Agile On Demand!
Industry Trends:
Gartner says Cloud and Agile Technologies are the key market driver for ALM(Application LifeCycle Management).
On Agile, Gartner states:
- Driven by cloud and agile technologies, the ALM market is evolving and expanding.
- One key driver for a move to ALM is the move to Agile - in particular, scaling agile to larger projects and distributed teams.
- Of the products in the Magic Quadrant, much of the growth is in the Agile planning category.
Gartner's analysts(Thomas Murphy and David Norton) predicted that by 2012 "agile development methods will be utilized in 80% of all software development projects".
Organizations that have increased their usage of Agile are seeing the benefits:
- The report confirms that teams who have successfully moved to Agile do see productivity improvements especially in "the flexibility of the development team to respond to shifting requirements.
- The promise of 4 times the improvements in overall productivity has been and will be achieved by select organizations.
Current Statistics of PMI-ACPs:
- Across the Globe:
- Number of PMI-ACPs - 3033
- Number of PMI-ACPs in the year 2011 - 518
- Number of PMI-ACPs in the year 2012 - 1587
- Number of PMI-ACPs in the year 2013 - 898
- Across India:
- Number of PMI-ACPs - 308
- Number of PMI-ACPs in the year 2011 - 59
- Number of PMI-ACPs in the year 2012 - 150
- Number of PMI-ACPs in the year 2013 - 99
(Source: PMI Online Registry as at 12:00 PM, 05/23/2013)
How to Become an PMI-ACP:
Preparation Schedule:
- 2 hours per day for 5 business days
- 4 hours per day during weekends
- Continue it for 2 months dedicatedly.
- Make our own notes/memory maps/charts even if you attend any training programme.
- Search for the areas in Google which seem to be little complex/difficult on your part to understand.
- Join in Linked In groups such as PMI Agile Certified Practitioner ACP Exam Prep Study Group and Agile PMP Certification (PMI-ACP) and try to go through the points made by PMI-ACPs.
Practice Tests:
- Simulation Tests by Saket Bansal ( http://www.izenbridge.com/)
- http://www.agileexams.com/
- http://www.proplanx.com/
Key Areas From Exam Perspective:
- Agile Manifesto and the principles behind it
- Scrum Events and understand each event in detail
- Product Backlog
- XP Practices & Values
- Lean Principles
- Kanban
- Product Roadmap
- Story Maps
- Agile Risk Management
- Gantt Charts
- Earned Value Management
- Cumulative Flow Diagrams
- Risk Burn-down graph
- Personas
- User Stories
- Information Radiators
- Velocity
- Globalization, culture and team diversity
- Self-organizing teams
- Osmotic Communication
- MMF
- Planning Poker
- Affinity Estimation
- Spike
- Burn up Chart
- Kaizen
- 5S Approach
- Scrum of Scrums
Recommended Books:
- PMI-ACP Prep Book by Mike Griffiths
- The Art of Agile Development by James Shore and Shane Warden
- Scrum Handbook by Jeff Sutherland
Agile is growing!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
