This topic is optional. Most NGO project roles in northern Ghana use plan driven methods, but if you work with a tech company, a software team or a hub, you will hear words like sprint, backlog and standup. Knowing what they mean helps you join in from day one, and the habits behind them are useful on any project.
The agile idea
Agile is a family of ways of working built on a few beliefs: deliver something useful early, get feedback often, and change the plan as you learn. Instead of planning everything for a year, an agile team plans a short cycle in detail, does the work, shows the result to the people who will use it, and decides what to do next.
This works well when the right answer is not clear at the start. Building a farmer advice app is a good example: you cannot know which features farmers will actually use until they try an early version.
Scrum in plain words
Scrum is one popular agile framework, described in a free document called the Scrum Guide. Its main parts are:
Three accountabilities
- Product Owner: decides what is most valuable to work on next and keeps the list of work in order.
- Scrum Master: helps the team work well and removes obstacles.
- Developers: the people who do the work. In Scrum this means anyone building the product, not only programmers.