Introduction to Agile Project Management
Why Agile? The History
The traditional Waterfall model: phases, handoffs, and why it struggles with changing requirements.
The 2001 Agile Manifesto: the four values and twelve principles that shifted how software teams work.
What "agile" means in practice — short feedback loops, working software over documentation, and responding to change.
An overview of the agile landscape: Scrum, Kanban, XP, SAFe, and how they relate.
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Scrum — Roles, Events, and Artefacts
The three Scrum roles: Product Owner (what to build), Scrum Master (how to work), and Developers (building it).
The five Scrum events: Sprint, Sprint Planning, Daily Scrum, Sprint Review, and Sprint Retrospective — their purpose and time-boxes.
The three Scrum artefacts: Product Backlog, Sprint Backlog, and Increment.
The Definition of Done: why a shared agreement on "finished" is critical.
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The Product Backlog
What a Product Backlog is: an ordered list of everything that might be needed in the product.
Writing Product Backlog Items (PBIs): user stories, bug reports, technical tasks, and spikes.
The INVEST criteria for good user stories: Independent, Negotiable, Valuable, Estimable, Small, Testable.
Backlog refinement: grooming items, splitting large stories (epics) into smaller ones, and prioritising with techniques like MoSCoW and WSJF.
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Sprint Planning and Estimation
How a Sprint Planning meeting works: selecting items from the Product Backlog and creating the Sprint Goal.
Estimation techniques: story points with Planning Poker, t-shirt sizing, and the #NoEstimates perspective.
Velocity: tracking how much a team completes per sprint and using it to forecast.
Capacity planning: accounting for holidays, meetings, and non-coding work.
Common pitfalls: over-committing, under-committing, and the pressure to estimate perfectly.
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Running a Sprint
The Daily Scrum (stand-up): three questions, fifteen minutes, and why it is for the developers, not management.
The Sprint Backlog as a living plan: updating task status and remaining work throughout the sprint.
Sprint burndown charts: visualising progress and spotting problems early.
Protecting the sprint: managing scope changes, unexpected bugs, and interruptions.
How a Scrum Master removes impediments and shields the team.
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Sprint Review and Retrospective
The Sprint Review: demonstrating the Increment to stakeholders, gathering feedback, and updating the Product Backlog.
The Sprint Retrospective: inspecting team process, not product — What went well? What can improve? What will we try next sprint?
Retrospective formats: Start/Stop/Continue, 4Ls (Liked, Learned, Lacked, Longed for), and the Sailboat.
Turning retro actions into measurable experiments, not vague intentions.
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Kanban for Software Teams
Kanban's origins in lean manufacturing and how it maps to software development.
The Kanban board: columns, swimlanes, and visualising workflow (To Do → In Progress → Review → Done).
Work In Progress (WIP) limits: why constraining active work increases throughput.
Kanban metrics: cycle time, lead time, and cumulative flow diagrams.
Scrum vs Kanban vs Scrumban — choosing the right approach for the team's context.
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Writing and Managing User Stories
The user story template: "As a [persona], I want [capability], so that [benefit]."
Acceptance criteria: Given/When/Then (BDD format) for making stories testable and unambiguous.
Splitting strategies: by workflow step, by rule, by happy/unhappy path, and by interface.
Epics and themes for grouping related stories in a roadmap.
Story mapping: organising stories by user journey to identify the minimum viable product.
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Agile Tools — Jira, GitHub Projects
An overview of popular agile project management tools: Jira, Linear, Trello, Asana, and GitHub Projects.
Setting up a board in Jira: projects, issue types, sprints, and workflows.
Using Linear for engineering-focused teams: cycles, priorities, and GitHub integration.
GitHub Projects as a lightweight option for open-source and small teams.
Best practices: keeping boards current, linking commits to issues, and avoiding tool overload.
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Agile Engineering Practices
Engineering practices that make agile work: Test-Driven Development (TDD), Continuous Integration (CI), and Continuous Delivery (CD).
Pair programming and code reviews as collaboration tools.
Refactoring: keeping code clean enough to change, sprint after sprint.
Technical debt: how it accumulates, how to measure it, and how to budget time to pay it down.
The relationship between engineering quality and sustainable velocity.
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Agile at Scale and in the Real World
Challenges when scaling agile across multiple teams: dependencies, shared backlogs, and alignment.
An introduction to scaling frameworks: SAFe, LeSS, and Nexus — without going deep.
Common dysfunctions: "Scrum but" (cherry-picking only the easy parts), zombie Scrum, and cargo-cult agile.
How to work agile in a company that is not fully agile: creating a pocket of good practice.
Agile beyond software: how UX, marketing, and operations teams adopt agile principles.
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Agile in a Full-Stack JavaScript Team
A capstone simulation: running two sprints for a fictional e-commerce feature — from backlog refinement through sprint planning, daily standups, review, and retrospective.
Connecting agile practices to the development tools covered in the course series: Git branches per story, PR-based code review, CI checks before merging, and deployment per sprint.
Certification paths: Scrum.org (PSM I) and Scrum Alliance (CSM) for those who want formal credentials.
Recommended reading and communities for continuing the agile journey.
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