Head First Agile

how to use this book: Intro

Note

In this section, we answer the burning question: “So why DID they put that in a book about agile?”

Who is this book for?

If you can answer “yes” to any of these questions:

1. Are you a developer, project manager, business analyst, designer, or other member of a team, and you’re looking to improve your projects?

2. Is your team going agile, but you’re not really sure what that means or how you fit in?

3. Are you thinking about a job search, and want to understand why employers are asking for agile experience?

4. Do you prefer stimulating dinner-party conversation to dry, dull, academic lectures?

this book is for you.

This book includes a complete guide to preparing for the PMI-ACP® certification exam, and has 100% coverage of the exam material. But the most effective way to prepare for it is to learn agile principles, practices, and ideas. So the entire first part of this book is focused on learning agile, not on preparing for the exam.

Who should probably back away from this book?

If you can answer “yes” to any of these:

1. Are you completely new to working on any kind of team or working with other people to achieve something?

2. Are you a “go-it-alone” loner who feels that working with other people on a team is always a waste of time?

3. Are you afraid to try something different? Would you rather have a root canal than mix stripes with plaid? Do you believe that a technical book can’t be serious if agile concepts, tools, and ideas are anthropomorphized?

Note

If you’ve never been on any kind of team before, then many of the ideas in agile will feel foreign. Just to be clear, we’re not necessarily talking about a software team—experience on any kind of team will be just fine!

this book is not for you.

Note

[Note from marketing: this book is for anyone with a pulse.]

Note

The PMI-ACP® (Agile Certified Practitioner) is one of the fastest-growing certifications in the world that employers are increasingly demanding.

Are you preparing for the PMI-ACP® exam?

Then this book is definitely for you! We built this book to get the ideas, concepts, and practices of agile into your brain—and we made sure to include 100% coverage of every topic that appears on the exam. We included a lot of exam preparation material, including a full-length simulated exam that’s as close to the real thing as you can get!

We know what you’re thinking.

“How can this be a serious book on agile?”

“What’s with all the graphics?”

“Can I actually learn it this way?”

And we know what your brain is thinking.

Your brain craves novelty. It’s always searching, scanning, waiting for something unusual. It was built that way, and it helps you stay alive.

So what does your brain do with all the routine, ordinary, normal things you encounter? Everything it can to stop them from interfering with the brain’s real job—recording things that matter. It doesn’t bother saving the boring things; they never make it past the “this is obviously not important” filter.

How does your brain know what’s important? Suppose you’re out for a day hike and a tiger jumps in front of you, what happens inside your head and body?

Neurons fire. Emotions crank up. Chemicals surge.

And that’s how your brain knows…

This must be important! Don’t forget it!

But imagine you’re at home, or in a library. It’s a safe, warm, tiger-free zone. You’re studying. Getting ready for an exam. Or trying to learn some tough technical topic your boss thinks will take a week, 10 days at the most.

Just one problem. Your brain’s trying to do you a big favor. It’s trying to make sure that this obviously unimportant content doesn’t clutter up scarce resources. Resources that are better spent storing the really big things. Like tigers. Like the danger of fire. Like how you should never again snowboard in shorts.

And there’s no simple way to tell your brain, “Hey brain, thank you very much, but no matter how dull this book is, and how little I’m registering on the emotional Richter scale right now, I really do want you to keep this stuff around.”

We think of a “Head First” reader as a learner.

So what does it take to learn something? First, you have to get it, then make sure you don’t forget it. It’s not about pushing facts into your head. Based on the latest research in cognitive science, neurobiology, and educational psychology, learning takes a lot more than text on a page. We know what turns your brain on.

Some of the Head First learning principles:

Make it visual. Images are far more memorable than words alone, and make learning much more effective (up to 89% improvement in recall and transfer studies). It also makes things more understandable. Put the words within or near the graphics they relate to, rather than on the bottom or on another page, and learners will be up to twice as likely to solve problems related to the content.

