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John Stenbeck, in his book “PMI-ACP and Certified Scrum Professional Exam Prep and Desk Reference”, he creates a grid of all 87 processes used in Agile project methodology.   They are divided into five process groups and 7 knowledge areas.

The past two posts have covered “3.8 Agile Estimating,”  that is, the eighth process in the third knowledge area of “Adaptive Planning”, which just happens to fall in the “Planning” process area.

This post covered a tool used in agile to accommodate                                         the short-term need for stability during the sprint and the long-term need for flexibility outside the sprint.    The tool is FBS, a Feature Breakdown Structure, analogous to the WBS or Work Breakdown Structure used in traditional PM.

The FBS is useful as a tool because it helps:

1. The prioritizing of the customer/proxy’s business value
2. Alignment of the customer/proxy and the project team by use of a common lexicon, expressed in the form of user stories and related tasks
3. Analyze and identify variances between estimates and actuals.
4. Participatory decision-making, because it helps extract important information in a workable form.
5. Implementation of sustainable, effective solutions to complex problems that cannot be fully defined in advance.

The next post will cover process 3.9 Sizing, which helps define the relative development effort required to complete stories.

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