Agile Teams

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.

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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.

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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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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.

Planning is a critical phase of the agile process; it's an opportunity to align on priorities as team and organize work in a sequence that will help it run smoothly. The planning process helps agile software development and other product development teams sort through new information, adapt to dependencies, and address evolving customer needs.

Agile is the opposite of traditional waterfall project planning, which takes a step-by-step approach. Waterfall has dominated project planning for many years, with detailed plans laid out at the beginning of a project that had to be adhered to rigidly. This may move a project or product forward, but it neglects to account for any new developments that could occur outside of the “master plan.”

Agile is an iterative process that helps teams reduce waste and maximize efficiency for the ultimate goal of bringing value to customers. This customer-first approach helps teams make informed choices throughout the development process — choices that continually and consistently provide value to stakeholders.

One of the greatest advantages of an iterative agile approach is that it enables early feedback from stakeholders. You don’t need to guess whether or not you’re making the right decisions — you can find out every step of the way by directly including stakeholders in your process. You can adapt your plan as you need to based on what will provide the most value to customers at any time.

Even if you are part of a seasoned agile team, there are always opportunities for improvement and processes to fine-tune. This post will outline some unproductive agile planning mistakes teams make, including how agile teams can avoid these common pitfalls.

Agile Planning Mistake #1: Not being on the same page as stakeholders

Do you involve stakeholders in your planning process? Do they understand your goals and why you are making each decision? Working directly with stakeholders, both internal stakeholders and the users of your product, will help you gain a clear view of both needs and constraints, and give you the information you need to determine what should be done when.

It's never a good idea to rest on assumptions. Your stakeholders live in a different world than the one you are deeply embedded in, with different priorities and assumptions of their own. So that you can produce deliverables that meet stakeholder expectations, you need to agree on what those expectations are. Involve your stakeholders in planning, but ensure everyone understands that expectations could evolve throughout the process based on new information gained from successes, failures, and customer responses.

Agile Planning Mistake #2: Not accounting for dependencies

Failing to account for dependencies in agile planning leads to bottlenecks, delayed releases, and undermines team collaboration. Collaboration within and across teams is needed for a business to deliver effectively. When multiple teams are working on interconnected features, if one team’s progress is blocked by another, the entire development cycle slows down. Without clear visibility of dependencies, work can be delayed and deadlines missed.

To minimize and avoid disruption to the flow of work, take the time to consult with stakeholders and anticipate dependencies early. Tools that help you visualise and map dependencies, and shared roadmaps to track cross-team dependencies, allow you to share an understanding of dependencies and sequence work in a way that avoids roadblocks. Proactively managing dependencies ensures smoother iterations, faster time-to-market, and a more predictable agile process.

Agile Planning Mistake #3: Using bland, flat product maps

Flat product backlogs are bland and boring 😴. Think carrot cake without icing. They lack the detail and functionality needed to realize the full story of your product backlog.

Plus, once you have more than a handful of items, they become overwhelming and difficult to organize in a meaningful way. It becomes less clear which item is the most important and more difficult to ensure your decisions align with the larger goal of the project.

When you plan out your roadmap, it needs context, and you must be able to clearly see the customer journey. User story maps visualize the customer journey in the planning process and throughout the entire process of product development. They utilize user stories — the smallest unit of work that can bring value to the customer — so you can plan and organize the backlog from the customer’s perspective.

📕 Read our ultimate guide to user story maps to learn more.

Agile Planning Mistake #4: Not allowing the plan to live, breathe, and adapt

As we've already discussed, agile is an iterative approach. This means your agile planning needs to leave room for changes. Your plan should be able to grow and adapt as you progress with each sprint or product roadmap.

At the beginning of a sprint, you lack the information needed to see the full picture. You don’t have everything you need to build the perfect solution, and that’s okay. It’s all part of the process. Spending hours or days trying to iron out the perfect plan just wastes time that could be better spent learning and solving problems as they come. What you thought would provide the most value during the planning phase could be completely different down the track.

You may need to alter your plan after a roadblock comes up in a daily stand-up, or you may learn about a customer concern that completely changes your direction. Iterations are inevitable and welcomed! They help you keep pace with incoming information as you learn from each other, stakeholders, and your customers.

Agile planning isn’t a promise. It’s an outline that will help you reach your goal, and that changes with your goals and circumstances.

Agile Planning Mistake #5: Not incorporating retrospective insights in the following planning session

Retrospectives are an essential piece of the agile process. They give teams a chance to reflect on everything that occurred in an individual sprint or after the completion of a product.

An effective retrospective asks the entire team key questions that can improve the process next time around. What went well? What’s worth repeating again? What didn’t go so well? What could be improved upon next time? What roadblocks or dependencies developed? What did you learn? How did you feel at the end of the sprint?