Use a conversational and personalized style. In recent studies, students performed up to 40% better on post-learning tests if the content spoke directly to the reader, using a first-person, conversational style rather than taking a formal tone. Tell stories instead of lecturing. Use casual language. Don’t take yourself too seriously. Which would you pay more attention to: a stimulating dinner-party companion, or a lecture?

Get the learner to think more deeply. In other words, unless you actively flex your neurons, nothing much happens in your head. A reader has to be motivated, engaged, curious, and inspired to solve problems, draw conclusions, and generate new knowledge. And for that, you need challenges, exercises, and thought-provoking questions, and activities that involve both sides of the brain and multiple senses.

Get—and keep—the reader’s attention. We’ve all had the “I really want to learn this, but I can’t stay awake past page one” experience. Your brain pays attention to things that are out of the ordinary, interesting, strange, eye-catching, unexpected. Learning a new, tough, technical topic doesn’t have to be boring. Your brain will learn much more quickly if it’s not.

Touch their emotions. We now know that your ability to remember something is largely dependent on its emotional content. You remember what you care about. You remember when you feel something. No, we’re not talking heart-wrenching stories about a boy and his dog. We’re talking emotions like surprise, curiosity, fun, “what the…?” , and the feeling of “I rule!” that comes when you solve a puzzle, learn something everybody else thinks is hard, or realize you know something that “I’m more technical than thou” Bob from engineering doesn’t.

Metacognition: thinking about thinking

If you really want to learn, and you want to learn more quickly and more deeply, pay attention to how you pay attention. Think about how you think. Learn how you learn.

Most of us did not take courses on metacognition or learning theory when we were growing up. We were expected to learn, but rarely taught to learn.

But we assume that if you’re holding this book, you really want to learn about project management. And you probably don’t want to spend a lot of time. And since you need to use this on a real project (and especially if you’re going to take an exam on it!) you need to remember what you read. And for that, you’ve got to understand it. To get the most from this book, or any book or learning experience, take responsibility for your brain. Your brain on this content.

The trick is to get your brain to see the new material you’re learning as Really Important. Crucial to your well-being. As important as a tiger. Otherwise, you’re in for a constant battle, with your brain doing its best to keep the new content from sticking.

So just how DO you get your brain to think that the material about agile is a hungry tiger?

There’s the slow, tedious way, or the faster, more effective way. The slow way is about sheer repetition. You obviously know that you are able to learn and remember even the dullest of topics if you keep pounding the same thing into your brain. With enough repetition, your brain says, “This doesn’t feel important to him, but he keeps looking at the same thing over and over and over, so I suppose it must be.”

The faster way is to do anything that increases brain activity, especially different types of brain activity. The things on the previous page are a big part of the solution, and they’re all things that have been proven to help your brain work in your favor. For example, studies show that putting words within the pictures they describe (as opposed to somewhere else in the page, like a caption or in the body text) causes your brain to try to makes sense of how the words and picture relate, and this causes more neurons to fire. More neurons firing = more chances for your brain to get that this is something worth paying attention to, and possibly recording.

A conversational style helps because people tend to pay more attention when they perceive that they’re in a conversation, since they’re expected to follow along and hold up their end. The amazing thing is, your brain doesn’t necessarily care that the “conversation” is between you and a book! On the other hand, if the writing style is formal and dry, your brain perceives it the same way you experience being lectured to while sitting in a roomful of passive attendees. No need to stay awake.

But pictures and conversational style are just the beginning.

Here’s what WE did:

We used pictures, because your brain is tuned for visuals, not text. As far as your brain’s concerned, a picture really is worth a thousand words. And when text and pictures work together, we embedded the text in the pictures because your brain works more effectively when the text is within the thing the text refers to, as opposed to in a caption or buried in the text somewhere.

We used redundancy, saying the same thing in different ways and with different media types, and multiple senses, to increase the chance that the content gets coded into more than one area of your brain.

We used concepts and pictures in unexpected ways because your brain is tuned for novelty, and we used pictures and ideas with at least some emotional content, because your brain is tuned to pay attention to the biochemistry of emotions. That which causes you to feel something is more likely to be remembered, even if that feeling is nothing more than a little humor, surprise, or interest.

