How to Choose the Best Agile Framework for Your Team
Allison Bokone
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Last updated on September 5, 2024
The Agile process for software development started with the Agile Manifesto in 2001, which emphasizes collaboration, flexibility, and adaptability. In particular, Agile focuses on people and enables them to self-organize, work in cross-functional teams, and adjust course as needed without a lot of process or documentation overhead. Over the past 20+ years several frameworks have come out of the Agile development process, each with their own approach to how to best uphold the 12 Principles behind the Agile Manifesto. Today we’ll take a look at some of the top Agile frameworks and how your team can leverage them for success.
Scrum is one of the most popular Agile frameworks. Each cross-functional team makes up the “scrum” and works together over short 2-4 week sprints to deliver features. Each sprint starts with a planning meeting and ends with a review and retrospective. This iterative approach to development allows teams to create repeatable processes that are improved through regular feedback during the retrospectives. Teams also meet daily for a brief check in to keep the team aligned and unblocked. The short nature of sprints allows teams to clearly define what tasks will be completed in that timeframe and work on only those tasks.
Scrum is great for smaller teams that want clear, timebound tasks that can be finished within 2-4 week sprints. The frequent communication allows teams to adjust quickly to customer feedback and bugs and encourages transparency and continuous improvement. For larger teams, the Large-scale Scrum (LeSS), Scrum of Scrums (SoS), Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe), and Scrum at Scale (S@S) frameworks offer different approaches to how to scale scrum across multiple teams. This gives teams in larger, often hierarchical, companies the flexibility to leverage the best parts of Scrum while still working within their company structure and managing dependencies across teams.
Kanban emphasizes a more visual approach to planning and organizing tasks and focuses on limiting the amount of work in progress. Teams define their software development workflow and represent them as vertical lanes on the planning board. Rather than assigning tasks to a certain sprint, Kanban allows tasks to continuously flow through the development process but places limits on how many tasks can be in each lane. If a lane fills up then the team must rebalance the workload, adapt their workflow, or wait for tasks to move to the next phase of development before taking on new tasks.
Kanban is great for small teams focused on continuous delivery. The definition of the software development workflow lanes can take some time up front but the continuous nature of Kanban cuts down on the dedicated time spent planning for a particular period of time, while the focus on collaboration and communication still lends itself to continuous improvement and regular review meetings keep everyone aligned on status, priorities, and risks.
Scrumban is a combination that brings together the strengths of Scrum and Kanban. Teams plan work in sprints and hold many of the same meetings as they would in Scrum, but they also visualize their work in lanes to help track progress during the sprint and to increase the focus on resources as items move through the development workflow. This enables teams to better understand their workflow within the sprint, along with their capacity in each workflow lane, so that they can plan and load balance more effectively.
Extreme Programming, or XP, emphasizes communication and collaboration the most out of the Agile frameworks. XP encourages having the whole team sit together in an open office so that face-to-face communication is easy and quick. XP also relies heavily on customer involvement – also ideally on-site – and expects the customer to be an active participant in the team. On the development side, XP uses Pair Programming, where developers work in pairs at a single workstation. They take turns writing code while the other reviews, offers suggestions in real time, and helps brainstorm solutions if the person coding gets stuck.
Because of the heavy emphasis on face-to-face communication and frequent in-person collaboration, XP really only works for teams that are co-located in the same office. Releases are done quarterly based on what tasks the customer has chosen during the weekly cycle meetings. While there may be limited flexibility in working arrangements, XP embraces incremental design, continuous integration, and adapting to changing customer requirements.
Feature-Driven Development, or FDD, focuses on breaking projects down into user stories and features that can be planned, designed, and developed in two weeks or less. The customer participates in design meetings at the beginning of each iteration to prioritize which user stories should be worked on next. Larger user stories may need to be broken down into several sets of smaller features, so there may be dependencies between features.
FDD emphasizes a more rigorous software development cycle and can, therefore, be a good fit for larger teams in more hierarchical companies or ones transitioning from less Agile frameworks such as the Rational Unified Process (RUP) or waterfall methods. While FDD requires smaller, distinct features, it does allow for dependencies that build those features into larger stories, making it scalable for larger teams.
No matter which Agile framework you choose, Assembla has tools to help your team plan, track, develop, test, and release your features on time and at quality. We offer flexible backlog management tools, including cardwalls and task boards, to assist your teams in creating, updating, and visualizing your feature list. Our task management system can quickly create tickets for bugs and our repo integration updates ticket status instantly from Git, Perforce and Subversion code commits.
For a deeper dive on all the Agile Project Management features Assembla has to offer, check out How to Use Assembla for Sprint Planning and Management. If you’re ready to try a cloud-based Agile development process, start a free 14 day trial of Assembla. Our team would love to talk with you about how Assembla can meet your Agile development needs.