A retrospective provides insights that will improve efficiency, teamwork and team dynamics, the effectiveness of tools, and communication with stakeholders.

Simply holding a retrospective or collecting retrospective feedback is not enough to gain value. You need to ensure you’re incorporating the feedback into the following sprint planning meeting, and take action that leads to meaningful improvement. The next iteration will be all the better for the time you spend reflecting and improving based upon what you learned.

Agile Planning Mistake #6: Choosing tools that don’t take a customer-centric approach

Whether your team uses a Scrum process, kanban boards, or other agile methods, the tools you choose should always be customer-focused. And you need to continue using them in a way that keeps the customer at the forefront of decision making.

Teams can fall into a trap believing they’re focusing on the customer when they aren’t doing much of anything beyond following simple agile methods and generic processes. Customers need to be embedded in your development process right from the planning phase so that every decision a team member makes considers customer needs first.

Choose planning tools that help your entire team get to the heart of what makes your customers tick, and always check in to ensure you are making decisions in line with your customers.

For example, Personas provide a deep understanding of what customers want, need, don’t want, etc. They reveal key information about customer pain points, desires, demographics, goals, shopping patterns, and much more. We highly suggest developing customer Personas to get a rich picture of all the people who will use your product, but it’s not enough to just have Personas lying around.

You need to bring these Personas into your agile planning process and keep them front and center as you complete issues and continue to develop your product.

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.

TL;DR: What T‑shirt sizing is, where it shines, how to run it with a real team, how it relates to story points, and how to avoid common traps.

A quick scene

Friday afternoon. You’ve inherited a backlog that sprawls for metres. Someone asks, “Roughly how long to ship the payments revamp?” Your team glances at the ceiling. You don’t need a perfect answer, you need a safe first pass that helps you plan sensibly. That’s where T‑shirt sizing earns its keep.

What is T‑shirt sizing in agile?

T‑shirt sizing is a lightweight way to estimate relative effort using XS, S, M, L, XL. It’s great for roadmaps, release planning, and early discovery, moments when detail is thin and the goal is direction, not exact dates.

Think of it as a sketch: enough shape to discuss options and make trade‑offs. As work moves closer to delivery, translate sizes into more precise estimates (for most teams, that’s story points).

New to story points or need a refresher? Read How to use story points for agile estimation and 10 reasons why you should use story points.

When to use T‑shirt sizes vs story points

Use T‑shirt sizes when:

• You’re scanning a large backlog to spot big items and cut noise
• You’re sequencing epics on a roadmap or release plan
• You’re aligning many teams for a Program Increment and need a first pass on effort

Switch to story points when:

• You’re shaping a commitment for a sprint or release
• The team understands the work well enough to discuss risk, complexity, and unknowns

Simple rule of thumb - 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.

How to run a T‑shirt sizing session (two practical patterns)

The main thing to keep in mind is you don’t need ceremony to get this right. What you need is speed and shared understanding.

1) Small set of items (do this in 20–30 minutes)

1. Pick the work: 10–20 epics or features you want to compare.
2. Calibrate quickly: Agree on one example for S, M, L from your history.
3. Silent first pass: Each person suggests a size. Keep it to 30 seconds per item.
4. Discuss only the outliers: If your spread is XS to XL, talk. If it’s S/M, move on.
5. Capture the decision: Write the size on the card/issue and one sentence on why (risk, dependency, unknown). Future‑you will thank you.

2) Huge backlog (affinity + buckets)

1. Affinity wall: Lay items left‑to‑right from smaller to larger.
2. Light buckets: Draw soft bands for XS/S/M/L/XL and nudge items into them.
3. One pass of challenges: People can move cards they strongly disagree with, but they must explain what information would change the estimate.

If you prefer a card‑based approach, swap in Planning Poker and use T‑shirt cards instead of numbers.

Here's an example of how T-shirt sizing would play out at a fashion retailer (we know, it's a bit on the nose). The team had a quarter‑long goal to reduce checkout drop‑off. In their first hour, they T‑shirt sized five ideas:

• New payment provider (XL) - Big integration, contract, risk
• Guest checkout (M) - Some UX and auth changes
• Auto‑fill postcode (S) - Low risk, measurable uplift
• Order status emails (M) - Copy, events, templates
• Retry logic on payments (L) - Engineering heavy, few dependencies

They sequenced S → M → L and left the XL until discovery removed the scariest unknowns. Two sprints later, they pointed the M/L items and committed. The XL became a spike with clear questions.

