Agile

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  • Estimating with Tee Shirt Sizes

    Mike Cohn's Blog - Succeeding With Agile
    mike@mountaingoatsoftware.com
    2 Apr 2013 | 12:16 pm
    I occasionally encounter the use of t-shirt sizes (Small, Medium, Large, or so on) in use as estimating units by teams. T-shirt sizes are an OK approach to getting started with relative estimating, but they suffer from two severe weaknesses: They aren't additive. You cannot tell a boss you'll be done in 3 mediums, 4 larges, and 2 petites. Your view of an XL may not match mine. You may think it's 50% bigger than an L; I may think 25% bigger. Teams get around both weaknesses with some underlying assumptions (hopefully stated) about size. They may, for example, state,…

  • 41 Things You Need to Know about the Scaled Agile Framework® (SAFe)

    Agile Development Blog: Scaling Software Agility
    Rob Pinna
    16 May 2013 | 10:00 am
    The Scaled Agile Framework®, or SAFe, provides a recipe for adopting Agile at enterprise scale.  It is illustrated in the big picture. As Scrum is to the Agile team, SAFe is to the Agile enterprise. SAFe tackles the tough issues – architecture, integration, funding, governance and roles at scale.  It is field-tested and enterprise-friendly. SAFe is the brainchild of Dean Leffingwell. As Ken Schwaber and Jeff Sutherland are to Scrum, Dean Leffingwell is to SAFe. SAFe is based on Lean and Agile principles. There are three levels in SAFe: * Team * Program * Portfolio At the…

  • Agile Coach Camp Bangalore 2013

    Managed Chaos
    Naresh Jain
    24 Apr 2013 | 8:56 am
    What: Unconference for Agile Coaches, Scrum Masters, Agile Trainers, Leaders, Change Agents and Mentors. When: 7th-8th June 2013 Where: Hotel Ramada, Bangalore Theme: True Essence of Coaching Role of a Coach? Many of us have embraced an agile coach’s role, but do we really understand what coaching is all about? How coaching is different from mentoring? To help us learn about the true essence of coaching, during this Coach Camp, we’ve dedicated one full day to work with Judy van Zon, who is Professional coach accredited by International Coach Federation since 2008 Co-Active…

  • Am Ende eines langen Tages

    bor!sgloger
    Bernd Krehoff
    16 May 2013 | 10:30 pm
    Kennt ihr ihn auch? Den ausgepowerten Product Owner, der vor lauter Terminen seinen Tag doppelt bis dreifach verplant hat? Oder den eifrigen ScrumMaster, der noch abends im leeren Teamraum sitzt und die Retro für den nächsten Tag akribisch vorbereitet? Manche sagen dann: “Das kann nicht gut sein.” Und zitieren das Agile Manifest, das von “nachhaltiger Entwicklung” und von einem “gleichmäßigen Tempo” erzählt, das “auf unbegrenzte Zeit” haltbar sein soll. Häufig geistert dann noch dieses eine Wort herum: Burnout. Ja, der gute Product Owner…

  • Start of a new chapter

    All About Agile | Agile Development Made Easy!
    Kelly Waters
    19 May 2013 | 1:37 am
    Hi everyone, Yesterday was my last day at ThoughtWorks. ThoughtWorks is an amazing company with some fantastic people, so I feel very privileged to have worked for them and very grateful that they gave me and my family the opportunity to live in Australia, which was a wonderful experience. However we’re back in the UK [...]
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    Agile Development Blog: Scaling Software Agility

  • 41 Things You Need to Know about the Scaled Agile Framework® (SAFe)

    Rob Pinna
    16 May 2013 | 10:00 am
    The Scaled Agile Framework®, or SAFe, provides a recipe for adopting Agile at enterprise scale.  It is illustrated in the big picture. As Scrum is to the Agile team, SAFe is to the Agile enterprise. SAFe tackles the tough issues – architecture, integration, funding, governance and roles at scale.  It is field-tested and enterprise-friendly. SAFe is the brainchild of Dean Leffingwell. As Ken Schwaber and Jeff Sutherland are to Scrum, Dean Leffingwell is to SAFe. SAFe is based on Lean and Agile principles. There are three levels in SAFe: * Team * Program * Portfolio At the…

  • When It Comes to Conferences, It’s Content, Content, Content

    Rally Software
    16 May 2013 | 7:00 am
    Countdown: 17 days until RallyON!  As we get closer to the event, we are knee-deep in content (and planning a welcome reception that will knock your socks off). We're refining the sessions and how they map to our overall themes of people, practice, and technology. This year's conference adds a new focus on Rally's platform, and how to optimize up and across the organization. People - What makes an Agile leader different? What kinds of trade-offs are involved in their decision-making? Find out as Rally's Tim Miller and Christopher Avery explore what it means to consciously lead an…

  • How to adopt Rally’s Agile portfolio management solution when you already have a PPM tool

    Catherine Connor
    15 May 2013 | 7:44 am
    Since Rally launched Rally Portfolio Manager in Dec 2011, I have worked with many PMOs, program managers and portfolio managers who ask: How can I adopt Rally’s portfolio management solution when I already have a PPM tool? The answer: Use a Rally--PPM tool integration.  But what does this look like, and what does it provide? Integrations ensure your PPM dashboards keep their value. As Gartner stated at their PPM and IT Governance Summit last year, there is not a “ one size fits all” solution in the portfolio management world right now. That world is experiencing a…

  • Evolve or Die: Build an Agile Business

    Bruce Winegarden
    8 May 2013 | 7:00 am
    I love riding 100 mph on twisty, turning race tracks -- my favorite is Laguna Seca in Monterey, California. In racing, as in business, keeping the finish line in mind is important, but if you can’t negotiate the curves and respond quickly to changing conditions along the way -- you won’t win. In this uber-competitive technology marketplace, the pace of change is only increasing. Disruptive new technologies are changing the game. Savvy business leaders are applying key agile concepts of continuous innovation, shorter iterations, and fail early/fail fast/fail often experiments not only…

  • Using Economics to Prioritize your Backlog

    Alex Pukinskis
    25 Apr 2013 | 7:00 am
    How do you prioritize your features?  Is it a gut-feel kind of thing?  Is it based on who’s yelling the loudest?  Is it based on what drives your next big sale?  Do you do it collaboratively or alone? In his book Principles of Product Development Flow, Don Reinertsen suggests using calculated economic models to decide what work to do first.  Specifically, he advocates an approach called Weighted Shortest-Job-First, or WSJF.  All other things being equal, the shortest job will deliver value soonest, so you should do that one first.   But all other things…
 
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    Managed Chaos

  • Agile Coach Camp Bangalore 2013

    Naresh Jain
    24 Apr 2013 | 8:56 am
    What: Unconference for Agile Coaches, Scrum Masters, Agile Trainers, Leaders, Change Agents and Mentors. When: 7th-8th June 2013 Where: Hotel Ramada, Bangalore Theme: True Essence of Coaching Role of a Coach? Many of us have embraced an agile coach’s role, but do we really understand what coaching is all about? How coaching is different from mentoring? To help us learn about the true essence of coaching, during this Coach Camp, we’ve dedicated one full day to work with Judy van Zon, who is Professional coach accredited by International Coach Federation since 2008 Co-Active…

  • Pricing and Positioning Agile related Tools and Services in Asia/India

    Naresh Jain
    4 Apr 2013 | 5:24 am
    Over the last few months, multiple friends and connection from US have asked me to share my experience with pricing Agile related tools and services in Asia (specifically India.) Following is my perspective: Disclaimer: Asia is the most diverse and dynamic continent out there. Any reasonable generalization is bound to have loopholes. Take it with a pinch of salt. Since the topic on hand is pricing & positioning agile related services and tools, let’s focus on senior managers at software companies, who are interested & responsible for procuring (or at least recommending) a…

  • Setting up Virtual Hosts on Mac OS X

    Naresh Jain
    22 Mar 2013 | 12:22 pm
    If you are building a web-app, which needs to use OAuth for user authentication across Facebook, Google, Twitter and other social media, testing the app locally, on your development machine, can be a real challenge. On your local machine, the app URL might look like http://localhost/my_app/login.xxx while in the production environment the URL would be http://my_app.com/login.xxx Now, when you try to test the OAuth integration, using Facebook (or any other resource server) it will not work locally. Because when you create the facebook app, you need to give the URL where the code will be…

  • Agile India 2013 – Final Attendees Profile

    Naresh Jain
    21 Mar 2013 | 12:26 am
    Agile India 2013 Conference hosted a total of 904 attendees over the 4 days. These attendees represented the following 195 different companies: 99tests ABB IDC Accenture Aconex India Pvt Ltd Aditi Technologies Aditya Birla Minacs IT services Agile Developer, Inc. AgileFAQs Alcatel Lucent India Alliance Global Services Allscripts Healthcare Solutions Allscripts India Pvt Ltd Altair Engineering AppDev Aricent Technologies ASCI Aspire Atex Atlassian BA Continuum India Pvt Ltd Bank of America BKTB Infosolutions Pvt. Ltd. BMC Software BNP Paribas India Solutions Bwin.Party C-SAM India Solutions…

  • Experimentation Driven Decision Making Workshop

    Naresh Jain
    19 Mar 2013 | 5:46 am
    In the last couple of months, I’ve got several requests from top-notch product companies in India, asking me to facilitate a hands-on workshop on decision making using Lean-Startup’s hypothesis validation techniques for their Executive and Senior Management. I’m thrilled to know that companies are seriously exploring these options. Following is a 1-Day workshop which I’ve successfully ran a few times: Experimentation Driven Decision Making Workshop Large number of products/services fail today, not because they cannot be built and delivered, but because the…
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    bor!sgloger

  • Am Ende eines langen Tages

    Bernd Krehoff
    16 May 2013 | 10:30 pm
    Kennt ihr ihn auch? Den ausgepowerten Product Owner, der vor lauter Terminen seinen Tag doppelt bis dreifach verplant hat? Oder den eifrigen ScrumMaster, der noch abends im leeren Teamraum sitzt und die Retro für den nächsten Tag akribisch vorbereitet? Manche sagen dann: “Das kann nicht gut sein.” Und zitieren das Agile Manifest, das von “nachhaltiger Entwicklung” und von einem “gleichmäßigen Tempo” erzählt, das “auf unbegrenzte Zeit” haltbar sein soll. Häufig geistert dann noch dieses eine Wort herum: Burnout. Ja, der gute Product Owner…

  • Fire all brilliant assholes

    Bettina Oebbeke
    15 May 2013 | 10:35 pm
    Why firing brilliant assholes is required to build a great engineering culture   Mein Blog besteht dieses Mal mit Absicht nur aus dieser Frage. Ich möchte damit zum Nachdenken anregen: Was passiert, wenn man Konflikte oder andere Probleme einfach „beseitigt“, anstatt genauer hinzuschauen, was dahintersteckt? Hätte es ipad, ipod und iphone gegeben, wenn der geniale, aber auch exzentrische Jobs seine Teams nicht zu Höchstleistungen getrieben hätte? Würde es heute Smartphones geben und Tablets? Ob wir das alles brauchen, ist eine andere Frage. Ich jedenfalls liebe mein ipad und ich…

  • ScrumMaster schützen den Prozess oder warum klein(st)e Veränderungen Applaus bekommen

    David Holzer
    14 May 2013 | 10:37 pm
    „Wir wollen das Scrum of Scrums (SoS) anders gestalten – und zwar grundlegend. So, wie es jetzt gerade läuft, funktioniert es nicht.“ Mit diesen Worten begrüßte mich vor einiger Zeit ein Company ScrumMaster, den ich zurzeit coache. Er berichtete, dass das Scrum of Scrums seit einigen Wochen bei den Teams in der Kritik stehen würde, weil die dort besprochenen Inhalte den Teams wenig Mehrwert brächten und die dort investierten 15 Minuten Zeitverschwendung seien. Es sei vor allem herausgekommen, dass nicht jedes Team jedem anderen Team etwas zu sagen habe – und schon gar…

  • Zählen ist doch ganz einfach, oder?

