Sprint review. The Scrum Master prepares this event in terms of logistics. When external stakeholders attend the meeting, it must go smoothly.
• Sprint retrospective. During this ceremony, Team Members should discuss what went wrong during the iteration. The Scrum Master should encourage a spirit of sharing and transparency, not only about technical and procedural aspects but also relational issues.

Team Member

These are the ultimate doers. ⛑️ Depending on the type of product, they may be developers, UX designers, and many other kinds of professionals.

Of course, depending on their skills, their role within the team varies. Nevertheless, they're the ones accountable for implementing amazing deliverables on time.

They're usually autonomous and creative, regardless of working together as a group, supporting each other. Actually, Team Members complement each other in terms of skills and experience. ☯️

It's not uncommon to find Team Members discussing ideas on how to work faster and easier. It can be a new tool or a new technique, for instance. And a single Team Member can belong to multiple teams.

Now, what else can we tell you about ideal Team Members?

• They trust and support each other much more. At the same time, they capitalize on each other's strengths and collaborate extensively. In the end, you should notice that the work flows smoothly.
• They learn and mentor one another. One day, a Team Member might teach another, and the day after, they might learn from the member they taught. This is continuous mentoring.
• With a shared skillset, Team Members are better equipped to support each other. They're also better prepared to switch technical specialties if needed.
• Team Members question success and come up with alternative ways of pushing continuous improvement all the time. It's in their 🧬, which means that they can't help it. And that's a great trait, as it's key to continuously growing products.
• Last, Team Members push themselves to deliver the absolute best outcome from an iteration.

Note: Project stakeholders are usually not part of the agile team itself, yet they're part of the overall equation. They might be members of the C suite, marketers, or anyone requesting or reviewing work from the team.

Here are team members' roles during the following agile events:

• Sprint planning. Team Members discuss the product backlog with the Product Owner to decide on the work that they will complete during the iteration.
• Daily stand-up. Every day, Team Members briefly describe the status of their work and what they’ll do next. If they have any blockages, they should ask for help.
• Sprint review. Team Members showcase complete work.
• Sprint retrospective. During this event, Team Members should talk about problems they faced along the iteration. Those can be technical problems, problems with the way they worked or interpersonal problems.

Majestic agile teams

Winning any team challenge would be a nightmare without a carefully thought out structure. Everyone's role in an agile team should be crystal clear. That's the basis for everybody to feel that they're contributing to the goal in a valuable way.

There are no individuals in the daily life of a great agile team. They aim for group success, not individual achievements. An agile team is a group of professionals who work together to achieve sprint goals. Long story short: no teamwork, no agile team.

Want to set your agile team up for success? Check out Easy Agile Programs or Easy Agile User Story Maps.

Your company has finally committed to practicing Scrum. WOOT!! 🎉 The promised land is laid out before you — self-organizing teams, sustainable delivery pace, and autonomy to do the right thing for the product and the team. You can't wait to get started! (Spoiler alert: There's an agile release train in your future.)

That was three months ago. Today, your product development organization is a hot mess. Teams are delivering the wrong work at the right time. Code is stuck on a shelf waiting for another team to deliver a dependency. And upper management is thinking about pulling the plug and going back to the older waterfall days.

If you work in a large organization with 50+ software developers and engineers, Scrum can be a tough nut to crack. The larger the organization, the more likely you'll have cross-team dependencies, scheduling conflicts, and challenges creating transparency between the business, product, and engineering teams. But fear not...

SAFe to the rescue! SAFe is short for scaled agile framework. Intended to help large companies implement Scrum, SAFe provides a framework for coordinating work across many Scrum teams.

Part of the SAFe framework is the concept of an agile release train (ART). If you're not familiar with ARTs, you're in the right place. We'll explain what an ART is, why it helps large companies deliver software solutions more efficiently, and how you can start an ART at your company.

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So, what is an agile release train?

First, let's explain the train metaphor. A train goes down the tracks intending to reach a specific destination. Along the way, the train may stop at multiple depots and add new cargo or passengers. Your software solution is the train tracks. Team contributions to that solution are the new cargo you pick up at the depots. And, the destination is the business value delivered to your users. Simple enough, huh?

ARTs help a group of teams stay aligned on the business purpose of their work and coordinate the delivery of solutions. Your teams are probably organized by function or value stream. An ART identifies the input and timing of each team's contributions that help achieve the business objective for the value stream. Think of it as cross-functional coordination on steroids.

Here are some basic requirements for an ART:

• The schedule is fixed so the scope is variable. But don't panic — once your teams have a consistent velocity, confidence in the scope will increase.
• All teams must be on the same sprint and release cadence.
• Each team follows the values and principles in the Agile Manifesto.
• ARTs participate in planning events for program increments (PIs) and inspect and adapt (I&A) ceremonies, which are similar to retrospectives and system demos.
• Innovation and planning (IP) iterations must be regularly scheduled between program increments. This provides your large team of individual agile teams time to innovate, update infrastructure, or indulge in some specialized training or a hot tech conference. IP iterations also offer a nice buffer in case your PI gets behind schedule.

If your organization is large enough, you may need multiple agile release trains focused on independent value streams. If that's the case, you may need an additional level of coordination found in a solution train. But let's not get ahead of ourselves.

Principles of an agile release train

An Agile Release Train (ART) takes its cues from the Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe) to ensure that multiple agile teams can align and collaborate seamlessly. Here are the core principles that guide an Agile Release Train:

Fixed schedule

ARTs adhere to a predefined schedule to deliver work consistently. This schedule is organized through Program Increments (PIs), which are typically 12 weeks long. The fixed cadence helps teams plan and deliver work efficiently.

Bi-weekly cadence

Much like individual agile teams work in sprints, ARTs operate in two-week segments known as system increments. This regular rhythm facilitates continuous progress and rapid feedback cycles.

Known velocity

The train's capacity to produce work in a given PI—referred to as velocity—is derived from historical performance data. By dividing projects into smaller tasks, teams can prioritize and deliver essential features more effectively.

Develop on cadence, release on demand

While development follows a rigid schedule, the release date is flexible and depends on project completion. This approach allows teams to continuously provide value to customers without being restricted by fixed release dates.

Program increment planning

PI planning is a cornerstone event where all agile teams within the ART come together, usually in person, to establish strategic objectives for the upcoming increment. This collaborative planning ensures everyone is aligned and working towards common goals.

Innovation and planning

At the end of each PI, teams participate in an innovation and planning (IP) event. This period is dedicated to planning the next increment, engaging in educational activities, and addressing infrastructure needs.

Inspect and adapt

To foster continuous improvement, ARTs hold an inspect and adapt (IA) event at the end of every PI. Teams assess their progress and identify areas for improvement through a problem-solving workshop, ensuring that they are always refining their processes and delivering better results.

Roles in a SAFe agile release train

Generally, teams use an ART in a Scrum environment, but, SAFe and agile release train concepts can apply to any agile methodology, including extreme programming (XP), Lean, or Kanban. Regardless of your chosen agile methodology, there are specific roles required to run an ART.

Agile teams

You can't have an ART without agile teams. Thank you, Captain Obvious. 🙄

One difference between SAFe and traditional Scrum is that ARTs allow you to operate with teams dedicated to a specific function, like frontend or backend development, quality assurance, DevOps, security, and business or product functions. ART itself is cross-functional so your teams don't have to be.

Each team is required to have a Scrum Master and Product Owner, just like in Scrum.

Release train engineers (RTEs)

Like Scrum Masters help their team members follow Scrum principles and best practices, release train engineers are servant leaders who do the same for the agile release train. RTEs help ensure the proper execution of program increments, remove blockers, manage risk, and work with the teams on improvements.

Release train engineers typically report to an Agile Management Office, or in the case of Lean, the portfolio management team.

Product managers

While some traditional Scrum teams use both product managers and product owners, SAFe operates at such a scale that both roles are required. The product manager drives the vision, roadmap, and feature backlog while the product owner is responsible for defining the PI objective with the team and executing the functionality.

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System architects

Again, due to the scale at which SAFe teams operate, a system architect is required to design the high-level structure of the overall system, determine how each piece fits into the puzzle, and create stable integration points to bring data and processes into a centralized ERP.

