Bcs Agile foundation/practitioner

[leovzla]

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Can any recommend a good book that would give me enough knowledge to sit the exams.

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mplaza.pm/product/scrum-master-training-manual - The Scrum Master Training Manual | MP

Regards

[Smartie]

Agile isn't some wonder cure for poor projects and it isn't new - been going in various guises for over twenty years (see Rapid Application Development). It was developed as a response to the terrible success rates for waterfall based IT projects. It's not really surprising that we're still learning how to do it as we've been building bridges for thousands of years but building (complex) software for less than a century.

No methodology will succeed if you're missing the basic project requirements such as the support of the business/senior stakeholders.
Equally, Agile isn't suitable for all projects and failure occurs when people try to apply it in situations where it simply won't work.

Stick to the basics, apply it in appropriate projects and it's more likely to succeed than waterfall.

That means daily interaction between the business and the team, a highly skilled, motivated team, a co-located team (possible to do it with offshore resource but harder), face to face discussions preferred over email/phone/whatever, an appropriate environment and support (other areas such as infrastructure can screw you), continuous improvement through reflection on process and progress. Don't use it to run very large, very complex critical systems such as nuclear power station control software.

Unfortunately Agile is the methodology du jour but saying your project is Agile doesn't make it so.

[BlasterBates]

The alternative to agile is spiral.

Spiral model - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Waterfall is rarely used and virtually every development team uses some form of incremental development.

Agile is an informal approach.

Personally find it chaotic and more likely to lead to hacked solutions because too little thought put into a longer term plan, as it ignores formal approaches to analysis and design. That's not to say you can't use them, but then that would effectively be spiral development, which is how waterfall evolved.

[SueEllen]

The alternative to agile is spiral.

Spiral model - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Waterfall is rarely used and virtually every development team uses some form of incremental development.

Agile is an informal approach.

Personally find it chaotic and more likely to lead to hacked solutions because too little thought put into a longer term plan, as it ignores formal approaches to analysis and design. That's not to say you can't use them, but then that would effectively be spiral development, which is how waterfall evolved.

Unfortunately unless you can nail down companies on their requirements which in lots of cases you can't then Spiral projects just don't work. Where the requirements are pretty much nailed down from the beginning then there is no point using an agile methodology.

Agile projects are simply ways of trying to get requirements out of the business and delivering what they want. They also allow the business to see - if you work next to them - if they change their mind every second how much extra work the changes cause.

Also not doing analysis, design and documentation is laziness as nothing in the Agile Manifesto says you should not do any of this. It just states working software is valued over documentation. Plus if you need to do research on something then you simply do a spike in a prior sprint.

[kaiser78]

Read the official book that the exam is based on - I did this, had no training and passed wfc

[Untouchable1]

I've been working on an "agile" project for the first time and well I don't really see much difference. A project meeting is a "scrum meeting" and you have them every day, although it's a waste of time you regurgitate what you're doing and no-one's interested. Requirements are called "stories", the PM is a "Scrum Master", the BA is a "Product Manager" and a release is a "Sprint".

That's all you need to know.

If the inventors of Agile had spoken to Quality Engineers in the 1990's they could have saved themselves a lot of effort, because it's all in the ISO9000 standards.

Great....now you can claim you 'know' agile. And at the same time you can bastardize it.

[Andrew Sutton]

This...

Read the official book that the exam is based on - I did this, had no training and passed wfc

If you are looking for the basic to pass the exam, the BCS Agile Foundation book is the one to have.

[TheFaQQer]

If you are looking for the basic to pass the exam, the BCS Agile Foundation book is the one to have.

Or get a lifetime subscription to actualtests.com and download the exam to memorise