    Kristina Klessmann
    13 May 2013 | 10:35 pm
    Auf der Suche nach Separators (Unterbrechern zwischen den Sequenzen “Was lief gut?” und “Was kann verbessert werden?”) für eine Retro bin ich auf drei ganz einfache und doch wirkungsvolle kurze Übungen gestoßen. Sie lassen sich ohne großartige Vorbereitung und Zeitaufwand durchführen und können je nach Retro-Ziel eingesetzt werden.   Variante 1 habe ich letzte Woche ausprobiert. Nach dem anfänglichen „Wie jetzt? Wir sollen bis 3 zählen? Ist das Dein Ernst?“, stellte sich schnell Überraschung ein. Es stellte sich nämlich heraus, dass es nicht so…

  • Von der Kraft der positiven Bilder oder wie Menschen ihre eigene Realität gestalten

    Dieter Rösner
    12 May 2013 | 10:35 pm
    "Es sind nicht die Dinge, die uns beunruhigen, sondern unsere Sicht auf die Dinge." SenecaEine Szene aus einem Training für Manager im Scrum-Kontext. Auf der Themenliste aus der konkreten Führungspraxis stand der Satz: Wie motiviere ich mein überlastetes und gestresstes Team? Im Fallgespräch erzählt der Teamleiter, der mit seinen vier Mitarbeitern für die Qualitätssicherung im Unternehmen zuständig ist, dass seine Mitarbeiter von den ständigen Unterbrechungen bei ihren täglichen Vorhaben genervt und immer mehr demotiviert sind. “Kaum eine Aufgabe können wir kontinuierlich zu…
 
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    All About Agile | Agile Development Made Easy!

  • Start of a new chapter

    Kelly Waters
    19 May 2013 | 1:37 am
    Hi everyone, Yesterday was my last day at ThoughtWorks. ThoughtWorks is an amazing company with some fantastic people, so I feel very privileged to have worked for them and very grateful that they gave me and my family the opportunity to live in Australia, which was a wonderful experience. However we’re back in the UK [...]

  • Agile Without Social Engineering

    Elena M Yatzeck
    16 May 2013 | 8:25 pm
    In 2006, Ivor Jacobson famously summarized, "Most important, agile is about social engineering."  And indeed one of the things that makes so many agilists so darned loveable is that we are, as a friend of mine put it yesterday, "the kind of people who want to create a work place where you can go and still be a human being."  Not a "resource," not an "FTE," but a human!  It's an inspiring dream!

  • The Rules of Scrum: Every Sprint is Four Weeks or Less in Duration

    Mishkin Berteig
    16 May 2013 | 4:56 am
    The length of a Sprint determines how quickly a Scrum Team can “inspect and adapt” to changing circumstances and learning.  Scrum, as a tool for product development, sets an upper limit to the duration of a Sprint.  In other words, … Continue reading →

  • Estimation as Hypothesis

    George Dinwiddie
    12 May 2013 | 6:07 pm
    Experimentation is a powerful learning tool. When I was young, I performed scientific experiments by mixing chemicals together to see what they would do. I learned that most random concoctions from my chemistry set would make a brown liquid that was often hard to clean out of a test tube. I learned that sometimes they [...]

  • Happy Fibonacci Day!

    Elena M Yatzeck
    8 May 2013 | 3:26 pm
 
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  • The Mikado Method Book at Manning

    danielbrolund
    13 May 2013 | 10:48 am
    I only write when I feel have something important to tell, and now I do. Me and Ola has been working on our book about the Mikado Method for quite some time now. First as a free PDF, and now as an upcoming book at Manning: The Mikado Method At the moment it is in the Manning Early Access Program, which means you can buy it and be a part of the process by sending in your thoughts and feedback. The new book is a thorough rework of what we had before, so hopefully you will find it worth it even if you read the PDF already. We’ll post the most recent stuff about it at @mikadomethod on…

  • Front-End Mobile Web Developer (Full-Time) - San Francisco, CA - Up to $120K Base + Bonus

    itmediajobsnyc
    13 May 2013 | 10:17 am
    Front-End Mobile Web Developer LOCATION: San Francisco, CA TERMS: Full-Time INDUSTRY: Finance Indust

  • How to design great e-Learning: ask the right questions

    julianstodd
    13 May 2013 | 6:58 am
    It has to be said that i’m a rather amateur gardener, much preferring the ‘BBQ on a summer evening‘ end of the event to the ‘months of digging holes and spreading manure‘ part of the process. On those occasions when shame or enthusiasm beckons, i tend to buy a few plants and stick them into a vacant patch of brown earth, but there is no master plan. The result is, how shall we say, rustic. I call it my ‘nature‘ garden, but my friends recognise it for what it is: overgrown, lacking structure or thought and full of weeds. Good for a party, but unlikely…

  • Insights from an Outsider

    Christian Weitendorf
    13 May 2013 | 6:55 am
    A couple of weeks ago, CoreMedia was seeking internal applications for an employee exchange program with etracker. The two companies had the idea to learn from each other by swapping a software developer for three weeks and offering insights to their culture, processes and software (see ‘Get Insights from Outside the Box’ and ‘Get more Insights from Outside the Box’). My Motivation The moment I heard about the experiment I wanted to participate. I thought it was a great opportunity to see another company, meet new colleagues and learn about another product and it’s technology stack.

  • The Agile Triangle

    RjHuddleston
    13 May 2013 | 5:36 am
    An interesting article testing the traditional project management triangle and proposing a new set of core measures to project success with an agile triangle approach.
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  • Halfway through the sprint

    BlogPoster
    7 May 2013 | 6:15 am
    We are just past the halfway point in this sprint and so one of the things I am doing as the product owner is to review our sprint goals to see how much of what we planned to do will actually get finished this sprint.  Doing this review brings up two topics I want to mention briefly here.  Both of these ideas could get a lot more attention (and probably will in future posts) but for now let me toss out some ideas that have more complexity behind them than I will unearth in this piece. First I want to say a few words about writing sprint goals.  One of the things that I’ve been…

  • Ретроспектива - Team Energymeter

    squiiirrel
    7 May 2013 | 4:40 am
    Многие сталкиваются с проблемой вовлечения команды в активное участие в ретроспективе. Да, все участики обычно живо присоединятся к жалобам, к обсуждению “Если бы не этот идиот заказчик?” (Да-да, у вас такого нет, вы все очень любите и уважаете заказчика и у вас прекрасная атмосфера, но у меня в командах так бывает). При…

  • TFS as perfect tool for Scrum (Part 3) – Sprint Planning

    renevo
    6 May 2013 | 1:24 pm
    This is the third part of the series TFS as perfect tool for Scrum. The series is based on my sessio

  • Focus behind the scenes

    BlogPoster
    6 May 2013 | 10:16 am
    I’ve focused the past few posts on how we dealt with a major obstacle this sprint, writing about how Agile processes helped us both to catch the problem and to address it successfully.  We’ve reworked our approach to the feature set and are now back to making good progress on development.  But this issue isn’t the only thing we’ve been paying attention to this week.  Our scrum team multitasks, and here I want to share some of what we’ve been doing in another part of our sprint. One of the core principles of Agile is this: “Continuous attention to technical excellence and good…

  • Salesforce.com Administrator $75K - 85K direct hire

    recruiterjdes
    6 May 2013 | 7:53 am
    Cabforce (Photo credit: Wikipedia) Are these your keywords? “client projects” AND develop, Salesforce.com, applications, development, testing, implementation, documentation, updating, software, systems,  administration, strategic, CRM, “sales operations” AND Java, jscript, force.com, “data modeling“, ETL, tools, Agile, Scrum Then please send an email today to discuss your next career move:  Salesforce.com Administrator.  jdesmond@georgekonik.com Related articles Salesforce.com Signs Agreement to Establish European Data Centre in the U.K. in 2014…
 
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  • Scrum on a post-it note

    Alistair Cockburn
    19 May 2013 | 12:37 pm

  • Horizon Velocity Plasticity for Organizational Agility

    Alistair Cockburn
    4 Feb 2013 | 7:00 pm
    Just talked to some people from U of Melbourne and Price Waterhouse Coopers in Melbourne about their new model for organizational agility. They key on these three terms: Horizon = capacity to continously sense the environment for emergent threats and opportunities. Velocity = capacity to quickly move material and non-material resources across its network in a goal-directed manner. Plasticity = capacity to rapidly form and dissolve internal and exteernal relationships and make changes to the nature of relationships. Net: Agility = “dynamic capability that allows organisations to adapt…

  • Random poem created by Google translate

    Alistair Cockburn
    6 Jan 2013 | 11:00 am
    Love the ending poem, produced by Google translate from something (who knows what) in Persian: “Staring at the horizon, leaving the logo side of life, rectified love sitting in contemplation, madness, stood an innocent face, a tired face, relying on the fact, sad face smiling at what an idea! that madness pounding deep into each side.” http://www.flyingmachinestudios.com/penguins/my-failed-social-web-experiment/

  • Audio Interview for Agile Revolution in Australia Nov 2012

    Alistair Cockburn
    13 Nov 2012 | 2:53 pm
    Craig Smith, Renee Troughton and Tony Ponton in Brisbane (Australia) caught hold of me and tied me down, plied me with wine while they joked about and asked questions… the result on the http://www.theagilerevolution.com/ site is their podcast #49, about 45 minutes of fun interview (missing only the Oath of Non-Allegiance (discussion: Re: Oath of Non-Allegiance), which they say they’ll get in the next interview). Check out http://www.theagilerevolution.com/episode-49 Some timing marks: Advanced Agile at 5:30 1st of Tony’s funny faces about 9:45 – 10:00 Agile…

  • Wheel of knowledge

    Alistair Cockburn
    26 Sep 2012 | 11:38 pm
    needing writing —- about being at the bottom again….
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    Managing Product Development

  • Individuals and Interactions With Gil Broza

    Johanna Rothman
    13 May 2013 | 6:07 am
    My friend and colleague, Gil Broza, is interviewing me for his Individuals and Interactions virtual training event. My topic? “Focus Keeps You Going.” If you read my personal kanban series a couple of weeks ago, you saw how my focus kept me going. Even with a big interruption last week, due to a death in the family, I was able to maintain my focus, because I knew exactly what I had to do, to finish my work, to get ready for my trip today. Gil has other great people in his event: Doc List, Ellen Gottesdiener, Mary Gorman, David Spann, Christopher Avery and Bob Schatz might be names…

  • Personal Kanban and Iterations, Day 5

    Johanna Rothman
    3 May 2013 | 4:53 am
    I am still making progress, although it’s more difficult to see my progress today. Why? Because I did not get as much to done. One of my readers asked a question about the Urgent queue  and the relative ranking of my ever-growing left hand column. How did I determine what to do, and what was the rank of each? The Urgent queue always trumps everything on the left hand side of the list. I was so frantic on Monday, I didn’t order anything when I put the list together. It almost didn’t matter what I worked on, as long as I made enough progress to get enough things to done. As you can…

  • Personal Kanban and Iterations, Day 4

    Johanna Rothman
    2 May 2013 | 5:55 am
    I’m still chugging along, making great progress. I took some interruptions yesterday, as many people do. They are not reflected on my kanban. They are in my calendar, which I am not showing you :-) A potential client emailed, asked for a call. I said yes, and we arranged for a call that day. Could I have put it on my kanban? Yes. Did I bother? No. Does that make me a bad person? No. It’s my kanban, not yours. I don’t track metrics from my kanban. If I did, I would want that and the other calls there. But I don’t, so it’s fine. I’m using my kanban to help me…

  • London Workshops Almost Full, May 16 & 17, 2013

    Johanna Rothman
    2 May 2013 | 5:45 am
    Are you considering joining me in my Coaching or Project Management workshops in London on May 16 or May 17, 2013? If so, please decide quickly. I have room for two more people in the coaching workshop. I have room for three more people  in the project management workshop. When those places are gone, they are gone. That’s it, no more. I will run a waiting list. If you are considering it because you are not sure, email me.  

