Agile

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• Command & Control: Let’s talk about power

  Insights You Can Use

  Esther Derby

  2 Jan 2012 | 7:47 am

  Command and control isn’t just a mindset and a style of management (though it is both those things). What we don’t often talk about is the power that rests with people in management roles. Traditional managers have power, and that power comes from different sources. Part of what rankles people in traditional organizations is the way managers wield power. I’m not suggesting throwing out all managers or eliminating all controls–controls help ensure a system is functioning within appropriate boundaries. That’s the case whether we are looking at the financial system,…

• What the World Needs Now… Citizen Engineers

  Agile Development Blog: Scaling Software Agility

  Ryan Martens

  4 Jan 2012 | 1:23 pm

  Are you an engineer? If so, our society needs you to apply yourself to the global warming and other global social problems for the remainder of your life. Just before the Holidays, an article I wrote ran in Fast Company on the call-to-action I believe all engineers need to embrace. Read the article, “Engineers: Why Aren’t You Doing Work For Good?“ Is this a calling that resonates with you? Do you think it’s feasible? If so, how can we get there? I would love to hear from you. Ryan Martens is CTO and founder of Rally Software, a recovering Entrepreneur-in-Residence at…

• You're Not a Complexity Thinker When...

  Agile Management | NOOP.NL

  Jurgen Appelo

  24 Jan 2012 | 11:41 am

  You’re not a complexity thinker when… you claim your interpretation of complexity is correct, while others’ are wrong. Because, among scientists, there is no consensus about complexity. You’re not a complexity thinker when… you predict someone else’s approach to generating change will be wrong, because complexity theory denies predictions based on earlier events. You’re not a complexity thinker when… you complain your model is misunderstood or misrepresented by many people because the point of your model should be to enable sense-making. You’re not a complexity thinker…

• Rally Agile Blog: Tractors and Agile Development?

  Scrum Planet - Agile Software Development Project Management Feeds aggregator

  27 Jan 2012 | 8:00 am

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• Agile Teams at Scale: Beyond Scrum of Scrums

  Insights You Can Use

  Esther Derby

  27 Dec 2011 | 10:15 am

  Agile methods depend on effective cross-functional teams. We’ve heard many Agile success stories…at the team level. But what happens when a product can’t be delivered by one team?  What do you do when the “team” that’s needed to work on a particular product is 20 people?  Or 20 teams? There are no simple answers. But there are design principles for defining workable arrangements when the product is bigger than a handful of agile teams. Some principles and practices to guide scaling Agile teams. Agile Teams at Scale: Beyond Scrum of Scrums View more…

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  Agile Development Blog: Scaling Software Agility

• Tractors and Agile Development?

  Ryan Martens

  27 Jan 2012 | 8:00 am

  Whenever I use John Deere as an example of a fantastic Agile adoption, I always get looks of surprise. That’s quickly followed by an ‘a-ha’ moment when I share that today’s From my visit to the test farm in Des Moines - note all of the hardware on top of the tractors tractors are run by more lines of code than the early space shuttles. Yesterday, ComputerWorld published a great article about John Deere’s Agile adoption, characterized as a ‘big bang’ across their 800-person development organization within a year. It’s definitely worth the 5…

• What the World Needs Now… Citizen Engineers

  Ryan Martens

  4 Jan 2012 | 1:23 pm

  Are you an engineer? If so, our society needs you to apply yourself to the global warming and other global social problems for the remainder of your life. Just before the Holidays, an article I wrote ran in Fast Company on the call-to-action I believe all engineers need to embrace. Read the article, “Engineers: Why Aren’t You Doing Work For Good?“ Is this a calling that resonates with you? Do you think it’s feasible? If so, how can we get there? I would love to hear from you. Ryan Martens is CTO and founder of Rally Software, a recovering Entrepreneur-in-Residence at…

• Strategy Meets Execution: The Industry’s First Agile Portfolio Management Solution

  Ryan Martens

  7 Dec 2011 | 3:06 pm

  Yesterday, we kicked off Rally’s Roadshow announcing the industry’s first Agile Portfolio Management solution. What an incredible opportunity to tell the Rally story, hear an inspiring presentation from Geoffrey Moore on how to escape the pull of the past, listen to the real-life story of aligning strategy and execution from Nina Schoen at Getty Images, and moderate a panel so lively that the panelists starting asking each other the questions. Catch the Next Agile Portfolio Management Roadshow Panelists Geoffrey Moore, Nina Schoen, Todd Olson, Dave West, Ronica Roth The best way…