Business owners

The business owners are responsible for achieving business outcomes like revenue or customer acquisition goals. As the primary stakeholder for ARTS, business owners operate at a strategic level and will participate in vision, roadmap, and program increment discussions. Their job is to ensure products are built to meet specific business objectives.

Customers

Customers are the ultimate economic buyers or value users of the solution. Their feedback and needs are critical to the success of the ART.

System teams

System teams typically assist in building and maintaining development, continuous integration, and test environments. They play a crucial role in ensuring that the infrastructure supports the ART effectively.

Shared services

Shared services include specialists necessary for the success of an ART but who cannot be dedicated to a specific train. These often include data security experts, information architects, site reliability engineers (SRE), database administrators (DBAs), and many more.

Get started with your agile release train

So, you're ready to jump on the ART! Great! Let's walk through the steps to get you started on your journey.

1. Start with training

Don't skimp on this one. You likely started your agile practices with some training. Do the same here. All the hard work and best intentions in the world can't help you if you don't have a solid understanding of the basics.

Along with training teams, you'll also want to train your leadership teams and executives. Just like when your company adopted agile principles, you'll want to make sure you have buy-in, an understanding of how agile release trains work, and the roles required to support them.

2. Identify your value streams

There are two types of value streams in SAFe: operational and development. An operational value stream focuses on delivering the value to end-users that was created by the development value stream. An example might be fulfilling an order from an eCommerce website.

A development value stream focuses on developing the business solution, like building that eCommerce website.

Identifying your value streams is important before selecting individuals and teams to work on the value stream and filling the additional roles required for the ART. Once the players have been chosen, you're ready to start planning.

3. Prepare the program increment backlog

It's time to refine your program backlog and get ready for PI planning. Planning and refining are best when you can meet face-to-face, but sometimes in large organizations, that's impossible. If you have a distributed team, make sure you have a good backlog tool like Jira to help facilitate virtual meetings.

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Ideal for distributed, remote or face-to-face Program Increment Planning.

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Create your user stories at the program level to fit in a two-week timebox and plan your initial release. Until your teams have established a predictable velocity, leave some wiggle room in the iteration.

4. Start the program increment

Now, it's Scrum as usual. You have your sprint ready to go — just execute it like normal. At the end of the sprint, you can add your teams' contribution to the release train.

5. Rinse and repeat

Agile release trains are a continuous, iterative delivery mechanism. Just like traditional Scrum, your teams will build, release, learn, and then start building again. Don't forget to schedule an innovation and planning iteration to give the team a break from the train and time to improve their systems or their team.

Are you ready to jump on board?

SAFe and agile release trains help teams maintain agile development practices as they scale up in size. What may look complicated at first glance is actually a well-orchestrated process designed for team synchronization according to business value streams.

Use the Scrum knowledge you have within the individual teams, and then train in SAFe practices and get prepared to build your first agile release train. You'll learn by doing but save yourself and your company some headaches and money and invest in training first.

We've linked to some great learning articles throughout this piece, but here are a few more to help you jumpstart your SAFe learning:

• The Ultimate Guide to PI Planning [2021 SAFe Edition]
• SAFe Program Board 101: Everything You Need To Know
• Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe) 5.0 — The Easy Agile Review
• Streamline your workflows with better PI Planning software
• How to prepare for distributed PI Planning

Good luck on your agile journey and stay SAFe! (Too corny??🤦🏽‍♀️)

At Easy Agile, we embrace agile principles (of course), and we strive to help software development teams put agile methodologies into practice. However, with so much to get done each day, it's easy to lose sight of the core principles of the agile manifesto.

You're probably thinking that you read the agile principles before and now put them into practice...all day, every day. Why do we need to revisit them?

You don't need to memorize the principles. They're much more of a guiding light than a rote process. But lining up the agile principles against your everyday agile practices provides reinforcement that you're putting them into action. This also helps you identify areas for improvement. 🙌

The continued relevance of the agile manifesto's principles

The agile manifesto focuses on:

• Continuous improvement by responding to feedback and change
• Allowing software developers and cross-functional teams to organize in a way that embraces collaboration and interaction
• Involving customers in the development process and responding to their feedback

The manifesto outlines 12 agile principles which are the bread and butter of agile software development. We'd like to provide practical context to these agile principles, so we're going to organize them into three categories — building working software by being organized, helping teams collaborate, and tactics for keeping customers happy.

Getting organized so you can build working software

The first few agile principles we'll review revolve around the concept of working software — a product your customers can use as early in the software development process as possible. You’ll adapt it as you get feedback about what’s working well and what could be improved. This is in contrast to a waterfall methodology to development, which is a more linear approach that typically does not allow for iterative updates.

Creating working software you can continuously update is one goal. But, that's easier said than done without the help of purpose-built tools like Jira, whose goal is to help agile teams manage their chosen agile framework, whether it be Kanban or Scrum. (You can read our guide on the differences between Kanban and Scrum...or how to use them together. 💪)

Now, let’s look at which of the 12 agile principles fall into this category — #3, #7, and #8 — and how Jira helps implement a framework that adheres to them.

Agile principle #3

"Deliver working software frequently, from a couple of weeks to a couple of months, with a preference to the shorter timescale."

Atlassian (the makers of Jira) sums up the embodiment of this principle perfectly in its definition of a sprint: "A sprint is a short, time-boxed period when a Scrum team works to complete a set amount of work."

While agile sprints run over a short period of time, running them smoothly takes a lot of work for product owners and software developers. Luckily, Jira provides ways to streamline that work — check out our guide on automating parts of your sprint.

Agile principle #7

"Working software is the primary measure of progress."

Sprints can help you ensure that your team delivers working software incrementally. If planned well enough, a sprint can serve as a stopping point for the release of your next batch of features and functionality to your end-users.

Agile principle #8

"Agile processes promote sustainable development. The sponsors, developers, and users should be able to maintain a constant pace indefinitely."

Agile frameworks like Scrum can help measure if a team is maintaining a consistent pace. Within sprints, effort can be measured in different ways like agile story points. As sprints are completed, Jira automatically creates a visual report of how many story points a team is completing from sprint to sprint in its velocity chart.

Time for team collaboration

You're an agile team delivering working software and using a super-tool like Jira to plan your work and track your progress. But you need a human touch to truly follow agile values. Please welcome agile principles #4, #6, #11, #5, and #12 to the stage.

Agile principle #4

"Business people and developers must work together daily throughout the project."

Daily stand up meetings are a manifestation of this principle. In this meeting, each team member addressed three topics: (1) what they worked on yesterday; (2) what they're working on today; and (3) what is preventing them from making progress today.

Agile principle #6

"The most efficient and effective method of conveying information to and within a development team is face-to-face conversation."

Whether it's in an in-person or remote meeting, conveying information is tricky — but (phew) we've already addressed that with practices like daily sprints and velocity charts to exchange information across team members and to visually review team progress. And you'll soon see other ways that agile software development teams organize and communicate with each other.

Agile principle #11

"The best architectures, requirements, and designs emerge from self-organizing teams."

Well, first, what exactly is a self-organizing team? It does not need outside direction or micromanagement to figure out what to work on and how that work gets defined and prioritized. These teams figure out how to plan their work, iterate to deliver that work, and then collaborate on how to continually improve. The agile ceremonies of Scrum — stand up, sprint planning, sprint review, and retrospective — are a working example of this.

Agile principle #5

"Build projects around motivated individuals. Give them the environment and support they need, and trust them to get the job done."

Ok, so we went out of order on this principle — but for good reason. Following principle #11 makes sense because good self-organized teams are inherently motivated. They work together to figure out how to get the job done and to help each other when someone is stuck. That said, it's important to have defined roles in an agile team, like a Scrum master who can motivate and give feedback to team members.

Agile principle #12

"At regular intervals, the team reflects on how to become more effective, then tunes and adjusts its behavior accordingly."

This principle perfectly describes a retrospective — a team meeting to reflect on your most recent sprint or iteration of work and to discuss how to improve for the next one. By answering these questions: (1) What went well?; (2) What could have gone better?; and (3) What can we adjust to improve for next time? your team is collaborating and interacting in an effort to become more effective.

