Agile Charting: A Practical Guide

Agile is fundamentally an iterative and cyclical undertaking. Agile Charting addresses issues surrounding the linear representation of agile processes that are usually found in traditional phased approaches to project management or in flow-centric practices such as Kanban. Put simply, Agile Charting equips teams with a simple but powerful tool for communicating intent and soliciting feedback. The principles and key features of agile charts are presented before moving on to concrete examples. In this guide, Agile Charting, developed over years of practical experience within Agile teams, is presented as a practical way to stimulate and encourage discussions within your team around how best to structure Agile practices. It helps identify and place important events and ceremonies based on the needs and circumstances of your team by making clear the dynamic aspects of Agile processes. For example, what sorts of practices should be done when? At what level of granularity should they be undertaken? How do we distinguish between development (iterative) and deployment (incremental) activities? How happy are we with how the process is working and which practices need improvement? Using several example applications Agile Charting presents simple techniques that help you in your day-to-day work and which may inspire you to create your own Agile Charts. To start, the rationale and the basics of how to draw an Agile Chart are presented before moving on to some common examples that show for which processes this approach works and for which it doesn't (e.g., Scrum, XP, DSDM). Then attention turns to how to some examples such as how to solicit feedback, how to determine which tooling should be used in a team, when to move to deployment activities and how to track where the team is in its current cycle.