• the second is Sprint Planning8. Your team should plan the work for the nearest iteration. It is an iterative approach, allowing teams to accelerate the delivery of value to customers and avoid unnecessary headaches. Instead of releasing the entire product as a whole, the agile team performs the work within small but convenient increments. Requirements, plans and results are constantly being checked for relevance, so that teams can quickly respond to changes;

• unit-testing9. This is a software testing method by which individual units of source code (sets of one or more computer program modules together with associated control data, usage procedures, and operating procedures) are tested to determine whether they are fit for use. Unit tests are typically automated tests written and run by software developers to ensure that a Chapter of an application or a program (known as the "unit") meets its design and behaves as intended. This is one of the simplest engineering practices that you can start using quickly. About 60-70% of bugs can be caught by unit testing;

• Release Planning10. We plan it in large parts: what and when we will release. Agile release planning is a product management method where you plan incremental releases of a product. It differs from raditional software planning where you focus on major releases. Using a release plan helps you plan which product increments (versions) get released to the market and when. And it’s an integral part of the Agile SDLC (Software Development Life Cycle) because it can also give higher-ups peace of mind that there’s a structure and plan beyond just the next sprint, and helps the individual Agile teams stay on track. What about Scrum, we can measure it with sprints (sprint planning).

It’s no secret that change is hard and can be difficult to be taken, especially with complex projects. Making even slight changes to existing systems can often feel laborious and not worth the effort. Studies show (Identifying the Reasons for Software Project Failure and Some of their Proposed Remedial through BRIDGE Process Models. INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF COMPUTER SCIENCES AND ENGINEERING. January, 2015, 3(1):118-126) that 60-80% of project failures can be caused by poor requirements gathering, analysis, and change management. The agile mindset is the best approach to variable and challenging environment as it offers an opportunity to embrace change, rather than continuously avoid it. It isn’t something that teams achieve, but rather something that is continuously cultivated. Developing teams should strive to optimize, solve problems, reflect, and continuously improve in the process.

Both Agile principles and values contain a very correct message, but they look quite abstract from the first sight. Agile methodology practices add to understanding of this approach. In order to investigate how Agile works, let's turn to the diagram and take a detailed look at the meaning of each link in Agile software development process:

LET'S SUMMARIZE WHAT WE’VE LEARNED IN THIS CHAPTER:

in brief, flexible methodology emergence was as natural as IT industry development. Deviation from out of time methods and software development flexibility request were influenced by huge expansion of the IT market and the subsequent demand for faster value to the consumer delivery.

Besides, now we know:

• Agile methodology started from 4 values which were followed by 12 principles;

• An iterative method of software development is in the base of agile approach;