  • Personal Kanban and Iterations, Day 3

    Johanna Rothman
    1 May 2013 | 8:08 am
    I’ve been busy crossing work off my list. And, as with all of us busy people, I’m adding more work to my list. I feel as if I’ve accomplished a lot this week. It’s just about time to rewrite my list, because with the cross-outs, it’s hard to see where I am. It’s time to go to draft 2 for the workshops, which might be the final drafts for the prose. I will be revising the simulations and interactions during the week. I hope to complete them by the end of the week. I do want to complete the workshops by the end of the week. I will feel more comfortable. I had…
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  • When I feel empowered, I can….

    Esther
    8 May 2013 | 1:52 pm
    In one of my AYE sessions, we started by completing a sentence: Read this aloud. Feel it. Is this the way you’d like to work? © Esther for esther derby associates, inc., 2013. | Permalink | 4 comments | Add to del.icio.us Post tags: Feed enhanced by Better Feed from Ozh

  • Agile and The Chasm

    Esther
    4 Jun 2012 | 6:40 am
    Someone posed the question:  Has Agile Crossed the Chasm?, a reference to Moore’s work on marketing. Agile is no longer the prevue of pioneers and visionaries.  Agile shows up in the popular business press. PMI is all over it.   The big accounting/consulting firms are marketing agile. Clearly (at least the term) agile is reaching the mainstream. According to Moore’s model, people on the other side of  The Chasm, the  Early Majority, want to improve existing processes. They are not interested in a radical change in operations. They want something that works out of the box.

  • Lessons in Self-Organizing Social Systems

    Esther
    21 May 2012 | 5:23 am
    Last week, I had a chance to reflect on eleven years of the Retrospective Facilitators Gathering. A bit of background on RFG: I started the Gathering in 2002 with Diana Larsen and Norm Kerth.  Each year, the different set of volunteers organize the Gathering.  Continuity comes from linking the immediate past organizer, the current year organizer, and the next year organizer as part of the organizing group.  Most years that’s worked reasonably well. We’ve used light weight planning and a market place for sessions from the start. But over the years, I and other organizers learned…

  • The Elements of Improvement

    Esther
    14 May 2012 | 5:18 am
    Improvement requires three factors: Information. People need information about the context and how their work fits into the big picture. They need information from the work so they can self-correct. Without this information, systematic improvement is impossible. A desire to improve. Most people want to do their best and learn to do better–until that impulse is squashed. One-sided evaluations, organizational hurdles, relentless pressure strangle the desire to improve. Time to reflect and learn. People need time to design and implement new processes, and  practice new skills. Relentless…

  • Self-Awareness Matters: Finding Your Filters

    Esther
    3 May 2012 | 10:41 am
    I remember sitting in a project meeting back when I worked for a Big Company. The project manager, Ted, announced the top three priorities.  When I offered a different view point, Ted declared, “You’re wrong. We decided on these priorities yesterday.”  He didn’t notice six out of eight people at the table  shaking their heads “No.”   Ted didn’t notice the responses and reactions of people around him. He also didn’t  notice that he didn’t notice. We all have filters. That’s a good thing–our cognitive systems can’t…
 
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  • Let's Measure Something Meaningless

    Jurgen Appelo
    17 May 2013 | 7:22 am
    Imagine that the government decided an intake of 2.500 calories per day should be the maximum for each person, regardless of age, gender, health, metabolism, dietary habits, etc. And imagine that the government also measured and enforced this every day, claiming it is “for your own health”, and handing out daily fines for each person who went over target. How would you feel about this practice? Now imagine that the government decided that a speed of 130 km/hours should be the maximum for each driver, regardless of age, health, mental condition, road condition, traffic condition, weather…

  • Blog Post #700

    Jurgen Appelo
    12 May 2013 | 2:50 pm
    Actually, the previous blog post was number 700. This is blog post #701. I wrote blog post #600 almost a year ago. In that year my readership has dropped from 1528 to 853 page views per day, and from 1078 unique visits to 629 per day. Why? Well, I can make an educated guess. I have changed my focus to writing the Management Workout articles, which of course means less time for my blog. And there are other new side-projects, such as Happy Melly and DARE. And I stopped making the Top 100 lists, which have traditionally been the biggest traffic magnets on my blog. But I’m not complaining! The…

  • Dare to Be at DARE!

    Jurgen Appelo
    7 May 2013 | 4:50 am
    I got myself involved in co-organizing a conference. Again. But this is not just any conference. This is DARE! DARE is a conference conceived by Maarten Volders, the organizer of the wildly successful Lean Kanban 2011 Benelux. Maarten has teamed up with the initiator of the weirdly successful Stoos Stampede (Amsterdam) (that’s me) and the Happy Melly business network. DARE is for people who dare to discuss wild ideas about organizational change. For people who dare to introduce bold new practices in their businesses. For people who dare to make work more engaging. And for people who dare to…

  • 12 Reasons Our License Is Better Than Theirs

    Jurgen Appelo
    6 May 2013 | 8:22 am
    I have been working on a new version of the Management 3.0 license agreement, with input from the current facilitators and the friends of Happy Melly. I needed a new agreement because: A) I want to allow other people to create Management 3.0 courseware modules; B) I needed a new pricing model that is more fair; and C) The licensing is taken over by the Happy Melly business network. Here are 12 reasons why it’s a contract I’m proud of. There is no legalese in this contract. I tested it by asking lots of people to read it, and nobody reported difficulties with the language. There are no…

  • Emphasize Good Practices

    Jurgen Appelo
    3 May 2013 | 5:28 am
    In many working environments people’s focus is usually is on fixing problems. This makes sense, because continuous improvement allows organizations to survive and thrive. However, a focus on things that could be improved usually comes down to a focus on failures and mistakes, and this mindset can have some serious side effects. Being a perfectionist, I have sometimes been guilty of this myself. I have “raised the bar” for me and for others until the bar was so high that Godzilla could do a limbo dance underneath while carrying a space shuttle. However, I noticed a strange thing when I…
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    Partnership & Possibilities

  • Partnership & Possibilities – Episode 4, Season 3

    Emmanuelle
    17 May 2013 | 5:30 am
    Partnership & Possibilities – Episode 4, Season 3 Partnership & Possibilities: A Podcast on Leadership in Organizations EPISODE 4: THE STAR “In a team situation, having a star performer becomes a threat and an opportunity. If a person is a star performer, their job is to spread their skills around to other members, to mentor and pair with people so other people’s skills are lifted up to where theirs are.” Running time 40:50 Have you encountered a star performer in your organization? Was it a positive experience? How did your organization respond to the star performer? Leave…

  • Partnership & Possibilities – Episode 3, Season 3

    Emmanuelle
    10 May 2013 | 6:30 am
    Partnership & Possibilities: A Podcast on Leadership in Organizations EPISODE 3: KNOW THYSELF “Using self-awareness and self-knowledge for self-management seems to be key in becoming an effective leader.” Running time 26:38 What instruments have you experienced that have been helpful to you? When has really good self-awareness and self-knowledge helped you self-manage as a leader? If you’ve experienced the Hogan, tell us about it. We’d love to hear your stories. Leave a comment on this blog or email us at leadershippodcast@gmail.com Summary Intro – Using assessments in…

  • Partnership & Possibilities – Episode 2, Season 3

    Emmanuelle
    3 May 2013 | 5:30 am
    Partnership & Possibilities: A Podcast on Leadership in Organizations EPISODE 2: AN INQUIRY INTO QUESTIONS “Leadership really comes from the nature of the questions you ask rather than the statements that you make.” Running time 32:54 What questions have been particularly powerful for you? What questions have you asked or have been asked that have made a difference in your life or which have stimulated learning in others (and in yourself)? Leave a comment on this blog or email us at leadershippodcast@gmail.com Summary Intro – What role do questions play in leadership? What does the…

  • Partnership & Possibilities – Episode 1, Season 3

    Emmanuelle
    26 Apr 2013 | 5:30 am
    Partnership & Possibilities: A Podcast on Leadership in Organizations EPISODE 1: THE SECRET CLUB “Membership in the secret club carries with it the need to behave in certain ways that may not be your personal inclination. My advice would be to get some experience to get a clear-eyed understanding of what it looks like because it’s not a one size fits all.” Running time 32:37 Have you made it in the secret club? What has your experience been like? If you opted out of the secret club, what prompted you to turn away and go in a different direction? Leave a comment on this blog or…

  • Partnership & Possibilities – Episode 9, Season 2

    Emmanuelle
    22 Mar 2013 | 5:30 am
    Partnership & Possibilities: A Podcast on Leadership in Organizations EPISODE 9: SIMPLE RULES “One of the guiding thoughts about simple rules is that not only are they pretty short and action oriented by starting with a verb, but they are also generalizable and scalable so that they can help you in many different kinds of context in any situation, whether it’s a big or small decision to be made.” Running time 30:54 Are you using simple rules in your work? Have you found ones that work particularly well for you and your team? Do you have questions about how simple rules can be…
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    Scaling Software Agility

  • Speaking at the Seattle Agile Meetup, Tuesday May 21

    Dean Leffingwell
    18 May 2013 | 6:30 am
    Hi, I’ll be giving a talk on SAFe this Tuesday night at the Beyond Agile Meetup in Seattle. Hope to see you there.

  • A 41 Point Perspective on the Scaled Agile Framework

    Dean Leffingwell
    18 May 2013 | 6:25 am
    Hi, Rob Pinna and I go way (and I mean way, way) back. I was interesed to see his perspective on the Scaled Agile Framework that he just published in a recent blog post. I thought he did a pretty good job of summarizing, but you can judge for yourself here.  

  • SAFe Case Study Miniseries: Part 5 of 5. Now, with Data!

    Dean Leffingwell
    18 Apr 2013 | 6:26 am
    Our colleague and SPC, Mark Richards from Australia has just concluded his case study of SAFe adoption at a large IT shop down under, now with Part 5: Conclusion. (for more on this and other case studies, check out Case Studies on SAFe). In Part 5, Mark summarizes some key findings, and most importantly publishes some quantitative results. After all, in the end, that’s all we really care about. In order not to keep you in suspense, here’s the high level summary of business benefits: Average delivery cycle time down from 12 months to 3 months Frequency of delivery increased from…

  • Upcoming Scaled Agile Framework Webinar with VersionOne

    Dean Leffingwell
    18 Apr 2013 | 6:08 am
    I’ll be guest hosting an upcoming free SAFe webinar “Accelerating Enterprise Agile Adoption with the Scaled Agile Framework” with VersionOne on May 13 at 12 noon EDT. I’ll provide a general overview of the features and benefits of the Scaled Agile Framework, and how you can apply it to accelerate value delivery in all of your most important value streams. It’s actually a webinar in two parts. On Wednesday, May 22 at 12 noon EDT, VersionOne will be describing how their product specifically supports SAFe, with particular focus on the Program execution and Portfolio planning. This…

  • SAFE Case Study Miniseries: Part 4 of 5.