We used a personalized, conversational style, because your brain is tuned to pay more attention when it believes you’re in a conversation than if it thinks you’re passively listening to a presentation. Your brain does this even when you’re reading.

We included more than 80 activities, because your brain is tuned to learn and remember more when you do things than when you read about things. And we made the exercises challenging-yet-doable, because that’s what most people prefer.

We used multiple learning styles, because you might prefer step-by-step procedures, while someone else wants to understand the big picture first, and someone else just wants to see an example. But regardless of your own learning preference, everyone benefits from seeing the same content represented in multiple ways.

We include content for both sides of your brain, because the more of your brain you engage, the more likely you are to learn and remember, and the longer you can stay focused. Since working one side of the brain often means giving the other side a chance to rest, you can be more productive at learning for a longer period of time.

And we included stories and exercises that present more than one point of view, because your brain is tuned to learn more deeply when it’s forced to make evaluations and judgments.

We included challenges, with exercises, and by asking questions that don’t always have a straight answer, because your brain is tuned to learn and remember when it has to work at something. Think about it—you can’t get your body in shape just by watching people at the gym. But we did our best to make sure that when you’re working hard, it’s on the right things. That you’re not spending one extra dendrite processing a hard-to-understand example, or parsing difficult, jargon-laden, or overly terse text.

We used people. In stories, examples, pictures, and so on, because, well, because you’re a person. And your brain pays more attention to people than it does to things.

Here’s what YOU can do to bend your brain into submission

So, we did our part. The rest is up to you. These tips are a starting point; listen to your brain and figure out what works for you and what doesn’t. Try new things.

Note

Cut this out and stick it on your refrigerator.

1. Slow down. The more you understand, the less you have to memorize.

   Don’t just read. Stop and think. When the book asks you a question, don’t just skip to the answer. Imagine that someone really is asking the question. The more deeply you force your brain to think, the better chance you have of learning and remembering.

2. Do the exercises. Write your own notes.

   We put them in, but if we did them for you, that would be like having someone else do your workouts for you. And don’t just look at the exercises. Use a pencil. There’s plenty of evidence that physical activity while learning can increase the learning.

3. Read the “There are No Dumb Questions”

   That means all of them. They’re not optional sidebars—they’re part of the core content! Don’t skip them.

4. Make this the last thing you read before bed. Or at least the last challenging thing.

   Part of the learning (especially the transfer to long-term memory) happens after you put the book down. Your brain needs time on its own, to do more processing. If you put in something new during that processing time, some of what you just learned will be lost.

5. Drink water. Lots of it.

   Your brain works best in a nice bath of fluid. Dehydration (which can happen before you ever feel thirsty) decreases cognitive function.

6. Talk about it. Out loud.

   Speaking activates a different part of the brain. If you’re trying to understand something, or increase your chance of remembering it later, say it out loud. Better still, try to explain it out loud to someone else. You’ll learn more quickly, and you might uncover ideas you hadn’t known were there when you were reading about it.

7. Listen to your brain.

   Pay attention to whether your brain is getting overloaded. If you find yourself starting to skim the surface or forget what you just read, it’s time for a break. Once you go past a certain point, you won’t learn faster by trying to shove more in, and you might even hurt the process.

8. Feel something!

   Your brain needs to know that this matters. Get involved with the stories. Make up your own captions for the photos. Groaning over a bad joke is still better than feeling nothing at all.

9. Create something!

   Apply this to your daily work; use what you are learning to make decisions on your projects. Just do something to get some experience beyond the exercises and activities in this book. All you need is a pencil and a problem to solve…a problem that might benefit from using the tools and techniques you’re learning in this book.

Read me

This is a learning experience, not a reference book. We deliberately stripped out everything that might get in the way of learning whatever it is we’re working on at that point in the book. Once you’ve read this book, you’ll definitely want to keep it on your shelf, so you can revisit useful ideas, tools, and techniques. But the first time through, you need to begin at the beginning, because the book makes assumptions about what you’ve already seen and learned.

The redundancy is intentional and important.

