6.2Agile project management

The belief that "agile is always superior" is a misconception. What is asked of a PM is the judgment to determine which lifecycle minimizes risk for the project at hand—by assessing how firm or how likely to change the requirements are, and choosing between a predictive approach that fixes the plan up front and an adaptive approach that continually revisits the plan in short iterations.

6.2.1Scrum and sprint operation

• Scrum is a leading agile framework that selects items to build from a prioritized product backlog for each fixed-length period (a sprint, typically 1-4 weeks), iteratively building working deliverables. At the end of each sprint the deliverable is reviewed and feedback is folded into the next sprint's planning, allowing changes or misunderstandings in requirements to be corrected early.
• Because of sprint iteration, even exploratory development where requirements are not yet firm can show something actually working early and correct direction along the way. On the other hand, for a project where contractual or regulatory constraints require the full scope of deliverables to be fixed up front, Scrum, whose scope can shift with each iteration, does not fit as-is.