    Dean Leffingwell
    4 Apr 2013 | 2:12 pm
    Our colleague and SPC, Mark Richards from Australia has been continuing his excellent case study of SAFe adoption at a large IT shop, now with Part 4: In-play Work and the Program Level Feature Wall. (for more on this and other case studies, check out Case Studies on SAFe). In this post, Mark focuses on the practices they put in place to track features as they move through sprints and onto delivery.  He highlights what is essentially a logical, and always-current, extension of the Program Board that is typically developed during Release Planning. Though supported by more in-depth tooling…
 
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    Mike Cohn's Blog - Succeeding With Agile

  • What Topics Would You Like Mike Cohn to Cover?

    mike@mountaingoatsoftware.com
    14 May 2013 | 11:22 am
    I’ve learned a lot about the challenges people face over the years across varying organizations when it comes to agile development and Scrum. But I’m always looking to help people solve their toughest or most nagging problems – and sometimes it’s easier to find out what those are just by asking. So today, I’m asking you to take a moment to fill in a one-question survey for me. It’ll help me ensure I'm discussing the topics you are most interested in. The feedback you provide in this survey will be added to our list of topics to address in our blog and…

  • Mike Cohn Speaking at Agile2013 in Nashville, TN

    mike@mountaingoatsoftware.com
    7 May 2013 | 1:01 pm
    I'm going to be speaking at Agile2013 in Nashville this summer. My 75-minute session will be part of an Agile Boot Camp track that is targeted mostly at people new to agile to help them understand the basic concepts, terminology, methodologies, and practices of agile development. My session will be on Monday, August 5 at 2 p.m. in the Delta B room. I hope to see many of you there. Here's the session description: Agile Planning & Project Management In this session we will shatter the myth that agile teams can't plan. We'll start by looking at the benefits of the short…

  • Learn Agile Estimating Online with Mike Cohn for Half Price

    mike@mountaingoatsoftware.com
    23 Apr 2013 | 10:18 am
    We’ve decided to run a spring sale of our popular eLearning course: Agile Estimating and Planning. Until May 19, you can access the entire course , worth 4PDUs, for half off. Some of the things we cover include: The problem and the goal. Story points and ideal days. Estimating the product backlog. Release planning. Multi-team projects. Here’s a sneak peek into the course – the intro: You can access the course at your leisure from any of the following devices: Any modern operating system with the latest versions of Firefox, Internet Explorer, Safari or Chrome. iPads and…

  • Estimating with Tee Shirt Sizes

    mike@mountaingoatsoftware.com
    2 Apr 2013 | 12:16 pm
    I occasionally encounter the use of t-shirt sizes (Small, Medium, Large, or so on) in use as estimating units by teams. T-shirt sizes are an OK approach to getting started with relative estimating, but they suffer from two severe weaknesses: They aren't additive. You cannot tell a boss you'll be done in 3 mediums, 4 larges, and 2 petites. Your view of an XL may not match mine. You may think it's 50% bigger than an L; I may think 25% bigger. Teams get around both weaknesses with some underlying assumptions (hopefully stated) about size. They may, for example, state,…

  • Be Quick but Don’t Hurry

    mike@mountaingoatsoftware.com
    25 Mar 2013 | 8:42 am
    It’s one of my favorite times of the year: March Madness. (For non-Americans: That means college basketball playoffs.) I grew up in Los Angeles during a time when UCLA (University of California Los Angeles) was the dominant college basketball team. As a kid, I would have wanted nothing more than to have played basketball there, especially for their amazing coach, John Wooden. Somehow my 3” vertical leap and complete lack of coordination nipped my basketball career in the bud. But it never stopped me from admiring Coach Wooden. He would have made a great ScrumMaster. My favorite…
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    David J. Anderson and Associates

  • Scrumban Practitioner Workshop - Boston, MA - September 26-27

    janice@kanban101.com
    23 Apr 2013 | 1:11 am
    Kanban is coming to New England!  Code Genesys, a Boston IT Solutions firm, has partnered with David J. Anderson & Associates to sponsor a series of workshops on the Kanban method throughout 2013.  The Kanban Method is an emerging flow-based system for managing software engineering projects and operations. Scrum is an iterative Agile methodology that has become popular and has contributed much to process improvement in development teams. We’ll start by covering the basics on how to get started and the advantages this method offers compared to other approaches for managing…

  • Kanban Practitioner Workshop (Boston, MA) - May 16-17

    janice@kanban101.com
    18 Apr 2013 | 3:07 pm
    with Ajay Reddy (instructor) Kanban is coming to New England!  Code Genesys, a Boston IT Solutions firm, has partnered with David J. Anderson & Associates to sponsor a series of workshops on the Kanban method throughout 2013. This Kanban Practitioner course teaches The Kanban Method. It begins by covering the basics on how to get started and focuses on the unique advantages Kanban brings to managing product development. Participants will walk away with a strong understanding of concepts such as key demand analysis, metric analysis, setting WIP, classes of service, SLEs etc.   By…

  • Join us at LKNA13 and get up to $3000 credit on a Kanban Masterclass

    janice@kanban101.com
    9 Apr 2013 | 5:19 pm
    I believe that attending Lean Kanban North America 2013 (LKNA13) will be such a benefit to aspiring kanban coaches and change agents that I’m making a special offer.  This week only—if you register to attend Lean Kanban North America 2013 in Chicago, you can get a huge credit toward any Kanban Coaching Professional Masterclass taught by David J. Anderson and Associates this year. These 3-day masterclasses meet the educational requirement for the Lean-Kanban University Kanban Coaching Professional designation.  They also prepare you to lead a successful kanban initiative, as well…

  • Kanban Coaching Professional Masterclass - Vienna 27-29 May 2013

    janice@kanban101.com
    1 Apr 2013 | 6:33 pm
    This 3-day leadership & coaching masterclass, formerly called the Advanced Kanban Masterclass, is for Kanban practitioners, consultants, coaches, change agents and managers. Spend 3-day of intense study with pioneer of Kanban, David J. Anderson. This workshop is limited to just 12 people. Achieve the educational requirements for the Kanban Coaching Professional designation from Lean-Kanban University. This masterclass with the pioneer of Kanban is ideal for anyone tasked with leading a change initiative in their organization or at a client organization in the next year. It is suitable for…

  • Kanban Coaching Professional Masterclass - London, UK - 12-14 June 2013 SOLD OUT

    janice@kanban101.com
    1 Feb 2013 | 6:07 pm
    This 3-day leadership & coaching masterclass, formerly called the Advanced Kanban Masterclass, is for Kanban practitioners, consultants, coaches, change agents and managers. Spend 3-day of intense study with pioneer of Kanban, David J. Anderson. This workshop is limited to just 12 people. Achieve the educational requirements for the Kanban Coaching Professional designation from Lean-Kanban University. This masterclass with the pioneer of Kanban is ideal for anyone tasked with leading a change initiative in their organization or at a client organization in the next year. It is suitable for…
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    The Agile Management Blog

  • Agile Construction Management

    mkovacevich
    16 May 2013 | 12:46 pm
    While at a recent Project Management Institute (PMI) event, the question came up of whether you could use agile techniques in Construction Project Management (after all, not all PMI members are IT Project Managers). Earlier in my career I worked for some electrical contractors, and thus have some first-hand experience in the Construction industry. My first inclination was that agile would not be a good fit; but after doing some research, it turns out there are some examples of the application of agile and Lean principles to Construction (see also sources below). After all, software…

  • Put It On the Team

    Matt Badgley
    10 May 2013 | 10:45 am
    Do you want to have more effective daily stand-ups? Do you want to have the planning meetings flow better and increase the value of these meetings? Do you want to see continuous improvement flow from your retrospectives? If your answer is yes, then put it on the Team. I’ve written about trust, relying on strengths, and improving self-organization many times — and the message of these can be summed up as “Putting it on the Team.”  Make the team responsible for solving problems; make the team responsible for defining how to deliver; and making the team accountable for…

  • Forecast Says: Your Forecast is History

    Dave Gunther
    6 May 2013 | 11:35 am
    You may have a well-articulated, strategic roadmap BUT how, when and what value you deliver against that roadmap can fluctuate. A benefit of iterative delivery and deliberate learning cycles is that product teams can tweak or radically change output based on what is discovered. Build, measure, learn and change. A high-performing product team will stop working on ideas when there is evidence that the value is not as high as projected, and start testing new ideas. Embracing this agility means recognizing change early and adjusting often. Any predictions you made one sprint ago should be…

  • StandUp? Or StandAround?

    JoEllen Carter
    30 Apr 2013 | 9:11 am
    One of my team's daily standups (or maybe a standaround; not sure). That's me in the middle. Since then we've added a few more ladies to the team! StandUp is a cornerstone of any agile practice.  It runs like a well-oiled machine at most agile shops. You get the talking stick (or ball, or the coolest piece of swag from your last agile conference (for the record, it was the V1 ‘Do Me Daily’ t-shirt), and you quickly and very professionally (even though you’re wearing cutoffs and flip flops) speed-speak your status so you can get back to your console and start slinging code…

  • Scaled Agile Framework® (SAFe): Worth Looking Into?

    Laurie Douglas
    24 Apr 2013 | 11:52 am
    I’ve been reading a lot lately about the concept of enterprise agile and how the heck to do it. Agile development roots point to a very team-centric concept. And its success has piqued interest from other teams, other business units, and larger enterprises when it comes to scaling agile faster, better and easier. In fact, more than 61% of VersionOne customers recently said they’re in the process of scaling agile across their organizations. The potential of agile is awesome… but it can be difficult to successfully adopt. For people who have been there, they can tell you it’s hard…but…
 
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    Learn Software Development

  • Scrum – Tackling the issue about less work for QE team in the early part of the cycle ..

    ashish
    19 May 2013 | 8:01 pm
    One of the constant issues that we hear on a regular basis is about the imbalance in terms of teams being busy during parts of a Sprint rather than through the Sprint. For example, one of the biggest problems reported was that the development team would be busy during the early parts of a Sprint, and after they had made the delivery of their components to the testing team, that would be the time when the testing team would become busy. The expectation was that things need to be configured such that this sort of cycle needs to be avoided, and that the testing team should not be busy only for…

  • The overlay concept in memory management

    ashish
    19 May 2013 | 9:04 am
    Memory is a vital element and central also. Memory can be thought of as an array of many locations having their own addresses. About Memory Management - The processes interact with each other through a sequence of read and write operations at the specific address spaces. - The program is fetched by the operating system from the disk and stored in to the main memory. - For the execution of the program it should be mapped with its absolute address and then loaded in to the main memory. - Usually, the programs are stored on the disk as the executable files. - That is why they have to be brought…

  • Scrum: Smaller size makes a team that works together and more capable of self-organizing

    ashish
    17 May 2013 | 3:29 am
    Scrum teams are typically kept at a size of around 6-9 team members, and it is recommended that if the number of people in the team grows larger, then the team need to be split into multiple teams. This was a topic of discussion within the Scrum Masters in the team. We had read about this in almost all the articles and books that we had read about Srum and even the training had emphasized this. But when we asked the trainer about the reasons about why a Scrum team should not have say 10 people, the reasons were not very clear. The basic reason given was that the team would become…

  • What is thrashing in memory management?

    ashish
    16 May 2013 | 10:15 am
    One of the frequent problems that is encountered during memory management is thrashing. - This problem usually occurs when the virtual memory subsystem of the computer system is in a state of constant paging. - The data is rapidly exchanged to and fro between disk and the memory. - All this is done excluding a major part of the application level processing. - This results in a major degradation in the performance of the system or it may even collapse. - This system might suffer from this situation indefinitely if the cause of the situation is not discovered and addressed appropriately. - If…

  • Getting a manager of a Scrum team to be more like a coach rather than a taskmaster ..

    ashish
    15 May 2013 | 4:18 pm
    This is a topic that I have heard enough about from members of Scrum teams. In informal conversations where the managers are not present, the biggest problem that these team members recount is that they are given training that being in a Scrum team provides them empowerment, the ability to decide on the work to be done after the Product Owner has provided a prioritized Backlog. They have the freedom to provide the estimates, and then to do their work without a project manager sitting on top of their head. It is also understood that it takes some time for these processes to stabilize, for them…
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    Atlassian Blogs

  • A Solution to SSO Authentication and Identity Management: Lessons Learned

    Brendan Haire
    16 May 2013 | 6:52 pm
    Here at Atlassian, we recently went through an exercise to consolidate the authentication and identity management of our key support systems.  As we have grown, we have seen a number of account silos materialize across our system landscape. This required customers to have separate logins for support, forums, account management, etc., resulting in a frustrating experience for our customers, and a tough situation for Atlassian staff. The problem of multiple account silos is common across the technology domain, yet is a surprisingly difficult one to resolve. It starts with a simple…

  • Alternatives To Git Submodule: Git Subtree

    Nicola Paolucci
    16 May 2013 | 5:25 am
    The Internet is full of articles on why you should not use Git submodules. I mostly agree, although I am not so harsh in my evaluation. As I explained in a previous post, submodules are useful for a few use cases but have several drawbacks. Are there alternatives? The answer is: yes! There are (at least) two tools that can help track the history of software dependencies in your project while allowing you to keep using git: git subtree google repo In this post I will be looking at git subtree and show why it is an improvement – albeit not perfect – over git submodule. As a working…

  • git? tig!

