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In John Stenbeck’s book “PMI-ACP and Certified Scrum Professional Exam Prep and Desk Reference”, he creates an “agile project management process grid” which describes 87 processes used in agile project management.   These processes are divided into five process groups (Initiate, Plan, Iterate, Control, and Close), which are analogous to the five process groups in traditional project management, and seven knowledge areas which can be mapped, more or less, onto the ten knowledge areas in traditional project management.

I am now covering a group of agile processes that support the “adaptive planning” knowledge area that are completed during each iteration of the project.   Process 3.15 was Burn Down Charts, Process 3.16 was Task/Kanban Boards, process 3.17 was Test-Driven Practices, and this post covers process 3.18 Agile Modeling.

Here are the basic principles behind Agile Modeling (AM).

1. Create multiple models in small increments–this is because any given model is bound to include some inaccuracies, and having multiple models will more likely produce code that ends up actually working
2. Create an abstract representation of the software–then prove or disprove its performance with code that either works or does not work
3. Use the right artifacts from each model–team improves its understanding of the approach to the solution
4. Follow a continuous forward match–iterating to the next model after one model is verified
5. Get active stakeholder participation in AM–project stakeholders know what the result of a successful model will be and can provide crucial feedback needed to improve between each model
6. Use applied simplicity–focus on the practice of only creating models for the current facet of the problem; this goes hand in hand with principle 1 above of creating multiple models in small increments, avoiding large, detailed models.   Do just enough modeling to understand the scope of the problem and the architecture of possible solutions.
7. Use open communication–display models on walls or Wiki’s, embrace collective ownership of artifacts, and use group-based model development.

These principles allow a team to do modeling in such a way that possible solutions are suggested, tested, and then improved upon in subsequent development iterations.

The next post covers the last of the processes related to the adaptive planning knowledge area, namely, Process 3.19 Wireframes.

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