Achieving customer satisfaction

Last, but certainly not least, in the agile principles are customer needs. Who is your customer? What are their needs? How do you respond to their feedback to make sure you provide a working product that they love? Enter principles #1, #2, #9, and #10.

Agile principle #1

"Our highest priority is to satisfy the customer through early and continuous delivery of valuable software."

It turns out that to satisfy your customer, you need to understand who your customer is. 😉 This takes work. A proven methodology for figuring out who your customers are is to create customer personas. These are fictionalized profiles of your customers that document things like their behavioral patterns, their shared pain points, and what their general demographic information looks like.

Agile principle #2

"Welcome changing requirements, even late in development. Agile processes harness change for the customer’s competitive advantage."

Requirements can't be effectively changed unless they are defined and made visible to stakeholders for feedback. Even if that feedback causes change late in a development cycle, that's ok! (You'll probably also receive change-inducing feedback on the working software you've already delivered. 😎) Tools like a product roadmap or a user story map that provide visual views of your product backlog help give your customers and stakeholders a platform to have the ability to provide feedback.

Agile principle #9

"Continuous attention to technical excellence and good design enhances agility."

One word: retrospective.

​Ok, two more words: sprint review.

In the context of principle #9, the retrospective and sprint review are two agile ceremonies to use to continually adjust your software's quality and design to best meet your customers’ needs.

Agile principle #10

"Simplicity–the art of maximizing the amount of work not done–is essential."

Imagine you had views of your customer profiles (personas), a visual mapping of their journey through your product (user story map), and a prioritized view of your plan to deliver your product (roadmap). What a time to be alive! If you're doing all three, chances are your team has pretty great insights into whether or not you're getting the right work done. 💪

Putting the 12 agile principles into action

Now you understand how the agile principles have been formed into agile frameworks and how tools like Jira can help agile teams run with those frameworks. We've also mentioned three effective ways to put these principles into action, and our products make it easy to do.

• Easy Agile TeamRhythm supports agile teams from planning through to review with features that support user story mapping, backlog refinement, sprint and version planning, and team retrospectives.
• Easy Agile Personas for Jira provides teams with a customer-centric approach to backlog refinement.
• Easy Agile Roadmaps for Jira gives visual insights for teams and stakeholders around the vision and plan for a product.
• Easy Agile Programs is a complete PI Planning solution that makes scaled cross-team planning and execution easy.

Check out all of our agile solutions in Atlassian's marketplace!

Agile software development is like a roadmap for getting software done right. As highlighted in the agile manifesto, it prioritizes real conversations over tools, delivering working software instead of drowning in documentation, collaborating with customers rather than just negotiating contracts, and being quick to adapt to change. The manifesto emphasizes the power of collaboration within cross-functional teams, making it relevant for project management in various contexts.

Think of agile as a mindset, not just a method. It empowers project teams to give and receive feedback in a friendly, iterative environment that leads to great results. While it gained popularity in software development, agile principles can actually work wonders for any project team. Whether it’s in construction management, content marketing, or even planning weddings, agile has you covered.

Let’s dive into why agile project management is a great fit for any team. We’ll explore how its principles can seamlessly fit into your project processes. Remember, it doesn't matter which agile framework—like Scrum or Kanban—you choose, as long as it suits your team. In short:

• Agile principles are perfect for team cooperation.
• Agile workflows for project teams are conducive to continuous iteration and improvement.
• The framework you choose, Scrum or Kanban, is less important than your team mindset.
• Using agile project management across your organization increases visibility and coordination.

Agile principles in project management

The core principles of agile — collaboration, empowerment, and transparency — are ideal for project management. No matter the type of team, the goal should be continuous improvement. Teams meet this goal by working together with an iterative approach to fulfill their projects.

Agile is a mindset of adaptability, sharing progress, and learning from what worked and what didn't. You improve as you go.

Thomas Edison encapsulates the spirit of an iterative approach perfectly: “I have not failed. I've just found 10,000 ways that don't work.” 💡It's this attitude that is the agile mindset.

Entities such as the Project Management Institute espouse the virtues of agile project management and its impact on teams’ collaboration:

• Teams are responsible for project delivery and self-organize in a way to maximize their opportunities for success.
• Agile project managers encourage discussion of frameworks and processes, but also encourage independent thinking.
• Agile values foster trust and healthy working relationships.
• As a decision-making framework, agile project management promotes accountability while driving continuous decision-making and delivery.

Agile workflows for project teams

How can a traditional project team become self-organizing enough to become more agile? Let's step through a Scrum workflow in the context of a general project.

Backlog

Development teams work from a product backlog, which is a list of prioritized features desired by a customer. But this list doesn't have to be a set of software features. It can be any set of tasks or outputs that a project team needs to complete.

Sprint planning meeting

Agile teams work in sprints, which are set periods of time (e.g., two weeks) to complete an agreed-upon amount of work. During sprint planning, the team reviews and discusses the top priorities from the backlog. They then decide what can be delivered in the sprint and commit to that work.

Let's use a marketing team working on a campaign as a non-typical example. In a traditional project management setting, the team may take a waterfall approach. They would create a months-long content calendar of social media, blog articles, videos, and other content. Under agile, they would only commit to the next two weeks of content production before deciding what comes next.

Stand-Ups

A stand-up is a daily meeting of team members. During it, each member answers three questions:

• What did you work on yesterday?
• What are you going to work on today?
• Are there any issues blocking your work from being completed?

The questions provide each person the opportunity to share their progress and to provide support in case they can unblock a teammate's work by helping to resolve their issue.

Sprint review

When the sprint is completed, teams meet to review and demo the work they just finished. In our marketing case, it can be a time for the team to get together to watch their content videos, read the comments and feedback from their social media posts, and review key metrics from all of their content.

Sprint retrospectives

Product development teams meet after each sprint to discuss how they might improve things for their next sprint. In this meeting, the team discusses:

• What went well?
• What didn't go so well?
• What can we improve going forward?

Suppose your marketing team had a post go unexpectedly viral. Why was it so effective? What can we learn from that to adjust the next two weeks of content? These are the types of questions to ask yourselves so you can continue to iterate and to learn together as a team.

Scrum or Kanban?

The workflow outlined above is a typical agile Scrum framework. However, it does not have to be the way agile practices are implemented in project management. Different types of projects may call for different frameworks. For example, in Scrum, roles are more clearly defined than in Kanban.

Scrum

A Scrum team is made of specific roles that are tasked with different responsibilities for moving the team through the development process. According to the Scrum Guide:

• Developers create a plan for each sprint iteration, define completeness of work, adapt their plan each day, and hold each other accountable.
• A product owner is responsible for managing the product backlog by communicating product goals, prioritizing items, and providing transparency into the full backlog.
• The Scrum master coaches and guides the team in its adoption of Scrum.

Kanban

Some projects may be more suited for Kanban as compared to Scrum. There are key differences between the two frameworks that may influence a team's approach to agile project management:

• Continuous workflow vs. fixed sprint iterations
• Continuous delivery vs. delivery after the completion of each sprint
• No set roles vs. defined scrum roles

Kanban teams use a Kanban board to visualize their tasks and to limit the amount of work that is in progress at a given time.

The agile framework you use, whether it is Scrum or Kanban, is less important than your team’s shared understanding of how you work together to achieve common goals. The beauty of an agile approach is its conduciveness to tweaking your framework and how you use it as you iterate and retrospect.

Agile project management for your whole organization

As software development teams continue to embrace agile processes, they can encourage other teams to join them. Using agile in other departments empowers those teams’ ability to collaborate. It also creates a shared sense of unity across your entire organization because you’re all applying the same methodology to get to each of your goals.

Try a daily stand-up for department leads to improve cross-organizational communication. Keep it short and to the point, focusing on the topics that will help the work progress.

Die Planung ist eine kritische Phase des agilen Prozesses. Sie bietet die Gelegenheit, sich als Team auf Prioritäten zu einigen und die Arbeit in einer Reihenfolge zu organisieren, die für einen reibungslosen Ablauf sorgt. Der Planungsprozess hilft agilen Softwareentwicklungsteams und anderen Produktentwicklungsteams dabei, neue Informationen zu sortieren, sich an Abhängigkeiten anzupassen und auf sich ändernde Kundenbedürfnisse einzugehen.