    Antoine Büsch
    7 May 2013 | 4:30 am
    I’m a big fan of Git, but I’m not such a big fan of most UIs for it, especially the ones integrated into IDEs. I find them convoluted and confusing. They try to map some generic “VCS” language onto the commands, or try to hide too much, making it hard to understand what’s going on. Or worse: they’re written in Tcl/Tk… In short, I don’t trust ‘em. So command line it is for me, which is fine because I love my command line. Except once in a while, it’s nice to be able to see a “graphical” view of your history, or to have a…

  • Git Branching and Forking in the Enterprise: Why Fork?

    Nicola Paolucci
    6 May 2013 | 5:09 am
    Enterprise DVCS Workflows are settling and patterns are consolidating. The flexibility git gives teams is so broad that even within a single company different teams might use different approaches to code sharing and collaboration. I speak from hard evidence as this is exactly what happens at Atlassian. The Stash team works differently than the Confluence team which works differently from the JIRA team. They all share a similar Agile process but have different approaches to branching, Continuous Integration and team organization. Differences not withstanding, common patterns are emerging. A…

  • Git: Automatic Merges With Server Side Hooks (For The Win!)

    Nicola Paolucci
    2 May 2013 | 4:46 am
    This will be standard and easily understandable to anyone who has already been working with git for a while. If you come from a centralized, old school version control background and you are thinking of switching to Git – which I heartily recommend – you will find the topic of this post awesome, almost magical. Not as magical as mini ponies but … you get the picture. It is still awesome to me even though I’ve been working with git for a while already. I am talking about automated merges from stable/maintenance branches to master. Real World Scenario Let me give you an…
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    Agile Software Development

  • CollabNet and UC4 Announce Joint Enterprise DevOps Platform

    13 May 2013 | 10:19 pm
    CollabNet and UC4 Software have announced the availability of CollabNet Deploy with UC4. CollabNet Deploy with UC4 is integrated within the TeamForge project workspace for centralized access to the extended toolset, and is offered as a priced option. Elements pertaining to automating release and ...

  • Agile Software Engineer, Hallmark , Kansas City, MO

    9 May 2013 | 9:52 pm
    The Agile Software Engineer is responsible for the design, development, and implementation of services (process and technology) required to deliver business value. You are skilled in problem solving and fearless in exploring both new and innovative technologies as well as weeding through large l ...

  • Scrum Gathering India Regional, 26-27 July 2013, Pune, India

    5 May 2013 | 11:26 pm
    Scrum Gathering® India Regional 2013 is the first ever Regional Scrum Gathering® conference in India that will take place in Pune, July 36 and 27 2013. Scrum Gathering® is the flagship conference of Scrum Alliance, the organization which provides the globally-recognized Certified Sc ...

  • VersionOne Introduces Agile Portfolio Timeline and Collaboration Enhancements

    1 May 2013 | 10:29 am
    VersionOne, recognized by agile practitioners as the leader in agile project management tools, today announced the availability of its Spring 2013 release. With the introduction of a new Portfolio Timeline and enhanced Conversations, the new release extends VersionOne's enterprise agile offe ...

  • Agile2013 Conference Program and Schedule Available

    30 Apr 2013 | 10:31 am
    The Agile2013 Conference Program and Schedule is now available on http://agile2013.agilealliance.org/program/sessionschedule/ As usual, a lot of big Agile names are included in the speakers list.
 
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    Agile Voices - Extreme Programming, Scrum, Test Driven Development & Lean aggregator

  • Adapting Configuration Management for Agile Teams: A Path from Command and Control to Agility

    19 May 2013 | 8:28 pm
    Have you ever noticed a team where with little engagement, a lack of ownership, and team decisions are scarce?  One reason could be the amount of command-and-control from management that is occurring.  Often times this is one of those unspoken elephants in the middle of the room.   Command-and-control bosses are a sure way to kill the feeling of ownership, engagement, and empowerment.  read more

  • Mark Needham: Ruby/Python: Constructing a taxonomy from an array using zip

    19 May 2013 | 3:44 pm
    As I mentioned in my previous blog post I’ve been hacking on a product taxonomy and I wanted to create a ‘CHILD’ relationship between a collection of categories. For example, I had the following array and I wanted to transform it into an array of ‘SubCategory, Category’ pairs:read more

  • Mark Needham: neo4j/cypher: Keep longest path when finding taxonomy

    19 May 2013 | 3:15 pm
    I’ve been playing around with modelling a product taxonomy and one thing that I wanted to do was find out the full path where a product sits under the tree. I created a simple data set to show the problem:read more

  • Mark Needham: Unix: Working with parts of large files

    19 May 2013 | 2:44 pm
    Chris and I were looking at the neo4j log files of a client earlier in the week and wanted to do some processing of the file so we could ask the client to send us some further information. The log file was over 10,000 lines long but the bit of the file we were interesting in was only a few hundred lines. I usually use Vim and the ‘:set number’ when I want to refer to line numbers in a file but Chris showed me that we can achieve the same thing with e.g. ‘less -N data/log/neo4j.0.0.log’.read more

  • J.D. Meier's Blog: Daniel Cook on 8 Laws of Productivity

    19 May 2013 | 8:35 am
    Daniel Cook has a great PDF on the 8 Laws of Productivity.  The subtitle is “8 Productivity Experiments You Don’t Need to Repeat.” It’s the synthesis of Dan’s learnings and research over the years on how to create more productive teams.read more
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    Software Development Musings from the Editor of Methods & Tools

  • 10 Resources for Code Review and Other Peer-based Software Quality Assurance Techniques

    The Editor
    13 May 2013 | 1:01 am
    Code reviews and software inspections have existed for a long time in the software engineering world. They have been however only adopted by a minority of software development projects. Programmers have always been reluctant to submit their code to the criticism of their peer. The pair programming technique promoted by the Agile approaches has faced the same obstacles and is regularly ranked in the bottom of the agile practices adoption surveys. The situation has a little bit evolved with the development of tools for static code analysis. The automation of the ...

  • Scrum Gathering India 2013, Pune, July 26-27

    The Editor
    6 May 2013 | 7:12 am
    Methods & Tools is proud to be the media sponsor of the upcoming Scrum Gathering India Regional 2013 that will take place in Pune, July 36 and 27 2013. For Scrum , Agile and Lean Practitioners, Scrum Gathering India Regional 2013 is a unique opportunity to share and learn from Agile and Scrum community leaders, fellow practitioners and coaches. As a participant, you also get a chance to discuss and deliberate with experts on how to take your organization to next level of maturity using Agile, Scrum, Lean and other new ...

  • The ScrumMaster as a Chess Master

    The Editor
    30 Apr 2013 | 12:34 am
    In the preface of his book Essential Scrum, Kenneth Rubin writes “giving a new Scrum team just The Scrum Guide and expecting good results would be like giving a new chess player a 15-page description of the rules of chess and expecting her to be able to play a reasonable game of chess after reading it.” I like this analogy as the basic rules of Scrum seem simple, but a successful Scrum project, like a good chess game, depends on the ability to use these rules in the game context. ...

  • Software Development Linkopedia April 2013

    The Editor
    25 Apr 2013 | 5:34 am
    Here is our monthly selection of interesting knowledge material on programming, software testing and project management: Web site: NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory Java Coding Standard (PDF) Web site: Guidelines for Unit Testing Python Code Web site: The Agile Atlas Article: Basing Earned Value on Technical Performance (PDF) Article: Ten Tips for Constructing an Agile Database Development Environment that Works Article: Taking on a Project in Difficulties Article: Iteration Retrospective Activity: Turn the Tables Article: QTP Best Practices Article: Dot NET Assemblies and Strong Name Signature…

  • Software Development Conferences Forecast April 2013

    The Editor
    22 Apr 2013 | 3:43 am
    Here is a list of software development related conferences and events that will take place in the coming weeks and that have media partnerships with the Methods & Tools software development magazine: STAREAST, April 28–May 3 2013, Orlando, USA GeeCON, May 15-18 2013, Krakow, Poland ICSE 2013, May 18-26 2013, San Francisco, USADevOps Summit Europe: Enabling DevOps, 23 May 2013, London, UK NxtGenTesting – Next Generation Testing conference, 23 May 2013, London, UK Android DevCon Spring, May 28-31 2013, Boston, USA Better Software & Agile Development Conference West, June 2-7 2013,…
 
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    Agile Web Development & Operations

  • Stop Scaring Your Customers and Speed Up Releases

    Dan Ackerson
    16 May 2013 | 12:00 pm
    Tom Check “But our customers don’t want 10 new versions a year. The last release alone had over 600 bugs!” retorts the hotline manager. “How about a small update with just a handful of bugs?” Your big-bang release is scary. It’s full of issues and weird, new features that nobody understands. It requires documentation and training and who the hell has time for all that? Monthly, bite-size updates will have fewer features requiring less support (pro-tip: less code == less bugs). Speeding up your release cycle also allows quicker response to customers’…

  • 3 Reasons To Avoid Overloading Your Teams

    Matthias Marschall
    16 Apr 2013 | 10:38 am
    Burning Image Monday morning on the highway. Your speed: 0 mph. You’re stuck in the usual rush hour traffic jam because the capacity of this road is exceeded. And it’s now obvious you’ll reach your destination much later than if the road were empty. But what happens if you exceed the capacity of your development team? What happens when you cram in more features than the team can develop? Your features will get stuck in development. Let’s see how this can happen. What happens if you push too many features into your development pipeline Let’s discuss three negative…

  • How badly set goals create a tug-of-war in your DevOps organization

    Matthias Marschall
    9 Apr 2013 | 11:49 am
    Wikipedia A rope. Eight people on either side. “Pull!” And then it begins: both parties are pulling in their own direction. A tug-of-war has started. Imagine your developers and sysadmins as those two parties starting that tug-of-war Each group has different goals. And having different goals leads to each party pulling in another direction. How can this happen and what to do about it? In most organizations every employee has a set of personal goals They usually bubble down all the way from the CEO (who get’s his goals from the board) via the middle management down to each…

  • Is DevOps just a fad?

    Matthias Marschall
    3 Apr 2013 | 12:41 pm
    Alasdair Middleton There are DevOps tools and DevOps job ads. People talk about culture and sharing and being nice to each other. Sounds pretty fishy, right? The only thing missing is a DevOps certification and we’re done with the DevOps hype. Is DevOps really just a fad? Let’s take a closer look… You’re frustrated with another department – again They don’t seem to understand the simplest things. They just throw stuff at you which keeps exploding in your face. The only way to deal with the continual onslaught of their crap is to become cynical. You rant…

  • Do Code Improvements Add Value?