• We Are ‘Go for Launch’

  Catherine Connor

  29 Nov 2011 | 7:02 am

  40 preview customers, 34 builds, 3 launch events, 1 product. That’s what it took to launch our Agile Portfolio Management solution. Following Rally’s latest customer development project (see Ryan’s Lean Startup post), here’s how it all happened and Rally’s gift to you for the holiday season… 40 Preview Customers A year ago, we put a call out to the Agile community. We knew to get it right, we had to first learn how customers currently managed their strategic plans, and the challenges they were encountering. So we scheduled many, many interviews talking to development…

• Geoffrey Moore Q&A on the Future of Portfolio Management

  Ryan Martens

  28 Nov 2011 | 12:57 pm

  Geoffrey Moore, a leading high-tech strategist and author of the bestselling Silicon Valley bible Crossing the Chasm, is speaking at Rally’s December 6th launch event. His new book, Escape Velocity: Free Your Company’s Future from the Pull of the Past, offers a pragmatic plan for established enterprises to move beyond past successes and drive next-generation growth from new lines of business. We chatted with Geoffrey last week about the focus of Escape Velocity, his thoughts on how companies can capitalize on their portfolio of opportunities, and why he’s excited to speak at Rally’s…

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  Managed Chaos

• Registered Participant’s Profile: Agile India 2012 Conference

  Naresh Jain

  21 Jan 2012 | 5:53 am

  Professionals with 160 unique Roles from 144 different Companies worldwide have registered so far. Following is the profile of the registered participants: Companies 3i Infotech Freelance NSN Accept Software Corporation Gama-Tech NXP Semiconductors Aconex GE Energy Ostrya Labs ACS (Xerox GTOD) GE Healthcare People10 ADP Goldman Sachs, Inc. Persistent Systems Ltd Aegisoft Growth Matrix Philips Agical HCL Technologies PracticeAgile Agile Alliance HP Pragati Software Agile Coaching DK Huawei Technologies Project Place Agile Developer, Inc. i-flex solutions Prologic AgileFAQs IBM PTC Software…

• [Agile India 2012] Largest first-of-its-kind Conference in Asia :: Feb 17-19 :: Bengaluru

  Naresh Jain

  9 Jan 2012 | 2:40 am

  Learn… Network… Explore… @ Asia’s Premier Agile and Lean Conference A refreshing yet intense 3-day conference where you can: Learn from over 135 expert practitioners and 120 hand-picked sessions. Network & share your knowledge and experience with over 700 eager international delegates from literally every software company practicing or exploring Agile & Lean. Explore diverse and interesting solutions and contribute to the future of Agile software development. AGILE INDIA 2012 (http://agile2012.in/ 17, 18 & 19 February 2012 Le Meridien, Bengaluru. REGISTER:…

• Agile India 2012 Conference Badges

  Naresh Jain

  5 Jan 2012 | 8:28 pm

  Promote the Agile India 2012 Conference, by showing off these badges on your websites/blogs/etc.  

• The Energy Project: Getting More Out of People by Demanding Less

  Naresh Jain

  2 Jan 2012 | 9:37 am

  A company called The Energy Project, are experts in the field of work performance and the problem of employee disengagement. They believed that burnout is one of its leading causes, and focused almost exclusively on helping individuals avoid burnouts by managing their energy, as opposed to their time. Time, after all, is finite. By contrast, you can expand your personal energy and also regularly renew it. They believe that enduring organizational change is possible only if individuals alter their attitudes and behaviors first. But they’ve come to understand that it’s not possible to…

• Deliberate Practice: The Expressway to becoming an Expert

  Naresh Jain

  1 Jan 2012 | 8:46 pm

  “Its God’s gift” or “S/he was born talented” or “S/He just lucky” is a common myth that undermines the relentless hard-work experts put to attain mastery in their respect work. Benjamin Bloom, a pioneer who broke this myth found out that: “All the superb performers, he investigated, had practiced intensively, had studied with devoted teachers, and had been supported enthusiastically by their families throughout their developing years.” Later research, building on Bloom’s study revealed that the amount and quality of practice were key…