Agile ist das Gegenteil der traditionellen Wasserfall-Projektplanung, die einen schrittweisen Ansatz verfolgt. Waterfall dominiert seit vielen Jahren die Projektplanung. Zu Beginn eines Projekts wurden detaillierte Pläne erstellt, die strikt eingehalten werden mussten. Dies mag ein Projekt oder Produkt voranbringen, aber neue Entwicklungen, die außerhalb des „Masterplans“ auftreten könnten, werden dabei nicht berücksichtigt.

Agile ist ein iterativer Prozess, der Teams dabei hilft, Verschwendung zu reduzieren und die Effizienz zu maximieren, um letztlich den Kunden einen Mehrwert zu bieten. Dieser kundenorientierte Ansatz hilft Teams, während des gesamten Entwicklungsprozesses fundierte Entscheidungen zu treffen — Entscheidungen, die den Stakeholdern kontinuierlich und konsistent einen Mehrwert bieten.

Einer der größten Vorteile eines iterativen agilen Ansatzes besteht darin, dass er frühzeitiges Feedback von Stakeholdern ermöglicht. Sie müssen nicht raten, ob Sie die richtigen Entscheidungen treffen oder nicht — Sie können jeden Schritt herausfinden, indem Sie die Beteiligten direkt in Ihren Prozess einbeziehen. Sie können Ihren Plan nach Bedarf anpassen, je nachdem, was den Kunden zu jedem Zeitpunkt den größten Mehrwert bietet.

Auch wenn Sie Teil eines erfahrenen agilen Teams sind, gibt es immer Verbesserungsmöglichkeiten und Prozesse, die optimiert werden müssen. In diesem Beitrag werden einige unproduktive Fehler beschrieben, die Teams bei der agilen Planung machen, einschließlich der Frage, wie agile Teams diese häufigen Fallstricke vermeiden können.

Agiler Planungsfehler #1: Nicht auf derselben Wellenlänge wie die Stakeholder zu sein

Binden Sie Interessengruppen in Ihren Planungsprozess ein? Verstehen sie Ihre Ziele und warum Sie jede Entscheidung treffen? Die direkte Zusammenarbeit mit allen Beteiligten, sowohl internen Interessenvertretern als auch Nutzern Ihres Produkts, wird Ihnen helfen, sich ein klares Bild von Bedürfnissen und Einschränkungen zu machen. Außerdem erhalten Sie die Informationen, die Sie benötigen, um zu entscheiden, was wann getan werden sollte.

Es ist niemals eine gute Idee, sich auf Annahmen auszuruhen. Ihre Stakeholder leben in einer anderen Welt als der, in die Sie tief verwurzelt sind, mit anderen eigenen Prioritäten und Annahmen. Damit Sie Ergebnisse erzielen können, die die Erwartungen Ihrer Stakeholder erfüllen, müssen Sie sich auf diese Erwartungen einigen. Binden Sie Ihre Stakeholder in die Planung ein, aber stellen Sie sicher, dass jeder versteht, dass sich die Erwartungen im Laufe des Prozesses ändern können, basierend auf neuen Informationen, die aus Erfolgen, Misserfolgen und Kundenreaktionen gewonnen werden.

Agiler Planungsfehler #2: Abhängigkeiten nicht berücksichtigen

Die Nichtberücksichtigung von Abhängigkeiten in der agilen Planung führt zu Engpässen, verzögerten Releases und untergräbt die Zusammenarbeit im Team. Die Zusammenarbeit innerhalb und zwischen Teams ist erforderlich, damit ein Unternehmen effektiv liefern kann. Wenn mehrere Teams an miteinander verbundenen Funktionen arbeiten und der Fortschritt eines Teams durch ein anderes blockiert wird, verlangsamt sich der gesamte Entwicklungszyklus. Ohne klare Sichtbarkeit der Abhängigkeiten kann sich die Arbeit verzögern und Termine nicht eingehalten werden.

Um Unterbrechungen des Arbeitsablaufs zu minimieren und zu vermeiden, sollten Sie sich die Zeit nehmen, die Beteiligten zu konsultieren und Abhängigkeiten frühzeitig zu antizipieren. Tools, die Ihnen helfen, Abhängigkeiten zu visualisieren und abzubilden, und gemeinsame Roadmaps zur Verfolgung teamübergreifender Abhängigkeiten ermöglichen es Ihnen, sich ein Bild von Abhängigkeiten zu machen und die Arbeit so abzufolgen, dass Hindernisse vermieden werden. Die proaktive Verwaltung von Abhängigkeiten sorgt für reibungslosere Iterationen, eine schnellere Markteinführung und einen besser vorhersehbaren agilen Prozess.

Agiler Planungsfehler #3: Verwendung langweiliger, flacher Produktlandkarten

Flache Produktrückstände sind fad und langweilig 😴. Denken Sie an Karottenkuchen ohne Zuckerguss. Ihnen fehlen die Details und Funktionen, die Sie benötigen, um die gesamte Geschichte Ihres Produkt-Backlogs zu erfassen.

Sobald Sie mehr als eine Handvoll Artikel haben, werden sie außerdem überwältigend und es ist schwierig, sie sinnvoll zu organisieren. Es wird weniger klar, welcher Punkt der wichtigste ist, und es wird schwieriger, sicherzustellen, dass Ihre Entscheidungen mit dem übergeordneten Ziel des Projekts übereinstimmen.

Wenn Sie Ihre Roadmap planen, benötigen Sie einen Kontext, und Sie müssen in der Lage sein, die Kundenreise klar zu erkennen. User-Story-Maps visualisieren Sie die Kundenreise im Planungsprozess und während des gesamten Prozesses der Produktentwicklung. Sie nutzen User Stories — die kleinste Arbeitseinheit, die dem Kunden einen Mehrwert bieten kann —, sodass Sie den Backlog aus Kundensicht planen und organisieren können.

📕 Lesen Sie unsere ultimativer Leitfaden für User Story Maps um mehr zu erfahren.

Agiler Planungsfehler #4: Dem Plan nicht zu erlauben, zu leben, zu atmen und sich anzupassen

Wie wir bereits besprochen haben, ist Agile ein iterativer Ansatz. Das bedeutet, dass Ihre agile Planung Raum für Änderungen lassen muss. Ihr Plan sollte in der Lage sein, mit jedem Sprint oder jeder Produkt-Roadmap zu wachsen und sich anzupassen.

Zu Beginn eines Sprints fehlen Ihnen die Informationen, die Sie benötigen, um das Gesamtbild zu sehen. Sie haben nicht alles, was Sie benötigen, um die perfekte Lösung zu entwickeln, und das ist in Ordnung. Das ist alles Teil des Prozesses. Stunden oder Tage damit zu verbringen, den perfekten Plan auszuarbeiten, verschwendet nur Zeit, die besser damit verbracht werden könnte, zu lernen und Probleme zu lösen, sobald sie auftauchen. Was Sie in der Planungsphase für den größten Nutzen hielten, könnte im Laufe der Zeit völlig anders sein.

Möglicherweise müssen Sie Ihren Plan ändern, nachdem eine Straßensperre in einem täglichen Gespräch auftaucht, oder Sie erfahren von einem Kundenproblem, das Ihre Richtung völlig ändert. Wiederholungen sind unvermeidlich und willkommen! Sie helfen Ihnen, mit eingehenden Informationen Schritt zu halten, während Sie voneinander, von Stakeholdern und Ihren Kunden lernen.

Agile Planung ist kein Versprechen. Es ist eine Gliederung, die Ihnen hilft, Ihr Ziel zu erreichen, und die sich mit Ihren Zielen und Umständen ändert.

Agiler Planungsfehler #5: Rückblickende Erkenntnisse nicht in die folgende Planungssitzung einfließen lassen

Rückblicke sind ein wesentlicher Bestandteil des agilen Prozesses. Sie geben Teams die Möglichkeit, über alles nachzudenken, was in einem einzelnen Sprint oder nach der Fertigstellung eines Produkts passiert ist.

