Link Search Menu Expand Document
Art of Agility

Getting Started

Agile methodology focuses on teams that create quality software products while adapting quickly to change. Part of being able to adapt quickly to changing requirements is building a team that understands the processes within the Scrum framework.

You will want to embrace the spirit of Agile as you are reading this section and getting started on Scrum at your company. Focus on understanding the processes and philosophies around them. Do not spend too much time trying to plan how each process will be handled. You will have to determine what things do and don’t work for your team. Sometimes the only way to do that is by trying new approaches.

Your team and how they perform work will change as they become more familiar with the Scrum processes and as they become more familiar with each other. There will be opportunities at the end of every sprint to evaluate what is going right and wrong. The team will want to make changes to improve efficiency, reduce conflict, or adapt to changes in the team dynamic, as team members are added to or removed from the team.

Perhaps, as you start down your journey with Scrum, you can take the ITIL® Guiding Principles into consideration:

  1. Focus on value
  2. Start where you are
  3. Progress iteratively with feedback
  4. Collaborate and promote visibility
  5. Think and work holistically
  6. Keep it simple and practical
  7. Optimize and automate

Although these principles were designed for the IT service management industry to help service providers align their IT services with the needs of the business, they are remarkably applicable to the Agile approach to development. In the Agile world, your focus on value is the focus that you place on producing quality software. You progress iteratively with feedback by developing software each sprint and evaluating the results during each sprint retrospective as well as taking steps towards applying an Agile mindset to the development process as a whole. And so on.

So, with our focus on making small steps towards our goal, let’s look at what things you need to know to get started with Agile scrum processes.