    Matthias Marschall
    26 Mar 2013 | 1:07 pm
    AMagill Investing into code improvement is a dual edged sword: on the one hand you know that if you don’t improve your code you’ll get slower over time. On the other hand improving your code does not deliver tangible value to your users. So how do you know whether you’re on track? Track the time a user story needs from idea to production If that time is getting longer you’re off track: your code is slowing you down. It’s time to invest more into improving your code. Measure the number of bugs per code push If that number increases, you’re investing too less…
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    LeadingAgile

  • Thinking Together for Release Planning

    Dean Stevens
    18 May 2013 | 5:32 am
    I’ve been noodling on the phrase “Thinking Together”. Thinking Together is one aspect of the mindset that Product Owners need to embrace. I have been using this phrase with new Product Owners to explain why many Agile practices work. But each time I start to write about this simple idea, it gets complicated because I get into process steps and roles and responsibilities. Yesterday, I returned to a big company with a pretty complex product portfolio where we had done quite a bit of work including starting up multiple Scrum teams. I recalled our first release planning with…

  • Scrum Gathering Las Vegas – Large Scale Program and Portfolio Management with Scrum

    Mike Cottmeyer
    8 May 2013 | 1:04 pm
    Hey everyone… I’m out in Vegas this week at the Scrum Gathering. Got invited to speak… which was really cool (thanks Daniel Gullo)… and did the most recent iteration of my Agile Program and Portfolio Management deck. Take a look and let me know what you think! The post Scrum Gathering Las Vegas – Large Scale Program and Portfolio Management with Scrum appeared first on LeadingAgile.

  • Jesse Fewell at PMI Atlanta Technology Forum on April 23rd

    Jayne LaFave
    22 Apr 2013 | 7:53 pm
    LeadingAgile’s very own Jesse Fewell will be a speaker at tomorrow night’s PMI Atlanta Technology forum in Alpharetta, GA. Check out the following link for more information: PMI Atlanta Technology Forum Jesse will stick around to answer all of your questions about LeadingAgile. We hope to see you there!   The post Jesse Fewell at PMI Atlanta Technology Forum on April 23rd appeared first on LeadingAgile.

  • Projects Are Not The Problem

    Mike Cottmeyer
    3 Apr 2013 | 2:38 pm
    A lot of folks in the agile community feel like projects and project managers are a big part of the problem we have delivering software. My view is that projects are not really the problem… it’s projectized organizations that are the problem. Projectized organizations form when we have people organized into functional silos and assign them as necessary to project work. The underlying assumption is that people are fungible resources and can be split indefinitely across projects to get work done. Agile methods take a different approach. People are organized into cross-functional teams…

  • Join us for “Intro to the Agile Mindset”

    Jesse Fewell
    1 Apr 2013 | 5:53 pm
    Friends, I’m really excited to announce that I (Jesse Fewell) will be appearing TOMORROW for the latest PMI Agile Community’s Tweetchat. The topic is “Intro to the Agile Mindset”. We will all be on Twitter TOMORROW, April 2nd at 12pm EDT (Eastern US). The hashtag will be #pmiagile and I’ll be tweeting as @jessefewell with some commentary by @leadingagile. Some of the proposed questions include: Q1: What is an Agile Mindset? #pmiagile Q2: How do I adopt an Agile Mindset? #pmiagile Q3: What barriers are there to an Agile Mindset within organizations? #pmiagile Q4:…
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    About Agility

  • Web Security: How OutSystems Protects Your Applications and Data

    Nuno Antunes
    10 May 2013 | 7:03 am
    In today's information-centric world, as web applications become more widespread and increasingly transactional, more and more corporate data and business logic are at risk. It has become necessary - in a way it's never been before - to ensure that every single line does not introduce a vulnerability and that every single software application - whether built for desktop, cloud or mobile -- is safe from cyber-attacks and that your intellectual property, customer data (credit card numbers, SSN, addresses, etc.), business processes and trade secrets are protected. With so much at risk - money,…

  • Why IT Needs to Change its Approach to Responding to Business Needs

    Michel Ozzello
    29 Apr 2013 | 1:15 am
    Earlier this year we posted an article about IT 'failures' and discussed why inefficiency in most IT departments was really due to the cost of changing and maintaining existing applications.  This cost results in ever-increasing backlogs and an increase in technical debt. In this post, let's take a closer look at the current approaches most IT departments are using to solve their backlogs and why those approaches correlate directly with IT's inability to respond to business requests. At first glance it stands out that the way companies currently deal with their backlogs and technical debt is…

  • Functional Requirements and Their Poor Cousins: The Truth About Non-Functional Requirements (NFRs)

    Gonçalo Borrêga
    25 Mar 2013 | 10:58 am
    blogpost-snow-white Whenever anybody says Functional Requirement, I think of princesses. I think of Ariel and Cinderella. I think of how each is central to her story and embodies a specific identity, and then I think of the princess who stands out as a true metaphor for functional requirements - the one who reflects the role perfectly. I think of Snow White. Snow White is a functional requirement if I ever saw one. She is at once central to her story, its main protagonist, its raison d'etre, yet surrounded by a host of supporting characters - dwarfs - whose roles are necessary for the story…

  • Modernizing Legacy for Mobile Use: Look Before You Leap

    Michel Ozzello
    4 Mar 2013 | 12:45 pm
    Mobile applications have become a recurring topic everywhere we turn. Our customers' IT departments are being pushed by their business units to create all sorts of mobile interfaces. If you look at the application backlogs at most IT departments, you'll find more than a couple requests for something mobile. Most of those requests include extending existing legacy systems to provide mobile interfaces that can be used by customers, partners or employees. If you're about to leap into the mobile world and need to provide unique capabilities that are extensions to existing systems, you probably…

  • The Hat-Trick of IT Failure: Maintenance, Backlogs, Change

    Marc Fitten
    14 Feb 2013 | 9:02 am
    Considering a New York Times Bits Blog article stating that enterprise-wide, IT spending will be $2.68 trillion in 2013, one would think the IT industry - with all its engineering nerd-brain powers - would be at the forefront of efficiency and automation.  Curiously, this is not the case.  Not even by a long shot.  Not even remotely.  Not even ... well, you get the picture!   And if what Gartner writes is true, then 80% to 85% of an IT department's budget is used simply to Keep The Lights On (KTLO.    Let's allow these numbers to sink in appropriately, shall…
 
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    Learn Software Development

  • Scrum – Tackling the issue about less work for QE team in the early part of the cycle ..

    ashish
    19 May 2013 | 8:01 pm
    One of the constant issues that we hear on a regular basis is about the imbalance in terms of teams being busy during parts of a Sprint rather than through the Sprint. For example, one of the biggest problems reported was that the development team would be busy during the early parts of a Sprint, and after they had made the delivery of their components to the testing team, that would be the time when the testing team would become busy. The expectation was that things need to be configured such that this sort of cycle needs to be avoided, and that the testing team should not be busy only for…

  • The overlay concept in memory management

    ashish
    19 May 2013 | 9:04 am
    Memory is a vital element and central also. Memory can be thought of as an array of many locations having their own addresses. About Memory Management - The processes interact with each other through a sequence of read and write operations at the specific address spaces. - The program is fetched by the operating system from the disk and stored in to the main memory. - For the execution of the program it should be mapped with its absolute address and then loaded in to the main memory. - Usually, the programs are stored on the disk as the executable files. - That is why they have to be brought…

  • Scrum: Smaller size makes a team that works together and more capable of self-organizing

    ashish
    17 May 2013 | 3:29 am
    Scrum teams are typically kept at a size of around 6-9 team members, and it is recommended that if the number of people in the team grows larger, then the team need to be split into multiple teams. This was a topic of discussion within the Scrum Masters in the team. We had read about this in almost all the articles and books that we had read about Srum and even the training had emphasized this. But when we asked the trainer about the reasons about why a Scrum team should not have say 10 people, the reasons were not very clear. The basic reason given was that the team would become…

  • What is thrashing in memory management?

    ashish
    16 May 2013 | 10:15 am
    One of the frequent problems that is encountered during memory management is thrashing. - This problem usually occurs when the virtual memory subsystem of the computer system is in a state of constant paging. - The data is rapidly exchanged to and fro between disk and the memory. - All this is done excluding a major part of the application level processing. - This results in a major degradation in the performance of the system or it may even collapse. - This system might suffer from this situation indefinitely if the cause of the situation is not discovered and addressed appropriately. - If…

  • Getting a manager of a Scrum team to be more like a coach rather than a taskmaster ..

    ashish
    15 May 2013 | 4:18 pm
    This is a topic that I have heard enough about from members of Scrum teams. In informal conversations where the managers are not present, the biggest problem that these team members recount is that they are given training that being in a Scrum team provides them empowerment, the ability to decide on the work to be done after the Product Owner has provided a prioritized Backlog. They have the freedom to provide the estimates, and then to do their work without a project manager sitting on top of their head. It is also understood that it takes some time for these processes to stabilize, for them…
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    Agile Complexification Inverter

  • Verily, I say, 'tis what it's all about

    David Koontz
    11 May 2013 | 2:24 pm
    The Hokey Pokey — by William ShakespeareO proud left foot, that ventures quick withinThen soon upon a backward journey lithe.Anon, once more the gesture, then begin:Command sinistral pedestal to writhe.Commence thou then the fervid Hokey-Poke,A mad gyration, hips in wanton swirl.To spin! A wilde release from Heavens yoke.Blessed dervish! Surely canst go, girl.The Hoke, the poke — banish now thy doubtVerily, I say, 'tis what it's all about.From a Washington Post Style Invitational contest, that asked readers to submit instructions for something (anything), but written in the style of…

  • Software Versioning Schemes - FAIL!

    David Koontz
    6 May 2013 | 11:56 am
    The software industry has created a knowledge and expectation of product versions.  Previously the closest industry to create this mindset was the automotive industry - they had the model year concept.  Typically they added nice to have "bells or whistles", but rarely added true features each iteration of the auto model year.Software was a new paradigm, back in the 1980s, this industry started using a version numbering scheme (major dot minor). For example, Windows 3.1, the first version to truly work and deliver value to the customer.What happens when a…

  • What's in Your Play Book?

    David Koontz
    29 Apr 2013 | 6:14 pm
    Thinking on Jay's suggestion at his presentation (DFW Scrum, AgileFest!) to create an Agile Playbook; I'm wondering why scrum masters don't do this more often.  Well, guess what?  It's very good advice.  The authors Chip and Dan Heath give this very advice in their new book Decisive: How to Make Better Choices in Life and Work.Why do teams continually over estimate the number of stories they can complete (potentially shippable tested working software) in a sprint?  There are many reasons.  But what play would you run next sprint if you were the team?If…

  • Workshop at ROW Conference

    David Koontz
    14 Apr 2013 | 3:02 pm
    I presented at the Results Oriented Web Conference in Dallas last week.  It was a very nice conference with lots of interesting people.  I had fun with my presentation, The Marshmallow Design Challenge.  Turns out it was finger licking fun.Finger licking FUN!Marshmallow Design ChallengeA winner - 26 inches tall.Wondering what this fun exercise teaches?  Watch the TED video to find out.  Spollier Alert - it's more fun to experience it and then watch the video.Next time I'm bring one of these:From Amazon

  • How-To Guide for Planning AgileFest!