Eine effektive Retrospektive stellt dem gesamten Team wichtige Fragen, die den Prozess beim nächsten Mal verbessern können. Was ist gut gelaufen? Was ist es wert, es noch einmal zu wiederholen? Was lief nicht so gut? Was könnte beim nächsten Mal verbessert werden? Welche Hindernisse oder Abhängigkeiten sind entstanden? Was hast du gelernt? Wie hast du dich am Ende des Sprints gefühlt?

Eine Retrospektive bietet Einblicke, die die Effizienz, die Teamarbeit und die Teamdynamik, die Effektivität der Tools und die Kommunikation mit den Stakeholdern verbessern werden.

Es reicht nicht aus, einfach eine Retrospektive abzuhalten oder rückwirkendes Feedback zu sammeln, um an Wert zu gewinnen. Sie müssen sicherstellen, dass Sie das Feedback in das folgende Sprint-Planungsgespräch einbeziehen und Maßnahmen ergreifen, die zu einer spürbaren Verbesserung führen. Die nächste Iteration wird umso besser für die Zeit sein, die Sie damit verbringen, auf der Grundlage des Gelernten nachzudenken und sich zu verbessern.

Agiler Planungsfehler #6: Auswahl von Tools, die keinen kundenorientierten Ansatz verfolgen

Unabhängig davon, ob Ihr Team einen Scrum-Prozess, Kanban-Boards oder andere agile Methoden verwendet, sollten die von Ihnen ausgewählten Tools immer kundenorientiert sein. Und Sie müssen sie weiterhin so einsetzen, dass der Kunde bei der Entscheidungsfindung immer an erster Stelle steht.

Teams können in die Falle tappen und glauben, dass sie sich auf den Kunden konzentrieren, wenn sie nicht viel tun, außer einfachen agilen Methoden und generischen Prozessen zu folgen. Kunden müssen bereits in der Planungsphase in Ihren Entwicklungsprozess eingebunden werden, sodass bei jeder Entscheidung, die ein Teammitglied trifft, zuerst die Kundenbedürfnisse berücksichtigt werden.

Wählen Sie Planungstools, die Ihrem gesamten Team helfen, genau zu verstehen, was Ihre Kunden bewegt, und schauen Sie immer vorbei, um sicherzustellen, dass Sie Entscheidungen im Einklang mit Ihren Kunden treffen.

Zum Beispiel Personas bieten ein tiefes Verständnis dafür, was Kunden wollen, brauchen, nicht wollen usw. Sie geben wichtige Informationen über Kundenprobleme, Wünsche, demografische Merkmale, Ziele, Einkaufsmuster und vieles mehr preis. Wir empfehlen dringend, Kunden-Personas zu entwickeln, um ein umfassendes Bild von allen Personen zu erhalten, die Ihr Produkt verwenden werden. Es reicht jedoch nicht aus, Personas einfach herumliegen zu lassen.

Sie müssen diese Personas in Ihren agilen Planungsprozess einbeziehen und sie bei der Bearbeitung von Problemen und der Weiterentwicklung Ihres Produkts in den Mittelpunkt stellen.

We’re off to the races! 🏃🏃‍♀️ Sprints are a key component of agile methodology. A sprint is a predefined time period in which agile teams work together towards an agreed-upon sprint goal. There are four types of agile meetings that occur over the course of a sprint, and each is vital to ensuring the success of the agile process. It’s all about sprinting through a predetermined amount of work to get to the finish line, where you learn from your process and begin the race again (only better off because of what you learned during the previous sprint).

Agile meetings are used to get team members, leaders, and stakeholders on the same page, and they guide the process of an agile sprint or Scrum.

This post will cover the four key agile meetings, which include sprint planning, daily standups, sprint reviews, and sprint retrospectives. Plus, we’ll discuss a bonus agile meeting that’s utilized for backlog refinement.

Agile meetings vs. Scrum meetings

Scrum is an agile methodology that’s most commonly used in software development. Scrum meetings are technically a type of agile meeting, but they have more specific parameters designed to fit within the Scrum framework. The process revolves around a 2-4 week sprint involving a product owner, Scrum Master, and the entire Scrum team.

We covered Scrum meetings (ceremonies) in detail in another article. For the purposes of this post, we’ll focus on the four main agile meeting types. These processes and best practices can be applied across multiple agile methodologies, including Scrum and Kanban. This framework can also be applied across industries beyond software development and can adapt to the needs of most teams.

Simply put: Scrum has a more rigid framework that follows four ceremonies/meetings. The agile process is much the same, with four very similar meetings, but there’s more flexibility to adjust the time frame of the sprint and adapt the process when not following Scrum guidelines specifically. Okay, maybe that’s still not simply put, but it wouldn’t be agile if it was linear and straightforward.

The 4 types of agile meetings

There are four central agile meetings: sprint planning, daily standups, sprint reviews, and sprint retrospective meetings. A sprint starts with a sprint planning meeting. Each day, a daily standup meeting is held. Finally, at the end of the sprint, a sprint review and retrospective are held. The process repeats with new springs until the product, project, or work is complete.

1. Sprint planning meeting

The sprint planning meeting occurs at the beginning of a sprint and involves the entire team. In sprint planning, the entire team meets to discuss and agree upon which work tasks (backlog items) should be moved to the sprint backlog — the items that need to be completed by the end of the sprint. During the meeting, sprint goals are determined, and the team aligns on expectations.

Without a sprint planning meeting to outline the sprint backlog (tasks that need to be completed), the team will waste time during the sprint trying to determine which work takes precedent.

Sprint planning mistakes to avoid:

• Starting planning without a refined backlog
• Not being on the same page as your stakeholders
• Ignoring the customer and the customer journey when making plans
• Creating a rigid plan that doesn’t have room to grow or adapt
• Using bland, flat product maps that lack critical context
• Failing to incorporate retrospective insights in the following planning session

Learn more about common agile planning mistakes and how your development team can avoid these pitfalls.

2. Daily standup meeting

The daily standup meeting occurs every day of the sprint. In the Scrum process, this meeting might also be called the daily Scrum meeting. It’s a chance for the team to connect about the work that was completed the previous day and what each person or team plans to complete over the course of the next 24 hours.

The meeting aims to answer three important questions:

• What work was completed since the last standup to help the team reach the sprint goal?
• What work do you plan to complete today?
• Is there anything currently in your way or hindering your progress?

This is a good time to address any bottlenecks. If work planned from the previous day wasn’t completed, what caused the delay, and how can the team work together to solve any problems keeping the work from moving forward?

A standup meeting is short and to the point so everyone can get back to the work they hope to complete. So short that it’s often recommended participants stand for the duration of the meeting. Hence the name daily standup. It includes all team members and ideally takes place at the same time every day to ensure everyone can always attend.

Daily standup mistakes to avoid:

• Not keeping track of the time during the meeting
• Continually going over the allotted meeting time
• Rambling participants who aren’t prepared to answer the meeting’s key questions
• Skipping the meeting due to lack of time
• Team members showing up late to the meeting or missing it altogether
• Allowing the loudest voices to overshadow the rest of the team
• Letting someone state the same task on multiple consecutive days
• Failing to address potential bottlenecks
• Assigning work beyond a person's capacity

3. Sprint review meeting

The sprint review is an opportunity for the team to showcase the work they accomplished during the sprint. This meeting might be an internal presentation or a more formal demo to stakeholders, depending on the needs of the project and how far along work is.

Sprint review mistakes to avoid:

• Not properly preparing for the meeting or demonstration
• Not bringing stakeholders in on your process
• Failing to demonstrate how the work brings value to the customer
• Exaggerating or embellishing successes
• Failing to address any problems and how they were solved
• Not incorporating sprint review feedback into the next sprint planning meeting

4. Sprint retrospective meeting

The retrospective is a crucial part of the agile process. The meeting comes at the end of the sprint, bringing the entire team together to assess their processes and discuss how they can improve next time.

