Agile project management with XP Manual

MANUAL GESTIÓN DE PROYECTOS ÁGILES

Plan using user stories User stories have become the standard in agile methodologies to concisely and succinctly describe the functionality of software and guide development. The XP methodology also recommends the use of this technique.

Margin in planning (Slack Some tasks may be included in the planning that are not mandatory and can be eliminated if you are not on time. It is important to meet commitments, so it is useful to have some leeway in the planning in case estimates are not tight. In some projects, the team or the manager plans more workload than can actually be done without compromising the quality of the product. This creates too much tension in the team, which is ultimately detrimental to the development of the project. Meeting the commitments made by the team is motivating. Not meeting targets is frustrating and demoralising. In many organisations, this extra time is often used for developers to collaborate on open source projects that may be of interest to the organisation. Or to experiment with new technologies. Or simply to improve their skills as programmers or managers. Google is famous for allowing its employees to spend 20% of their time on open source projects. The Madrid-based company Kaleidos also applies a similar technique with its pi-week. The weekly and quarterly cycle Unlike the Scrum methodology, which recommends iterations of between 1 and 4 weeks, Kent Beck, in the second edition of his book Extreme Programming Explained, proposes short iterations of 1 week. He says that this allows the team to focus on the user stories they have to implement in that iteration. A week, he says, is a framework that is widely used in many other human contexts. The synchronicity between the days of the week and the tasks of the iteration makes the work more predictable. The main disadvantage of such short iterations is that, if we want to apply the scrum methodology with its planning, demo and retrospective meetings, the week may be too small for those activities not to result in wasted time.

On the other hand, XP recommends holding 3-month cycles as a general

developmental guideline covering all weeks within those three months.

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European Open Business School