Agile Class Week 1: Agile Values

The first time I heard the word “agile” was when I read the curriculum of the Web and Software Development program.  I had to choose between Systems Analysis and Design or Agile Project Management class. After researching, I decided to take Agile Project Management because I heard that most software development companies are using it, like Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, Facebook, Adobe, Nokia, Siemens, BBC, CNN, General Electric, Bank of America, etc.

On the first day of class, our professor started the discussion by enumerating what we are going to learn. I got overwhelmed by the new words I was hearing such as Scrum, Sprint, Backlog, Retrospectives, Roadmap, Burndown Chart, etc. After that, he began to explain Scrum, a type of agile methodology consisting of 5-9 people which uses iterative and incremental practices on the software product. He also showed the Scrum Values which are Courage, Openness, Commitment, Respect, and Focus. I started to understand it better when he compared Agile to Waterfall, the classic approach to the systems development that is linear and sequential. Next, he enumerated and explained to us the Agile Manifesto and the 12 Agile Principles. Lastly, he discussed the Scrum Framework roles which are the product owner, scrum master, and developers or scrum team.

That was a lot of information for the first day which was great because I was able to get some ideas of what will be the topics or words I should look for when I do my research about Agile Development. Yes! I will study and do research about it, not only because it's part of my curriculum, but I will do it to widen my knowledge in project management, because my next goal after being a full-stack developer is to be a project manager.

Source(s):
Learning Agile: Understanding Scrum, XP, Lean, and Kanban