Which aspects of the sprint went well, and what can you learn from that success? What didn’t go so well, and what bottlenecks did the team hit? What could be done better next time? Since agile is all about learning and iterating, there are lessons to be learned after each sprint. Everything from the good to the bad to the mediocre can be transformed into actionable improvements.

Retrospective mistakes to avoid:

• Blaming individual team members for bottlenecks
• Allowing only the loudest voices to provide insight
• Failing to empower the softer voices in the room
• Repeating the same questions over and over without changing things up
• Allowing the retrospective to run too long (aim for two hours for a two-week sprint)
• Skipping a retrospective due to a lack of time or resources
• Forgetting about or not including stakeholder insights or needs
• Failing to improve upon the sprint retrospective process (retrospective the retrospective!)
• Failing to incorporate retrospective insights in the next sprint

Bonus: Backlog refinement meeting

It could be argued that there’s a fifth agile meeting, especially in the product development world. Before the sprint planning meeting, the product owner must create a product backlog, which comprises all of the tasks and items the team needs to complete in order to fully develop the end product or project. The items include user stories, bug fixes, features, and other tasks that must be addressed to achieve the end goal.

Backlog refinement prepares the backlog for sprint planning by ordering items to deliver the most impact over the next sprint. During backlog refinement, a product owner ensures that product backlog items contain enough information, detail, and prioritization for the team to make smart decisions about what to tackle when.

A meeting to refine the backlog may occur before sprint planning begins, depending on the current state of the product backlog. Outside of the product development industry, the product backlog might be akin to a master project task list.

Backlog refinement meeting mistakes to avoid:

• Not completing backlog refinement in time for sprint planning
• Leaving too much backlog refinement for the planning meeting
• Failing to prioritize items that provide customer value
• Not incorporating new stakeholder feedback, questions, and concerns

Agile meetings: Final review

So there you have it! The four key agile meetings are sprint planning, daily standups, sprint reviews, and sprint retrospectives, with an honorable mention going out to backlog refinement.

Let’s review each meeting’s purpose:

• Sprint planning gets everyone on the same page about what needs to be accomplished over the course of the coming sprint.
• Daily standups ensure the team stays on track and helps them address and resolve any potential bottlenecks.
• Sprint reviews are an opportunity for the team to showcase the work accomplished during the sprint to stakeholders and receive critical feedback.
• Sprint retrospectives allow the team to come together to discuss what went well, what didn’t go well, and how they can improve next time.
• Backlog refinement prepares the backlog for sprint planning in order to deliver the most impact over the next sprint.

Hold effective agile meetings with Easy Agile

Easy Agile is committed to helping teams work better with agile. Easy Agile builds products specifically designed for Jira users to help agile teams work more efficiently and effectively.

We regularly publish lists of tools, advice articles, and how-to guides for agile teams. If you work with Jira, you’ll find our resources are especially helpful in navigating the ins and outs of product development and the Jira apps that will improve the way your team collaborates.

“Agile” is a simple word that means quite a lot today. What was once resigned to software developers and product development is now commonplace in many businesses, and agile implementation is showing no sign of slowing down.

It all boils down to this: Businesses today must be able to adapt fast.

The rigid approaches that worked for years don’t fit our rapidly changing business landscapes. Businesses of all shapes and sizes need to continually adapt to changing requirements, the changing needs of a global economy, cultural shifts, and evolving technological advancements.

It’s clear that agile is the way of the future, but how do you implement such a massive change across an organization, especially enterprises? Do you need a top-down approach, a bottom-up approach, or something in between? Let’s take a closer look at the benefits of agile and how to choose the best agile implementation approach.

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Why switch to an agile approach?

We’ve covered the benefits of agile in detail in our Beginner's Guide to Agile Methodology, but let’s recap some of the key points and why so many businesses are choosing to make the switch.

Agile practices focus on an iterative approach that continually adapts to new information and circumstances. By contrast, traditional project management generally adopts a waterfall approach — the project manager lays out a plan at the beginning of a project that the project team is expected to follow to the letter.

The problem with the traditional project management process is that it leaves little room to quickly grow and evolve. Agile project management and agile software development, on the other hand, need feedback and iterations at every turn. Agile teams test early and often to ensure they are on the right path, and they make adjustments in real-time.

The benefits of agile methods are far-reaching — that’s why we love it! Though it may take time to implement, agile is a worthy investment for any future-focused organization.

Additional benefits of agile:

• Managers can more easily account for the capacity of individuals and entire teams.
• The team can better manage work in progress (WIP).
• Everyone can clearly visualize the prioritization of tasks.
• Bottlenecks or roadblocks are addressed before they halt progress.
• Wasteful processes are eliminated or changed to improve efficiency.
• Multiple voices are included in the decision-making process.
• Teams can make iterations on products or projects in real-time.
• Stakeholders, customers, and end users are involved in your processes.
• Teams can provide continuous delivery to customers and stakeholders.
• Collaboration and teamwork improve.

With Easy Agile Programs you can equip your distributed or co-located teams to implement the Scaled Agile Framework® (SAFe®) without leaving Jira.

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Agile implementation: Top-down or bottom-up?

So, you believe in agile and you’re ready to make it happen, but what’s the best approach? Do you implement it from the top-down or bottom-up? Let’s find out!

A top-down approach to agile implementation starts with those in charge. It often begins with management or business owners who hear about the benefits of agile and want their business to adopt agile practices. The problem is, when an idea only comes from the top, it can catch the rest of the organization off guard. If those in charge don’t give enough notice or provide all of the necessary resources and time to implement new ways of working, employees can become resentful and push back against the change.

On the other hand, when agile implementation comes from the bottom-up, leadership can push back. Teams and team leaders may want to improve their processes and adopt new ways of working, but they may not get adequate support or resources when they need them. It can take time to convince those in charge of the benefits of agile, which can take away from the time needed to actually learn and implement agile practices.

A hybrid approach

The good news is you don’t need to pick just one. The best approach for your business may turn out to be a hybrid approach. The more people you have on board, the better.

Agile implementation is easiest and most effective when as many people as possible buy into the process. It’s best if you have buy-in throughout multiple levels of your organization, from employees to managers to owners to CEOs.

Push-back on change is quite common in organizations, no matter the industry. It’s important to have people throughout the company who believe in the value of agile, are passionate about agile processes, and are excited about the possibilities agile presents.

Choosing an agile framework

As you implement agile principles, you’ll need to choose the framework that works best for your team. Depending on the needs of your team and organization, you may choose to adopt one framework or establish a mixture of frameworks.

Below, we’ll outline a few popular agile methodologies.

Scrum

Scrum is a strange word that’s very popular as a software development process. It’s a series of events that revolve around repeating sprints. One sprint (or Scrum) begins with sprint planning. The product owner reviews the product backlog, which represents all of the work that needs to be completed. They choose which items/tasks are the most important for the upcoming sprint and move those tasks into the sprint backlog.

Next, the development team, guided by the Scrum Master, works over a two-week span to complete the sprint backlog. Each day, the team meets for daily standups, which allow the team to go over what was accomplished over the previous 24 hours and discuss any possible roadblocks that stand in the way of the team completing work.

Lastly, the team completes a sprint review to gather feedback from stakeholders. They also conduct a sprint retrospective to discuss what went well and what didn’t over the course of the sprint. The insights are carried over into the next sprint to help all team members keep improving.

Wow! 🤯 That was a whirlwind explanation of Scrum. If you want to understand the process in more detail, we cover Scrum in a number of other guides, including the difference between Kanban and Scrum and guides to Scrum sprint planning and Scrum retrospectives.

Kanban

The Kanban framework is a visual process that helps teams manage the amount of work in progress. It allows teams and team leaders to see an at-a-glance view of what’s currently in progress and what’s on the horizon.

A Kanban board has three sections: to-do, doing, and done. Tasks flow throughout these sections one at a time to ensure no one is taking on more than one task at once. This ensures focus is always put on work in progress, no one gets bogged down with too many tasks, and potential bottlenecks are discovered before they impede productivity.

Chances are you’ve seen a Kanban board in action in some form or another. Trello is an example of an interactive Kanban board. The Kanban framework can be used on its own or paired with other frameworks, such as Scrum.