One distinct difference in a Head First book is that we want you to really get it. And we want you to finish the book remembering what you’ve learned. Most reference books don’t have retention and recall as a goal, but this book is about learning, so you’ll see some of the same concepts come up more than once.

The Brain Power exercises don’t have answers.

For some of them, there is no right answer, and for others, part of the learning experience of the Brain Power activities is for you to decide if and when your answers are right. In some of the Brain Power exercises, you will find hints to point you in the right direction.

The activities are NOT optional.

The exercises and activities are not add-ons; they’re part of the core content of the book. Some of them are to help with memory, some are for understanding, and some will help you apply what you’ve learned. Don’t skip the exercises. Even crossword puzzles are important—they’ll help get concepts into your brain. But more importantly, they’re good for giving your brain a chance to think about the words and terms you’ve been learning in a different context.

Try the exam questions—even if you’re not studying for the exam!

Some of our readers are preparing for the three-hour, 120-question exam PMI-ACP® certification exam. Luckily, the most effective way to prepare for the exam is to learn agile. So even if you’re not interested in the PMI-ACP® certification, this book is still for you. But you should still try the practice exam questions at the end of each chapter, because answering the exam questions is a really effective way to get agile concepts into your brain.

The technical review team

Technical reviewers:

Dave Prior has been managing technology projects for over 20 years and he has been focusing exclusively on agile since 2009. He is a Certified Scrum Trainer and works for LeadingAgile. His spirit animal is Otis Redding and if he could ingest only one food substance, it would be coffee.

Keith Conant has developed software for 20 years as a software engineer, project manager, and group manager. He currently leads a team enhancing a point-of-sale payment application used by universities around the world. Away from the office, Keith can be found composing music, playing drums, guitar, or keyboards in a band, or challenging himself physically kayaking, running, hiking, or cycling.

Philip Cheung has been developing software for 15 years and he has been exclusively using agile since 2013 to manage and deliver projects. He works in the financial industry involved in creating various enterprise-level applications. Philip likes to escape into the rural English countryside and one day hopes to retire in a charming country cottage.

Kelly D. Marce, PMP®, PMI-ACP® has more than nine years in project management. Kelly is an agile trainer, certified project manager, and PMP® mentor at a leading financial services company in Canada. In his spare time, he acts as a producer of live events within his community and tries to keep up with his four-year-old son, Jacob.

And, as always, we were lucky to have Lisa Kellner return to our tech review team. Lisa was awesome, as usual. Thanks so much, everyone!

Acknowledgments

Our editor:

We want to thank our editor, Nan Barber, for editing this book. Thanks!

The O’Reilly team:

There are so many people at O’Reilly we want to thank that we hope we don’t forget anyone.

We’ll definitely be thanking the production team in this space. In the meantime, here are a few people we definitely want to acknowledge.

And as always, we love Mary Treseler, and can’t wait to work with her again! And a big shout out to our other friends and editors, Mike Hendrickson, Tim O’Reilly, Andy Oram, Laurel Ruma, Lindsay Ventimiglia, Melanie Yarbrough, Ron Bilodeau, Lucie Haskins, and Jasmine Kwityn. And if you’re reading this book right now, then you can thank the greatest publicity team in the industry: Marsee Henon, Kathryn Barret, and the rest of the folks in Sebastopol.

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More Praise for Head First Agile

– Mike Monsoon, International Rock Star

Listen to the song here: https://bit.ly/head-first-agile-song

Part 1: Understanding Agile

In part 1, you’ll learn all about agile and how it helps your teams work better together and build better software. First we’ll take you through the basics of agile principles and practices. Then we’ll do a deeper dive on the most common forms of agile found on teams today: Scrum, XP, Lean, and Kanban. By the end of Part 1, you’ll have a solid foundation in the ideas that drive agile teams... and a toolbox that you can use to put agile in place on your own team today.

Note

Part 1 of this book has just a little bit of material to help you prepare for the PMI-ACP® exam. But we were really careful to design that material so that it’s focused less on preparing for the exam, and more on getting agile into your brain. So even if you’re not even thinking about taking the PMI-ACP® exam, you should still do those parts because they’ll help you learn the core material in this book.