    David Koontz
    14 Apr 2013 | 10:16 am
    One of the suggested improvements for our AgileFest! 2013 was a  "How-To" document for planning a conference.  So in the nature of an experiment in gathering some "validated learning" I'm going to post a rough draft of this future book here.  If it gets some interest, hits, comments, suggestions then I'll turn it into an eBook.Since this page will be an on going effort to create a draft, outline, sketch, etc. of the whole how-to guide, you may want to revisit this page in a week, and again in a month.First, creating a conference is an Agile project, so treat it like any other…
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    Boost Blog

  • The Board – episode 10

    Kirstin
    16 May 2013 | 8:45 pm
    Episode 10 of The Board saw the debut of our cameraman Gavin Coughlan as he took a place at the desk in front of the camera. Gavin and Paul’s topic this time was project kick offs.They discussed how to introduce teams to the concepts of Scrum, doing a definition of ready, a definition of done and a team charter. They also suggested using journey lines in a project kick off to help the team get to know each other. Links Using Journeys Lines for Retrospective Journey Lines Activity Improving user stories with a Definition of Ready What is the Definition of Done Join us for Episode 11 of…

  • The Board – episode 9

    Kirstin
    16 May 2013 | 8:38 pm
    Episode 9′s topic was quality on Agile projects, Paul and Kirstin talked about the following items: how is quality defined? how do we maintain quality on Agile projects? what tools do we use? we also discussed the use of system metaphors, and also recommended Extreme Programming (eXtreme Programming in Action) simple design, Test drive development, behaviour driven development, pair programming Further reading Test driven development Behaviour driven development System metaphors Related Posts: No Related Posts  

  • The Board – episode 8

    Kirstin
    16 May 2013 | 8:10 pm
    On episode 8 of The Board Nathan and Kirstin talked about Agile in China and the Scaled Agile Framework. We also covered Agile tooling (Rally) and reviewed Ken Schwaber and Jeff Sutherland’s Software in 30 days. Links Rally Dev SAFe Toolkit Scaled Agile Framework Book – Software in 30 days Book – Agile Software Requirements Related Posts: No Related Posts  

  • The Board – episode 7

    Kirstin
    16 May 2013 | 7:50 pm
    During episode 7 Paul and Kirstin talked about User Stories: the why, the what and the how. They discussed all things related to User Stories and their journey through Scrum. They also discussed Mike Cohn’s book, Agile Estimating and Planning. Links User stories: a beginner’s guide User stories: a beginner’s guide to acceptance criteria User stories and stakeholders – bringing people on board with Agile Agile experiments: creating user stories with story mapping and ‘buy a feature’ prioritisation Agile Estimating and Planning – Mike Cohn Comakers – Jeff Patton…

  • The Board, Episode 6

    Kirstin
    16 May 2013 | 7:42 pm
    Paul Flewelling and Kirstin Donaldson hosted Episode 6 of The Board and they covered: Scrum teams, what they are, how they work and tips for coaching scrum teams games we’ve used for team building and for demonstrating Agile principles encouraging team members to contribute to retrospectives The Rope game book review of Gamestorming by James Macanufo Retrospectives ideas resource http://tastycupcakes.org/ Related Posts: No Related Posts  
 
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    Agile Pain Relief

  • Learning Story Mapping Through Exercises

    Mark Levison
    30 Apr 2013 | 9:03 am
    Attendees in Kitchener Waterloo – collaborating on building their Story Maps. Story Mapping is a simple tool to help you visualize your Product Backlog. The traditional Product Backlog in Scrum is a real improvement over traditional methods for tracking and understanding the work ahead. However its still a long To Do List which has some issues: It’s hard to see the forest for the trees. It’s easy to miss important items in the morass of detail. It’s hard to prioritize well since we can’t see the big picture. It’s not explicitly focused on the user needs. In other words, flat…

  • ScrumMaster Tales: Technical User Stories or The Team Try to Pull a Fast One on The Product Owner

    Mark Levison
    27 Mar 2013 | 10:15 am
    While working on the FedEx 2-day shipment story Martin discovers some very crufty code in the Foobar class. He doesn’t need to work in the class to complete the story, nor can he see it causing any bugs right now. He doesn’t want to ignore the issue so he grabs an index card and writes “Foobar class is very crufty and it will slow us down later”. Later in the day the following conversation occurs: Martin: “We need to rework the underpinnings of the Foobar class so that we can work faster.” Product Owner Sue: “Martin, why is that important? Help me see that.”…

  • Systems Thinking help Sponsor a New Book

    Mark Levison
    7 Mar 2013 | 1:52 pm
    Credit: Gerard79 – http://www.sxc.hu/photo/1008231/ The Definition of Systems Thinking from Wikipedia is: the process of understanding how things, regarded as systems, influence one another within a whole. In nature, systems thinking examples include ecosystems in which various elements such as air, water, movement, plants, and animals work together to survive or perish. In organizations, systems consist of people, structures, and processes that work together to make an organization “healthy” or “unhealthy”. When working with Agile teams System’s Thinking is an…

  • Yahoo bans Work from Home – an alternative perspective

    Mark Levison
    2 Mar 2013 | 9:45 am
    Distant communications are never as good as face to face. In the past week Yahoo has said that its employees must work in a Yahoo office by June. The stated goal is to bring people together to increase collaboration. In addition, comments on Quora suggest that current and former employees feel the old work from home policy was badly abused – with Fridays being known as a “no work day”. Please appreciate that as I others write we have no special insight into what is happening at Yahoo. In addition sometimes when you’re trying to change an entrenched organizational culture its necessary…

  • Endorsements for CST Candidates

    Mark Levison
    25 Feb 2013 | 7:49 pm
    Qualifying to be a Certified Scrum Trainer is a long and sometimes arduous process. As part of that process Candidates seek out endorsements and mentors the past year I’ve seen the number of requests go up and I wanted to make my expectations explicit. As you read these notes, bear in mind that they’re simply written words; and as a result I won’t do a perfect job of getting the points across. In addition, it’s worth keeping some Manifesto statements in mind: “Individuals and Interactions over Processes and Tools” and “Working Software over Comprehensive Documentation”.
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    BrainsLink

  • Are No Estimates the Solution to Bad Estimates?

    Vin
    19 May 2013 | 6:30 pm
    #NoEstimates. Is it the latest agile software development trend or meaningless hype? Your guess is as good as mine. It’s an interesting question that deserves closer examination. The general premise is that software estimates are unreliable. They are usually overly optimistic and are often grossly inaccurate. So is it better to avoid all the work that goes into estimating? To answer any complex question, we need to establish context. Let’s start with a small team of 5-7 developers and testers. They are working on a relatively small, targeted, software application. The marketing…

  • Focus on Building Complete Software Systems Not Just Software Components

    Vin
    16 May 2013 | 6:39 pm
    So you’ve adopted an iterative approach to software development. Every ‘N’ weeks your team delivers working software. ‘N’ is usually 2-4 but could be 6-8. The point is that the project is divided into a series of iterations or sprints rather than building everything and delivering all of it in one big bang. Congratulations! Your software development team is agile — or maybe not. We need to take a closer look at how the work is being broken down into chunks and spread out among the iterations. Let’s begin with a few basic assumptions. If you’re…

  • It’s Better to Have Great People Than a Great Process

    Vin
    14 May 2013 | 7:29 pm
    Imagine you had a team of ace software developers. This team is fabulous. They know how to get stuff done. They work well together and they work well with other teams. They always find a way to deliver good software. Now imagine that they are given a terrible software development process to follow. The process is big, complex, redundant and bureaucratic. Every decision has to be validated, reviewed and approved. They are also given inadequate tools, poorly defined requirements, and a poor project manager. How could any team possibly succeed in such circumstances! Yet, great teams overcome…

  • Perform Work Iteratively To Be More Productive and Efficient

    Vin
    12 May 2013 | 7:09 pm
    Some people have a hard time accepting iterative approaches to getting work done. It may be because many of us have an innate desire to finish something — we need to be done. Yet, when we iterate over a work item, it feels like it takes longer to get to done. Here’s a simple example taken from everyday life. Let’s say you want to clean your entire house or apartment. Cleaning one room at a time seems like a good approach. You’d get a sense of accomplishment after finishing each room. But it’s not efficient. You’d be switching among cleaning products and…

  • To Change, You need to Learn AND Unlearn

    Vin
    9 May 2013 | 6:45 pm
    The challenge isn’t learning new things. It’s unlearning old ones. Change is all but doing something differently, which requires learning something new. No problem, right? Life is learning. But there’s a flip side to change. You have to unlearn something old. You need to stop doing something you’ve learned to do. If you’re not particularly happy with the old way of doing things, unlearning should be a pleasant task. However, if you’re comfortable and skilled in the old way, unlearning it will be a challenge. Consider this common example. Let’s say we…
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    Agile Scout

  • Becoming a PMI Registered Education Provider (R.E.P.) – More like RIP for Trees

    peter
    16 May 2013 | 4:22 pm
    Almost 500 pages…for the application…proof, proof, and more proof.  If you are a trainer, and you want to become a PMI REP so people can claim PDUs for taking your class or workshop, you have some tree-choppin’ to do. Maybe the option to submit this in electronic form is better…way to go. You just finished reading Becoming a PMI Registered Education Provider (R.E.P.) - More like RIP for Trees! Consider leaving a comment! We run our blog on Standard Theme. Be a writer for us. Post a job with us on Agile Jobs. Becoming a PMI Registered Education Provider (R.E.P.)…

  • Slowest Email Response Ever [Friday Weird]

    peter
    3 May 2013 | 11:41 am
    I’m not sure whether I was offended or just… surprised. Happy Friday! You just finished reading Slowest Email Response Ever [Friday Weird]! Consider leaving a comment! We run our blog on Standard Theme. Be a writer for us. Post a job with us on Agile Jobs. Slowest Email Response Ever [Friday Weird]

  • Developers and Depression – Killing our Knowledge Workers

    peter
    2 May 2013 | 8:18 am
    This presentation, by Greg Baugues: “I am a developer, and I have Type II BiPolar and ADHD. It’s not something we talk about, but BiPolar, depression, and ADHD runs rampant in the developer community – they tend to correlate with higher intelligence. Many of the symptoms of this conditions make for great developers, but also cause incredible damage. We recently lost one of our co-workers because of untreated mental illness. I want to share my story – and let people know that it’s okay to talk about these things, that it’s nothing to be ashamed of, and how…

  • Get out to Seattle for AgilePalooza May 16th

    peter
    25 Apr 2013 | 1:02 pm
    Know someone in the Seattle area? I’ve been to a couple AgilePalooza’s in my day. They rock. So get your butt over there if you’re in the Seattle area fo’ sho. On May 16th Dave Hussman of DevJam will deliver an agile keynote at AgilePalooza in Seattle. VersionOne has sold out the last few of these events, which bring the agile community together for a jam-packed day of low-cost agile learning in an informal, interactive format. Speakers are generally agile coaches, consultants, and otherwise butt-kickers in their knowledge of agile best practices. Other guest…

  • Growing High Performance Teams through Mentoring [Webinar] 2013.04.22 at Noon

    peter
    19 Apr 2013 | 3:15 pm
    Agile Community of Practice Register for Upcoming Webinars Topic: “Growing High Performance Teams through Coaching & Mentoring” Presenter: Peter Saddington C.S.T 22 April 2013 • 12 PM – 1PM EDT Abstract Did you know that over half of Nobel Prize winners were apprenticed by other Nobel laureates? To grow companies and teams to performance you have to take servant leadership to it’s logical conclusion: Intentionally mentoring and growing others. This is a time-tested and practiced art. As a volunteer life coach and marriage counselor and Organizational Consultant,…
 
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    AgileIQ Blog

  • Why Are You Not a Software Engineer?

    16 May 2013 | 9:26 am
    by David Wylie Are you a rock star developer? A prodigious code creator, widely read, developer of new frameworks, familiar with many languages? Then you may not need this advice because you are already productive (unless you have an unusual level of humility and desire to improve). For the rest of us normal folks, there are things we can do better. The practices that lead to good software are well known: Work frequently and closely with requirements providers Write automated tests Check in small changes and run the tests Demonstrate new code and release regularly Pair program Extreme…

  • Distributed versus Scattered Teams

    10 May 2013 | 9:25 am
    by David Wylie I think we need to refine how we define teams and team members when they are geographically dispersed. The issue is how best to implement technical practices, work distribution, and communication among team members in different locations. A key Agile principle recognizes that “the most efficient and effective method of conveying information to and within a development team is face-to-face conversations.” How does this apply in a world of distributed teams? There are many successful implementations of projects where sub-teams are geographically distributed. What they have in…

  • Is the Product Owner on the Scrum Team?