Lean

The lean methodology focuses on eliminating waste to improve efficiency. Lean follows five main principles: identify value, map the value stream, create flow, establish a pull system, and seek perfection.

Lean aims to waste less time by ensuring processes, communication, and the transfer of products or services run smoothly. When waste is eliminated and time is optimized, businesses can reduce costs. Efficiency is paired with a continuous improvement mindset, which helps teams work better together and deliver ever-improving products and services.

➡️ Learn more: Understanding Lean Agile and the 5 Lean Principles.

These are only a few popular agile methodologies. To learn more, read our article on 8 Software Development Methodologies Explained.

Seamless agile implementation

Agile implementation works best when people at all levels of the organization buy into the agile transformation. A top-down approach means the leadership is on board, but it forces employees to adopt a new way of working, and they may not be comfortable with the change. When it’s the other way around, employees, team members, and team leaders will struggle to implement agile without the support from those in charge and the people who allocate resources. A hybrid approach is often ideal, where as many people as possible are excited about and invested in the transition.

With the right tools, agile implementation becomes even easier. Easy Agile is dedicated to helping teams work better with agile. We design products that highlight the customer journey and allow teams to collaborate with each other seamlessly.

Easy Agile Programs is simple to use, collaborative, flexible, and it integrates directly with Jira. You can contact our team at any time to learn more about our suite of Jira products!

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Agile software development uses iteration to improve agile practices. More than that, development teams use agile principles to enhance self-organization. Improving the Scrum framework leads to improvements in rapid deliverables and product outcomes through iteration.

But taking on agile when you're not familiar with this approach can be challenging. Team members need a bridging tool. A bridging tool like virtual team building activities supports new learning activities. New learning promotes new ways of thinking that promote continuous improvement. Enter, Agile games!

Learn how these games can support team-building and promote problem-solving for better software development processes, and which agile games to look for.

What are agile games?

Agile games are online games that entire teams can play. These games were created for team-building activities. They help nurture effective teams by getting everyone to work towards a common goal. When agile teams put their heads together, communicate effectively, and take on new learning, everyone wins — including product owners.

Team building games drive innovation by encouraging a new perspective through team-building exercises. Agile games are fun, but they are also practical. This practical approach enables team members to adopt new behaviors.

When they play agile games, teams implement better working methodologies in software development. Agile games support team building through new learning activities and iteration.

Ultimately, agile games augment the good communication and self-organization of DevOps teams. The outcome of playing agile games is that your team members more rapidly assimilate agile software.

As agile teams improve their problem-solving skills, they reap multiple benefits that might have fallen along the wayside if they didn't use an agile methodology or these agile games.

Types of agile games

There are multiple agile games that you can use to familiarize new teams with agile software. Tastycupcakes developed many of these simple games as ice breakers, which encourage introverts to participate more fully in Scrum practices. These games also help build multitasking skills in high-pressure DevOps environments, which any agile coach will be happy to use.

Now that you have some groundwork to help you understand the thinking behind agile games, you’re probably keen to find out what types of games you can play to build teamwork.

Here are a few agile games to whet your appetite. This list of games goes from the shortest to the longest playing times, each with its own objective.

1. Chocolate Bar Game

Playing TimePlayers RequiredFormatObjectives5 mins4+Virtual & in-personTeam building activity for customer feedback and iteration

The Chocolate Bar Game is ideal for new teams who are unfamiliar with agile practices. Teamwork improves as the members play this game and learn more about iteration. Entire teams can also play this game to understand how to integrate customer feedback into their retrospectives.

You can either play the game in person or play an online game with remote teams.

The Chocolate Bar game works as a Scrum simulation. The goal is to create a chocolate bar as if you were taking instructions from the product owner. Development teams choose their product manager who can also be the product owner. The rest of the agile team are the customers.

The product owner acts as a facilitator, instructing team members to create a chocolate bar that appeals to the target market. This chocolate bar must be delicious and can be made from either dark chocolate, milk chocolate, or white chocolate.

Additionally, the team can select a range of fillings to improve their product. Toppings and other unique features also come into play as teams can include organic or gluten-free features that cater to a niche market.

After each iteration, the project manager provides the team with customer feedback. Customers can give the software development team (or chocolate bar creation team) a thumbs up for their creation if they approve of the chocolate made by the agile team. Customers can also give team members a thumbs down if they don’t like the initial stages of their chocolate bar creation.

Teamwork involves recording customers' responses for changes before the next iteration, which involves the chocolate bar fillings. The team members will continue building their chocolate bar, adding or subtracting fillings and toppings until most customers are happy with their creation.

As you can see, playing the Chocolate Bar Game involves repetitive iteration based on customer feedback, which is the objective of this agile game.

2. How to Hug

Playing TimePlayers RequiredFormatObjective5 mins (or less)3+Virtual onlyAgile team collaboration

How to Hug is a simple game for improving team collaboration, especially on a remote team. How to Hug is a great icebreaker when introducing new team members.

The Scrum team can access this agile team-building activity online. The entire team uploads their photos for display on the How to Hug virtual circle. The whole team can then vote to place their image at the circle's center.

Once the agile team has a central image, the rest of the members move their images to touch the Scrum Master's image at the circle's center.

Everyone has a chance to place their image at the center of the circle, and the team repeats the process. Although a simple game, this is one of those virtual team-building activities that involve lots of laughs.

Team members learn about each other during this virtual hugging session with collaboration and team bonding helping to create a great team.

3. Ball Point Game

Playing TimePlayers RequiredFormatObjective15 mins, split into 3-min sessions4+In-person & virtualAgile production process

The objective in playing Ball Point is for the Scrum team to navigate agile projects better. By understanding the agile production process, the team appreciates the importance of self-organization. Self-organization is the cornerstone for creating Scrum processes that work so that the entire team can engage in effective iteration.

Entire teams can play this game physically or online, using game icons on the virtual whiteboard.

The common goal is for the team to move a ball or several balls around the table. Team members must all touch the ball or balls once. After one team member touches the ball, the next person must do the same. The Scrum team earns a point if they successfully manage to move the ball around the table.

Each sprint lasts for three minutes, and the whole team must participate in five sprints to see who wins the Ball Point game. During the first sprint, the team discusses their strategy and takes notes to anticipate how many points they will score in the first minute.

The second minute involves moving the ball around the table. The Scrum team records their points and new learning in the third minute.

As the game progresses, teamwork intensifies as members add more balls in the following sprint rounds. As the team passes balls simultaneously, the game becomes more complex. More thinking is required in the iteration process as team members attempt to increase their scores. After each round, the teams engage in a brief retrospective to see what tactics they can use to score more points in the next sprint. Simple but effective!

4. Marshmallow Tower

Playing TimePlayer RequiredFormatObjectives20 mins4+In-person onlyIteration & collaboration

This is an in-person team building activity, and the team will need a few supplies:

• Dry spaghetti
• One yard of tape
• One yard of string
• Marshmallows

Team members must engage in this learning activity in groups of four people. The Scrum master hands out 20 pieces of spaghetti to each team, along with the other provisions.

The objective here is to build the highest marshmallow tower with these items. The marshmallow tower must be freestanding, and team members must place all the marshmallows at the top of the structure. Some agile games use one marshmallow, while others match the marshmallow numbers with the spaghetti sticks.

Inevitably, the tower collapses as the team places the marshmallow on top. But the goal is to simulate the Scrum retrospective through several iterations. The whole team must quickly regroup through good communication and collaboration to improve each successive round.

The concept sounds simple, but its execution is deceptively tricky. Teams need to collaborate quickly, and you’re sure to see plenty of towers collapse at the last second as teams scramble to place the marshmallow on top of their structures.

But, repeat the challenge several times, and you’ll see teams refine their approaches to collaboration and iterate on their earlier creations.

5. LEGO Flow Game

Playing TimePlayers RequiredFormatObjectives60-90 mins3-9In-person onlyScrum simulation, iteration, collaboration, workflow

The LEGO Flow game focuses on a Scrum simulation. Agile teams build a virtual LEGO Advent Calendar to detail work items in an efficient workflow. Each section of the workflow involves specific role players.

