Agile Project Management
Values, then mechanics
The Agile Manifesto prioritizes individuals and interactions, working software, customer collaboration, and responding to change over the values on the right. Agile is iterative and incremental and suits evolving requirements; predictive (Waterfall) suits stable, well-understood scope. Hybrid blends both.
Scrum roles: Product Owner (maximizes value, owns and orders the backlog), Scrum Master (servant leader who removes impediments and coaches - not a traditional project manager), Developers (self-managing). Artifacts: product backlog, sprint backlog, increment, plus the Definition of Done. Events: the sprint itself (timeboxed, commonly one to four weeks), sprint planning, daily scrum (15 minutes, inspect progress toward the sprint goal), sprint review (inspect the increment with stakeholders), and retrospective (inspect the team's process). The classic trap: swapping sprint review and retrospective. Review = product; retro = process.
Story points estimate relative effort and complexity, not hours. Velocity is points completed per sprint; it is team-specific and should never be compared across teams or used as a productivity club.
Kanban visualizes workflow, limits work in progress, manages flow, and makes policies explicit - it has no required sprints. XP emphasizes engineering practices such as pair programming, test-driven development, and continuous integration.
Rule of thumb: choose a method by asking how stable the requirements are and how much delivery risk exists - stable scope and fixed contracts push toward predictive; high uncertainty and frequent feedback push toward adaptive.