How real projects actually get planned, scheduled, and run: Waterfall, the Agile family (Scrum, Kanban, XP, Lean), the hybrids and "agile-inspired" reality most companies actually practice, and the scheduling techniques (WBS, Gantt, Critical Path Method, PERT) that sit underneath all of them.
Every methodology course starts by knocking Waterfall down, usually without reading the paper that supposedly invented it. That's worth fixing, because the real history complicates the story in a useful way: the model…
"Agile" is not a methodology. It's a set of four values and twelve principles, agreed in a weekend by people who mostly ran different , competing methodologies, and who found they agreed on more than they expected.…
Scrum is the most widely adopted concrete implementation of the values described in Agile: Origins and the Manifesto . It is a deliberately small framework — the official Scrum Guide is a short document, not a…
Kanban is often taught as "Scrum without the ceremonies," which gets the relationship backwards. Kanban wasn't derived from Scrum at all — it comes from a manufacturing discipline decades older than either — and the…
Ask a Scrum team how they write code and you often get a shrug — Scrum defines process : roles, ceremonies, a cadence of sprints. It says almost nothing about how the code itself should be written, tested, or…
"Lean" gets used loosely in software conversations — sometimes meaning Kanban boards, sometimes meaning startups moving fast, sometimes just meaning "not much process." Lean Software Development is a specific, named…
Everything taught in Agile Origins and Scrum describes a coherent, self-consistent way of working. Very few students will graduate into a company running it in that pure form. This page is about the gap between the two…
Water-Scrum-Fall describes a hybrid that mostly happens by accident — organisational constraints leave a waterfall shell around a genuine Scrum core, without anyone designing it that way on purpose. This page covers the…
Before anyone can draw a schedule, someone has to answer a more basic question: what, exactly, is the work? A Work Breakdown Structure (WBS) is the answer written down as a hierarchy — total project scope decomposed…
Once a Work Breakdown Structure has produced a list of work packages, someone still has to lay them out in time and show how they depend on each other. The Gantt chart is the tool almost everyone reaches for first — a…
A Gantt chart shows you a schedule; it doesn't tell you which tasks actually determine how long the project takes, or how confident you should be in any of the dates. Two techniques, developed independently within a…
Every technique on this site's project-management pages — a Gantt chart , a critical path calculation, a sprint commitment — consumes a duration estimate as its raw material, and produces a schedule only as trustworthy…
DevOps is usually introduced as a set of tools — pipelines, containers, infrastructure-as-code — but it started as a cultural argument about who is responsible for what happens after code is written, and the tools…
By this point in the section you've met a WBS, a Gantt chart, the critical path, and a run of named methodologies — waterfall, Scrum, Kanban, XP, Lean, and the wider agile family. Each has genuine strengths, real case…