The common goal is to build the items, find the following advent calendar number (analysis) and then identify a set of LEGO pieces that must align with the supply source (suppliers).

The Scrum team builds (builders) the LEGO item as they progress through the game. Team members must engage in constant iteration to determine whether the build is correct and acceptable to the market representatives or product owner (acceptors).

Agile coaches will love using this game as it is an excellent tool to introduce new teams to Agile. LEGO Flow offers new teams the opportunity to engage in new learning activities through a simulated Scrum exercise.

LEGO Flow is an agile game that requires three rounds, each with its own objective. These objectives include batch and phase-driven processes together with time-boxed and flow-based processes.

After each of the three rounds, teamwork involves sprint retrospectives to understand what went well and what challenges the team encountered. The objective is to analyze the pros and cons of each sprint approach, demonstrating the benefits of teamwork. The game ends with the building of an overall Cumulative Flow Diagram.

This diagram allows the whole team to view its strategies and decisions, consider where they went wrong in each round of this agile game, and enhance their workflow.

If time allows, the Scrum master can question team members about what policy changes they would make for future sprints.

Agile games and team building activities

The whole team can transform their work-life with virtual team-building activities over Zoom. Having some fun while learning definitely beats using a physical whiteboard and sticky notes to introduce new teams to the Scrum framework.

Easy Agile apps are yet another innovative way to ease your new team into the Agile family. Dive into the world of Easy Agile Scrum Workflow for Jira that you can combine with LEGO Flow.

Agile estimation techniques are amazingly simple yet can sometimes be made more complex than necessary for software development teams. Having experienced the wrath of missing a deadline on previous assignments and fearing 20-hour workdays in the last weeks of a big project, it's no wonder agile team members approach estimation cautiously. How many times has your estimation come back to bite you? 😱

Designed to create a sustainable development pace and provide more realistic deadline expectations for stakeholders, agile estimation techniques use relative sizing rather than predicting real-time estimates.

Popular estimating methods in an agile development environment include story points, dot voting, a bucket system, affinity mapping, and t-shirt sizing. T-shirt sizing is a common agile estimation technique that can be very effective for long-term planning or helping your team get used to relative estimating.

We'll give you a quick review of these agile estimation techniques, but then, we'll dive into t-shirt sizing and the different ways you can use this technique.

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A quick review of some popular agile estimation techniques

If you're reading this article, you're probably already familiar with story points typically used for sprint planning, so we won't spend time rehashing these. However, if story pointing isn't a familiar agile estimation technique, here's an article defining story points and another about specific times when story points might work best on your team.

The other agile estimation techniques we'll review first are more appropriate for road mapping or release planning than sprint planning. Let's run through a quick overview of affinity mapping, bucket systems, and dot voting.

Affinity mapping

In product development, “affinity” refers to similar backlog items, either in terms of types of code, areas of the product, or effort. For affinity mapping within agile estimation, we're talking about grouping work items of similar size. Go figure.

To perform an affinity mapping exercise, the facilitator puts the backlog items on individual sticky notes and attach them to a wall. On another wall, identify one side as "Smaller" and the other side as "Larger." Then, ask the Scrum team to silently move the items from the backlog wall to the sizing wall where they fit based on the item's perceived size, or how long the team will likely take to complete it.

The key to this technique is to move quickly, don't overthink it, and don't discuss it. Once all the items are placed on the wall, team members can discuss which items are potentially sized incorrectly. After a brief discussion, the team can choose whether to move the items.

After everyone is satisfied with the placement, the Product Owner can imagine vertical lines on the wall dividing the backlog into sections and easily assign a t-shirt size to each item and place it on a roadmap.

Bucket systems

A bucket system is similar to affinity mapping, except it expects you to get a little more specific. It uses the numbers 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 8, 13, 20, 30, 50, 100, and 200 as relative sizes, and team members put all the backlog items in one of the buckets. Again, this is done silently, but the team is free to discuss any items they feel have been placed in the wrong bucket at the end.

Dot voting

Another way agile development teams can estimate is dot voting. Yeah, it's really about putting dot stickers on note cards or sticky notes. But, this is an interesting technique that brings in concepts other than relative size.

During dot voting, team members receive five dots. Those dots relate to what each team member thinks is the most critical work in the backlog. The importance could come from a technical reason like reworking a database to scale before the next busy season or business value like the most requested new functionality from customer feedback.

Backlog items are then added to the roadmap based on value (the number of dots) and then can be sized for effort using another technique.

As you can see, these agile estimation techniques are especially useful if you have a large backlog that makes you feel like you're herding cats every time you try to organize it. Typically, these estimating processes are used at the beginning of a project, significant feature build, or annual or semi-annual roadmap planning.

Now let's take that deep dive into t-shirt sizing.

T-Shirt sizing for product backlog items

Ahhhh, the t-shirt size. XS, S, M, L, XL — how can that be intimidating? It's so simple and yet so flexible. Mostly used for roadmap and release planning, t-shirt sizing is nothing more than a guesstimate at effort based on the information available at the time of the estimate. That's why it's so basic. It's a guesstimate, and that's ok. 👌

You might be wondering why t-shirt sizing is essential if it's such a ballpark figure and relative estimation. It's helpful for long term planning. Yep, you heard it right. Agile teams plan. If you take a quick look at the Agile Manifesto, the fourth value of agile development teams is:

“Responding to change over following a plan.”

A team can't respond to change if they were never following a plan from the start. Long-term agile planning lets you know if you're setting realistic expectations with stakeholders for the next 6 to 12 months. Or if the company's needs change or existing resources won't suffice and you need to spin up an additional team. T-shirt estimates also help determine how many iterations need to be included in each release to deliver the most value to end-users.

Agile estimation starts as a t-shirt size for planning future releases, then is broken down into story points for sprint planning, and can even be broken down further into hours for sprint execution. Regardless, the main point is this: The closer the work gets to a developer's keyboard, the smaller and easier it is to estimate accurately. The t-shirt size is furthest away from execution, so the estimation isn’t expected to be perfect.

T-Shirt sizing is fast

If you've ever inherited a backlog of hundreds of work items and then received the question "How long will it take to finish all that?" you're not alone. Your first attempt to avoid answering that impossible question might be a good backlog cleansing. Let's say you delete any work item over six months old. I mean, hey, if it's been in the product backlog that long, maybe it's not really that important.

But if you've joined a team just getting started with agile methodologies, you'll probably be stuck with a large backlog and product executives expecting an old-fashioned estimate.

T-shirt sizing comes in handy here. Because it's understood that you're delivering gut-level estimations, your team can power through a super-sized backlog in no time. To ensure team members aren't over-thinking each item during t-shirt sizing exercises, restrict decision-making to 30 seconds per item.

The result is a somewhat organized backlog with relative estimates. The product owner and stakeholders can use that information to decide what to move forward within the short term.

How does t-shirt sizing work?

There are a couple of different ways you can tackle t-shirt sizing depending on your backlog size. For a small number of items, planning poker works great — just ask your Scrum Master to swap out the Fibonacci sequence number cards for t-shirt size letters.

This technique also works well if you need to estimate a subset of a more extensive backlog.

You'll probably want to use a process similar to affinity mapping and bucket systems for large backlogs. Everyone works independently to assign sizing and then discusses conflicts at the end. This technique allows even small teams to get through a large backlog relatively quickly.

Finally, some new agile teams might want to start their estimating journey using t-shirt sizes for user stories and sprint planning. Mike Cohn, one of the founders of Scrum Alliance and an authority on agile processes, suggests that if teams go with that approach, they assign a story point value to each t-shirt size. This technique helps teams get comfortable with story points within the safety net of t-shirt size estimating.

Practice makes perfect with agile estimation techniques

Regardless of the type of agile project you're working on or the estimation process you choose, the more you practice, the quicker your team will become master estimators. 👑 We recommend trying a couple of different methods to see which one feels most comfortable for your team.

One last thing, remember that story point estimates are best for sprint planning. Affinity mapping, bucket systems, dot planning, and T-shirt sizing are better for roadmap and release planning.

If you need help moving your planning off the wall and into Jira, you should try

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Don't forget to check out our other blog articles to help your team on their agile journey.