Where sizing goes sideways and how to recover

Converting sizes to points then leaving them untouched

Why it bites: People treat the conversion as a promise, plans harden, trust erodes when reality changes.‍

Try this: If you convert for prioritisation, mark those items as provisional, replace the size with true points during refinement, and keep a short note on what changed. For more on timing and trade offs, see 5 agile estimation tips.

Treating sizes as dates

Why it bites: A neat row of S and M turns into calendar commitments, and the team inherits a deadline they never made.‍

Try this: Share ranges based on throughput, update as you learn, and keep the conversation focused on outcomes.

One scale across many teams

Why it bites: S in one team is M in another, cross team comparisons become arguments not insight.‍

Try this: Keep scales local, and during PI Planning compare sizes only to surface risk and dependencies. Use a shared program board instead of chasing numeric parity.

Endless debate on edge cases

Why it bites: The time you spend arguing dwarfs the cost of being slightly wrong.‍

Try this: Timebox each item, discuss only the outliers, capture the uncertainty in one sentence, and move on. If a decision is still sticky, schedule a small spike with a clear question.

Skipping calibration examples

Why it bites: What counted as M last quarter slowly drifts, new joiners anchor on guesses.‍

Try this: Keep a living set of examples for S, M, and L in Jira, refresh them when your tech or team changes, and link those issues in your session notes.

Loud voices steer the room

Why it bites: Anchoring replaces thinking, quieter people disengage.‍

Try this: Start with a silent first pass, reveal together, then invite two or three different voices to speak before the most senior person. A little psychological safety goes a long way.

Jumping from XL epics to sprint commitments

Why it bites: The team commits to fog, you get churn and rework.‍

Try this: Slice the work first, use story mapping to find thinner slices, and refine before you point.

Mixing size and value

Why it bites: Small items with real impact wait behind large but low value work, momentum stalls.‍

Try this: Keep a separate value signal, a one line impact hypothesis is enough, then weigh size against value when you sequence. The planning guide above has a simple pattern you can copy.

No breadcrumb of why you chose a size

Why it bites: You cannot learn from your estimates later and the next session restarts from scratch.‍

Try this: add one sentence on risk, dependency or unknown to each decision, then check a sample in your next retro. Use action-driven retrospectives to close the loop.

Recording sizes and keeping plans honest in Jira

• For shaping and tracking epics, keep sizes and notes on a shared board the team actually uses every day. A user story map gives context and helps when you later point stories. Easy Agile TeamRhythm supports mapping, lightweight estimation and retros all inside Jira.
• When several teams are involved, use a program board to visualise objectives, dependencies and dates. Easy Agile Programs keeps this view in Jira so you can plan PI events without spreadsheets.
• For public roadmaps, keep it simple and visual. Easy Agile Roadmaps helps you share a plan stakeholders actually read.

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.

FAQ (for searchers and skimmers)

• ‍What’s the point of T‑shirt sizing if we’ll use story points later?‍

It lets you compare big pieces quickly so you can decide what to pursue, sequence sensibly, and avoid wasting refinement time on the wrong items.

• ‍Can we convert sizes to story points?‍

You can, locally, for prioritisation, just mark them clearly and replace with real points before a sprint commitment. Don’t reuse another team’s scale.

• ‍Stakeholders want dates. How do we answer without over‑promising?‍

Share ranges based on today’s sizes and the team’s recent throughput, and update as items shrink and you learn more. For a practical way to connect goals, value and delivery, see How to make plans that actually ship and We simplified our OKRs.

• ‍How do we run T‑shirt sizing across many teams?‍

Keep it team‑local first. During PI planning, compare sizes only to surface risk and dependencies, not to rank teams. Use a program board to keep the conversation grounded. Start with our PI Planning guide.

Backlog prioritization is a never-ending task for product owners and product managers. As priorities evolve in response to changing business needs, or even as work is completed, or adjustments to team resourcing are made, it's important to maintain focus on the work that will deliver the most value by keeping your backlog in good shape. Agile estimation techniques can make prioritizing your backlog faster and easier.

So, let's take a look at some specific methods to prioritize your backlog and see how agile estimation can help deliver the most value to your end-users and stakeholders.

5 ways to prioritize a backlog

Of course, there are more than five ways to prioritize work items in a backlog. But, we've picked a few of our favorites that, when combined with an agile estimation process, help keep our product backlog prioritized so we can breeze through sprint planning.

1. Weighted Shortest Job First

Wow, is that a mouthful! Let's use the "WSJF" acronym to refer to this SAFe technique. Not as intimidating as it sounds, WSJF is a simple formula that assigns a business value to product backlog items.

WSJF = Cost of Delay ÷ Job Duration

Cost of Delay is the sum of three relative metrics:

• User/Business Value: the relative importance of the work item.
• Time Criticality: the decline of user/business value over time.
• Risk Reduction: the reduction of business or technical risk.

