Agile Software Engineering Cheatsheets

About This Book

Why this book? I do and teach Agile, and I love check-lists.
Besides, It’s a brave new world out there and people are busy and have precious little attention for books, courses and lectures. Our attention span is youtube-size at best. 10 minutes is all we have.

In this reality, expecting people to read books to learn something is becoming less realistic, and even when we do read a book, a year later, we have forgotten 99% of its content. And now comes the time when we need that knowledge and we are back at square one.

What I needed was cheat sheet for individual topics so I could remind myself (and others) how to do something specific, troubleshoot something as a coach, or have a focused discussion about a specific topic, just as I was walking into it. These lists have helped me and others, so I hope it can help you as well, and perhaps you’ll even want to contribute. So here it is. Enjoy and contribute. This is (and will always remain) work in progress.

The Cheat Sheets

• Introductory
  • Why Agile? What is Agile? The elevator pitch for why agile
  • Agile 101 Videos
  • Scrum overview
  • eXtreme Programming overview
  • Kanban overview
  • Agile readiness assessment - Is my company ready to go agile?
  • The role of the manager in Agile
• Basic Practices
  • Agile Requirements - User Stories & beyond
  • Effective Retrospectives
  • Engineering Practices
  • Quality in Agile (Fix bugs first, how to improve quality)
  • Agile Testing
  • Kanban Kickstart
  • Code Reviews
  • Daily Meeting / Standup / Daily Scrum
  • Sprint/Iteration Planning meeting
  • Estimation (methods of estimation, the pitch for using story points, alternatives)
  • Clean Code
  • Meeting Facilitation (Why and how)
• Improving
  • Agile Tools Evaluation score card (or mind map)
  • Top 10 Games to sharpen your agile knowledge and skills
  • Problem solving activities (Toyota Kata?)
  • Agile Inspiration Videos - These are great for “special-edition” retrospectives
  • Conducting Surveys
  • Agile company assessment
  • Team Agile Scan
  • Agile engineering assessment
  • Coaching teams
  • Organizing a ShipIt days
  • Making distributed teams work

About The Author

I am Sagi Smolarski, Lead Coach at AgileSparks.com. I have been working with, teaching and coaching Agile since 2001, when a project I was managing started using eXtreme Programming. Since then I have worked with dozens of teams and companies, and I am still learning. You can contact me at sagi at agilesparks.com.