    3 May 2013 | 9:40 am
    by David Wylie Some people that are new to Scrum believe that the product owner has to be kept at arm’s length. Originally, Scrum books taught that the PO and the development team were separate. I’ve even heard people state that the PO is a chicken, and not as committed as the pigs on the development team. However, according to the latest Scrum Guide, the Scrum team includes the development team, ScrumMaster, and product owner.  Is the product owner part of the team or isolated? Agile principles say that the team should work with business people daily, and the best way to convey…

  • Agile Values and Organizational Transformation

    19 Apr 2013 | 10:59 am
    by Dan Williams The Agile Manifesto was developed in February 2001 by seventeen people who met to find commonalities between several ‘lightweight’ methods that emerged in the 1990s. Representatives from Extreme Programming, SCRUM, DSDM, Adaptive Software Development, Crystal, Feature-Driven Development, and Pragmatic Programming along with many others were able to agree on a core set of values.[1] The values expressed in the Manifesto center on people and their interactions within the limiting context of the work environment. This does not mean that the values cannot be applied in other…

  • Agile at PMI

    12 Apr 2013 | 11:13 am
    by Dan Williams Last night I attended the Seattle Project Management Institute (PMI) monthly dinner with my wife. As I am a PMP in good standing and hold the new Agile Certified Practitioner (ACP) certification from PMI, I was very interested in the topic and the speakers presenting. The topic for the evening was Creating an Agile Culture. The speakers were Joseph Flahiff, President of Whitewater Projects, Inc.; Ann Konkler, CSM and Agile Coach from Rally Software; and Jim Grams, CTO from Online Shoes. The speakers shared their perspective of the major cultural shift experienced by companies…
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    The Agile CEO: A Blog About Agile Management

  • The Lean Startup, Agile, and the Harvard Business Review

    Pam Dyer
    13 May 2013 | 1:07 pm
    Steve Blank has an article in the May 2013 edition of HBR entitled Why the lean startup changes everything. It is an excellent example of the crossover of Agile principles from the software domain to the much broader context of business management. The fact that it is published in HBR and not Computerworld is significant. Blank first describes what the Lean startup is and why it’s such a huge improvement over the traditional approach to starting a business. He differentiates the startup from the established business by observing, “One of the critical differences is that while existing…

  • More Waste in Software Development

    Charlie Rudd
    22 Jun 2012 | 12:09 pm
    Last week we explored how inventory and waiting, two of the original seven lean manufacturing wastes, have analogs in software development. This week we will explore two more, overproduction and transportation. As we will see, even though software development has fundamental differences with manufacturing we can use manufacturing as a metaphor that helps us open our minds about what constitutes waste in knowledge work such as software development. Overproduction. Overproduction is production ahead of demand. For example, saleable units waiting in warehouses for buyers are overproduction…

  • Waste in Software Development

    Charlie Rudd
    14 Jun 2012 | 8:13 am
    In the first in a 5-part series that explores how Lean principles are applied through the practice of Agile, we discussed how the differences between Lean and Agile in software development are more about when particular practices might be best applied under particular conditions and less about how the two approaches are fundamentally different. In fact, Agile and Lean hold many guiding principles in common. In this second installment, we will explore examples of what might qualify as Lean waste in software development. The seven kinds of waste, as first outlined by Taiicho Ohno, provides a…

  • Agile vs. Lean: False Debate?

    Charlie Rudd
    7 Jun 2012 | 4:52 pm
    Ever since Mary and Tom Poppendiek wrote their book Lean Software Development: An Agile Toolkit, there has been a lot of discussion about Lean and Agile in the world of software development. Sometimes we hear about how Agile and Lean are different and sometimes we hear about how they are the same. The conversation about how they are different includes discussions such as: Why Kanban is better than Scrum (or not), or Why Lean is better at scale than Scrum, etc. The conversation about how they are the same includes discussions such as: How iterative development reduces work in process (WIP), or…

  • Why Agile is Not a Methodology

    Charlie Rudd
    10 May 2012 | 12:01 pm
    If Agile isn't a methodology, what is it? What is a methodology? A methodology is a process taxonomy designed to govern a work domain (e.g. software development). Each process is defined in terms of a set of prescriptive formulas or rules. Rules generally take on forms similar to the following: Under these circumstances, do these activities. When you get to this point, do this activity. An activity is defined by executing this task sequence. The input of this task is “X” and the output of this task is “Y”. And so forth… At the highest level, a methodology is a…
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    agileManiac

  • Words Mean Things – Waterfall

    Matt
    19 May 2013 | 8:09 am
    If you are someone who is passionate about Agile, the word “Waterfall” is usually used in a derogatory manner or, at least, when you use it — you are making the stink eye. On the converse, if you are someone who practices what is popularly known as “Waterfall” Project Management you generally get offended or defensive when the phrase “Waterfall” is used.Apply here payday loans 100% secure Here’s how the conversation plays out: Agile Practitioner – There’s no way I’ll ever work on a Waterfall project. Waterfall Practitioner…

  • Presentation – Doc is a Four Letter Word

    Matt
    28 Mar 2013 | 7:52 am
    Doc is a Four Letter Word from mtbadgley

  • This is an Agile Team.

    Matt
    15 Mar 2013 | 11:18 am
    Agile teams can get totally fried in the wrong culture. So be sure you are not only addressing the practices around agile, but the people and culture are just as important.  Read about Behavior and Cultural impacts on making good stuff, especially with Agile Teams.

  • Bruce Feiler: Agile Programming – For Your Family

    Matt
    14 Mar 2013 | 9:03 am
    Really fun and interesting … cements the fact that Agile methods are more natural, and getting the small wins that make you feel good.  What would happen if we did this in our schools? Here’s the link to TED … http://www.ted.com/talks/bruce_feiler_agile_programming_for_your_family.html

  • Behaviors and Culture Can Impair Creating Good Product

    Matt
    12 Mar 2013 | 2:28 pm
    When we think culture, we often think about nationality and or regional cultures. Culture is often a dinner discussion with my wife and friends, it’s great to reflect upon how our upbringing, surroundings, and maybe even our genetics drive our work habits, how we work with others, and how we see and work with authority. Culture is a difficult thing to work with because it’s engrained in us. A few weeks ago, VersionOne released the 7th Annual State of Agile Survey. Within the survey, it is obvious that culture is the leading challenge to all aspects of agile adoptions and…
 
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    QSM SLIM-Estimate blogs

  • New Article: Data-Driven Estimation, Management Lead to High Quality

    Elisabeth Pendergrass
    14 May 2013 | 10:46 am
    Software projects devote enormous amounts of time and money to quality assurance. It's a difficult task, considering most QA work is remedial in nature - it can correct problems that arise long before the requirements are complete or the first line of code has been written, but has little chance of preventing defects from being created in the first place. By the time the first bugs are discovered, many projects are already locked into a fixed scope, staffing, and schedule that do not account for the complex and nonlinear relationships between size, effort, and defects. At this point,…

  • Let's Get Serious About Productivity

    Donald Beckett
    7 May 2013 | 10:47 am
    Recently I conducted a study on projects sized in function points that covers projects put into production from 1990 to the present, with a focus on ones completed since 2000. For an analyst like myself, one of the fun things about a study like this is that you can identify trends and then consider possible explanations for why they are occurring. A notable trend from this study of over 2000 projects is that productivity, whether measured in function points per person month (FP/PM) or hours per function point, is about half of what it was in the 1990 to 1994 time frame.Median…

  • They Just Don't Make Software Like They Used to… Or do they?

    Taylor Putnam
    1 May 2013 | 11:42 am
    With the release of SLIM-Suite 8.1 quickly approaching, I thought I’d take a moment to share a preview of the updated QSM Default Trend Lines and how it affects your estimates.  In this post I wanted to focus on the differences in quality and reliability between 2010 and 2013 for the projects in our database.  Since our last database update, we’ve included over 200 new projects in our trend groups.Here are the breakouts of the percent increases in the number of projects by Application Type:Business Systems: 14%Engineering Systems: 63%Real Time Systems: 144%Below you will find an…

  • Updated Function Point Gearing Factor Table

    Katie Costantini
    25 Apr 2013 | 8:16 am
    Version 5.0 of the QSM's Function Point Gearing Factor table is live!The Function Point Gearing Factor table provides average, median, minimum, and maximum gearing factors for recently completed function point projects. A gearing factor is the average number of basic work units in your chosen function unit. Originally, it was designed to be used as a common reference point for comparing different sizing metrics by mapping them to the smallest sizing unit common to all software projects. QSM recommends that organizations collect both code counts and final function point counts for…

  • QSM Partners with Digital Celerity for CA World 2013

    Elisabeth Pendergrass
    18 Apr 2013 | 12:35 pm
    We are pleased to announce QSM's partnership with Digital Celerity LLC, a leader in Project and Portfolio Management (PPM) and IT Service Management expert services and solutions, for CA World 2013. At the event, representatives from both QSM and Digital Celerity will showcase how QSM's SLIM Suite of Tools feeds project estimation data into the CA ClarityTM PPM tool to allow for improved planning and resource allocation. Out of the top 10 systems integrators in the world, seven rely on SLIM intelligence. By engaging in this type of top-down estimating, analytics for project planning…
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    ScrumZen

  • Should a talk on Agile engage its target audience?

    Utpal Vaishnav
    7 May 2013 | 8:46 am
    “Of course it should,” would be the your answer if you know little bit about Agile concepts. But in practice, often they do not! I was watching a YouTube Video from an “Agile expert” who is a Global Head of Delivery with a Leading Based Software Development Company. My expectation was: I will get new insights about agile from his practical experiences. And guess what: I am writing a blog post titled “Should a talk on Agile engage its target audience?” Funny, isn’t it? Not only his speech was NOT engaging, but also there were clear misconceptions…

  • Don’t Code for Perfection

    Utpal Vaishnav
    18 Apr 2013 | 11:16 am
    Enter year 2000 to know that Ket was more than a competent programmer. Not just competent, super intelligent too. He was also a kind of perfectionist. It was initial two years of his career but because of his intelligence he was leading the team of five and working day and night on delivering a software product that had hundreds of order booked prior to its launch. Ket simply wouldn’t allow the less than perfect code to check in into the code repository. The code had to be “perfect” and he has to be absolutely clear about it. He would allow the code to check in only when…

  • Roman Pichler on Product Backlog

    Utpal Vaishnav
    9 Mar 2013 | 1:29 pm
    Reading an excellent post on Product Backlog from Roman Pichler – The Good, The Bad and The Ugly Product Backlog. The product backlog is the roof that covers a Scrum Project.  So what’s good, bad and ugly about it? Good – Simple list. Flexible. Supports sprint and release planning. Bad – Needs that are hard to describe in a list-form become difficult to maintain. Often requires another tool. Also, when it becomes challenging to use a list when release planning is not feasible. Ugly – When requirements are stated with unnecessary details, and the list is of hundreds of items,…

  • On Scrum and Estimations

    Utpal Vaishnav
    26 Feb 2013 | 12:33 pm
    I have seen many Scrum novices arguing and saying that Estimates are not useful as we are anyways putting in our focus and energy on the most important tasks. That’s seldom true. Estimates are important and provide a rough idea about how future should shape itself. Read this insightful post on Estimation in a Scrum Project  from Mike Cohn. It shows a dialogue between client and the Scrum team. It is important to note that Scrum projects are part of real world that requires some idea about what will be delivered. Any Scrum team cannot take the flexibility that the framework provides…

  • Scrum and Control

    Utpal Vaishnav
    30 Jan 2013 | 8:59 am
    Scrum and Control…What? Scrum is all about NOT being in conventional control and still getting things done, fast and more effectively. Today, Blogger, Author and a friend, Tanmay Vora wrote an interesting post that conveys a similar point – How NOT to be in control. Tanmay talks about three important points: Positional Power. Staying on top of the information and Communication. All the three points are nicely conveyed.  Read Tanmay’s full post here. An effective implementation of Scrum also touches upon all three points that Tanmay mentioned. In Scrum, there is no…
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