To determine the relative size for Cost of Delay, think of the lowest business value, the smallest decline in value over time, and the least risk reduction as a 1 value. The same as with Fibonacci sequence story point estimation, adjust that score appropriately when comparing work items to score them relative to one another.

The Job Duration is also expressed in relative terms. If you estimate your work items using relative estimation with story points, the story point value equals the Job Duration.

If you're using this technique to prioritize a large amount of work in a backlog where some items have only been t-shirt sized, convert your t-shirt sizes to standard Fibonacci numbers and use that value.

Warning: Be careful with converting t-shirt sizes to story points. You'll need a way to flag the t-shirt size work items that you converted to story points. You and your Scrum Master need to recognize those as t-shirt level estimations rather than the real story point estimates that come with fully refined work items.

See more at a glance in Easy Agile TeamRhythm, to make prioritizing your backlog faster

💡Tip: Add up to three extra fields on issue cards

SEE HOW

2. MoSCoW

Must-have, should-have, could-have, and won't-have are the buckets used to prioritize a backlog with the MoSCoW technique. The product team defines these designations based on the product's unique features and competitive offerings.

Each work item falls into one of those categories. The easiest part of this process is sending Won't-have items directly to the trash and getting them out of your way. Next, prioritize must-haves first and then should-haves. The could-have items naturally fall to the bottom of the backlog.

Take these items through your regular refinement meetings with your team members, and assign each item a t-shirt size or story point value. You're then ready to add the right amount of work items to your sprints or releases based on your teams' velocity or the number of story points they expect to finish during a sprint.

3. Kano

The Kano model of prioritization uses five classifications:

• Must-be: the basic functionality that your users expect.
• Attractive: a pleasant surprise for your users, but no one is going to be upset if it's not there.
• One-Dimensional: work items that make your users happy and will disappoint them if they aren't part of your product.
• Indifferent: work items that are unimportant to your customers. Often, these work items represent technical debt or enhancements that help the software development team develop more efficiently or work in the latest versions of their tech stack — but your customers really don't care about them.
• Reverse: the process of undoing a previous feature or update. If you've ever built a feature or made a UI update that your users hated, you understand reverse work items. Oops. Unfortunately, sometimes these are necessary evils, especially when it comes to security features or transitioning users to a new product after retiring a legacy product.

Like the MoSCoW method, you'll estimate these work items during refinement and then add them to your iteration or release plan. But, different from MoSCoW, you may want to balance out your sprints and releases with work items from each classification.

4. Stack Ranking

The most brutal of all prioritization techniques, stack ranking forces teams to have a linear rank of work items, which means there is only one top priority, one second priority, one third priority, and so on. Brutal!

Once you get used to it, stack ranking is a useful way to force product managers to make tough choices between work items. Even if two work items can be completed during the same sprint, it's up to the PO to determine which one gets done first, and then that choice is reflected in the sprint backlog.

Often, this job becomes easier when it's put in dire terms. For instance, if you only had one day to attract new users to your product, what work would you want in production? BOOM! There's your top priority.

The nice thing with stack ranking is that it allows POs to slide smaller work items into current sprints when other higher-priority work is too large. Adding the larger work item over-commits the team based on their velocity. Those small work items serve to fill up sprints so teams can maintain velocity and be as productive as possible. So, just because a two-story point work item is two-thirds the way down the backlog doesn't mean it will never get done.

5. Story Mapping

Story mapping helps you visualize the customer's journey through your product from start to finish. (Yep, we stole that straight from our other excellent article on story mapping.) For advanced story mappers, take what you’ve learned about story mapping, and think about how you can add MoSCoW or Kano techniques to your story maps.

Perhaps your epic backbone at the top of the user story map could represent the buckets in the MoSCoW method?

If you're like us, your story mapping sessions are productive brainstorming activities, and you'll leave the sessions with way more work than you can accomplish. By applying MoSCoW or Kano principles to the stories in your user journeys, you’ll discover the most important stories to prioritize and the stories that can wait for a later release.

Building agile estimation into backlog prioritization

We've given you five different techniques to corral your work items into an organized, prioritized, value-delivering product backlog:

1. Weighted Shortest Job First
2. MoSCoW
3. KANO
4. Stack Ranking
5. Story Maps

We've also shown you ways to incorporate agile estimates like t-shirt sizes and story points into your prioritization process to keep your team delivering the most important work while maintaining velocity and dazzling your customers and stakeholders.

We encourage you to take these ideas, share them with your team, and give them a try. If you need help using the Story Map concept, try Easy Agile TeamRhythm. However your team prioritizes its product backlog, remember to put the most important work first and then adjust those priorities as needed. Keep it easy and keep it agile!