The Agile Heartbeat

The following diagram shows the heartbeat of a typical agile project, how the information flows through the project, and what the inputs and outputs are and when they are required.

An agile project ( like all projects ) starts with requirements. In an agile project this is termed the Product Backlog, owned managed and prioritised by the customer, the backlog is used to make a first cut of a release plan, showing how the highest priorities would be delivered first, and the least prioritised last. The plan is divided into equal sections called Iterations

At the start of the iteration, a Planning Session is held, where the requirements for an iteration are then broken down into all the tasks required to implement all of the requirements. The sum of tasks assigned to an iteration become known as the Iteration Backlog

The core of an agile project is the iteration, a fixed period of time ( Timebox ) from which the output is a new potentially releasable product containing all the requirements completed during the iteration.

At the end of every iteration, the team hold a demonstration or Show & Tell to the customer of the functionality delivered to date and then a Retrospective, a review of the current iteration, looking at what went well, what didn't go well and what the team can improve upon. The outout pf the demonstration and the retrospective are then fed into the planning session for the next iteration and the whole cycle starts over agains.