Agile project management is an iterative approach to delivering a project throughout its life cycle.

Iterative or agile life cycles are composed of several iterations or incremental steps towards the completion of a project. Iterative approaches are frequently used in software development projects to promote velocity and adaptability since the benefit of iteration is that you can adjust as you go along rather than following a linear path.

One of the aims of an agile or iterative approach is to release benefits throughout the process rather than only at the end. At the core, agile projects should exhibit central values and behaviours of trust, flexibility, empowerment and collaboration.

This course digs into the problems which we all face with estimating and planning. It's worth highlighting the motivations behind creating good estimates. The key motivation behind good estimation is to be useful for project planning. There is a huge amount of inherent uncertainty surrounding estimates, especially early in the project. So, we shift our aim from 100% precise, or "true", estimates, and towards providing estimates which are useful and accurate (accurate in this sense meaning that they are a good measure of effort and convey a truly representative amount of uncertainty).

The usefulness of an estimate is achieved through the following:

It provides insights into the risks involved with the project.
By constantly reassessing as more knowledge is gained throughout the project you reduce the uncertainty involved over time.
Reliable estimates lead to reliable delivery which establishes trust between the developers and management.
Estimating supports decision making by providing insight into the costs and schedule of a proposed project.