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  bor!sgloger

• Shu-Ha-Ri oder Scrum by the book ☺

  Boris Gloger

  24 Jan 2012 | 12:11 pm

  Es kann nicht oft genug gesagt werden: Natürlich ist Scrum ein Framework, um Organisationen, Product Development und Team zu managen und zu führen. Selbstverständlich kann ein Framework nicht Lösungen für jede Organisation, jede Abteilung oder jedes Team haben. Selbstverständlich muss jede Organisation best practices entwickeln, die nur in ihrem Kontext funktionieren. Die besten Beispiele dazu sind die Firmen, die heute nach Jahren sehr erfolgreich mit Scrum, KANBAN oder anderen agilen Methoden und Ideen sind. Doch den ersten Schritt vor dem zweiten zu tun, also die Anpassung vor der…

• Agile Architektur ist änderbar!

  Boris Gloger

  14 Jan 2012 | 1:26 pm

  Wer iterativ entwickeln will, hat ein grundsätzliches Problem: Er weiß nicht, ob er in der Zukunft eine Anforderung erhält, die es notwendig machen wird, Grundannahmen umzuwerfen. Das kann im extremsten Fall dazu führen, dass große Teile des Produkts nachträglich verändert werden müssen. Dieses Wissen treibt viele Softwareentwickler zu der Überlegung: Man müsste ein Framework entwickeln, das möglichst robust ist, sodass man möglichst flexibel auf zukünftige Wünsche eingehen kann.Dieser Ansatz wird immer wieder versucht, immer wieder entstehen neue Frameworks, immer wieder wird…

• Kreativität schafft Raum, wo kein Platz ist

  Boris Gloger

  4 Jan 2012 | 6:32 am

  Größte Kreativität entsteht oft, wenn die Möglichkeiten begrenzt sind. Das vielleicht eindrucksvollste Beispiel, das ich 2011 zu diesem Thema gefunden habe, war die Arbeit von Gary Chang. Als Architekt in Hongkong hat er sich mit den Möglichkeiten auseinandergesetzt, Wohnungen auf kleinstem Raum zu gestalten. Wohnungen, die dennoch alles bieten, was man benötigt.www.youtube.com/watch?v=ynVJJLHvF9UKreativität braucht ein Problem, das am besten sogar als überlebenswichtig angesehen wird. Nach meiner Erfahrung sind Menschen dann richtig kreativ, wenn sie ein wirkliches Problem unter…

• There is no “I” in team – mit Marshmallow, Spaghetti und Kreativität einen Schritt in Richtung Teambildung

  David Holzer

  28 Dec 2011 | 7:37 am

  Sie sind Teamleiter, Scrum-Master, Projekt-Manager und finden sich in nachstehender Annonce wieder?Suche: Interaktive Tools zur TeambildungBiete: Kommunikationsbarrieren, Abstimmungsschwierigkeiten, Rollenkonflikte, Intransparenz, Teamnebel, verkrustete Denkweisen, Handlungsroutinen, Langeweile im Berufsalltag Dann lesen Sie unbedingt weiter! Der aus meiner Sicht größte Sportler des vergangenen Jahrtausends ist Michael Jordan. Sechsfacher NBA-Champion (National Basketball Association), zweifacher Olympiasieger, Werbefigur, Vorbild, charismatische Persönlichkeit. Mit seiner…

• Christbaumschmücken Advanced

  Sven Blesin

  16 Dec 2011 | 2:11 pm

  So kurz vor Weihnachten durfte ich bei einem der Teams, mit denen ich arbeite, eine wirklich nette „Retro“ miterleben. “Retro” in Anführungszeichen, weil nicht wirklich alle Elemente vorhanden waren, aber in diesem Fall war das auch nicht so wichtig. Was zählte war die Wertschätzung für die geleistete Arbeit der einzelnen Teammitglieder. Für den ScrumMaster steckte eine recht lange Vorbereitungszeit dahinter, aber jeder sollte jedem am Ende des Jahres etwas Nettes sagen. Vielleicht ist das auch eine Idee für eure Teams.Der Weihnachtsbaum, den ihr hier seht, steht in…

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  All About Agile | Agile Development Made Easy!

• Rotating the ScrumMaster Role

  Mike Cohn

  26 Jan 2012 | 9:18 pm

  Some teams that struggle with choosing the best ScrumMaster decide that an appropriate strategy is to rotate the role among all team members. I don’t advocate this, as I don’t think it demonstrates an appropriate respect for the challenges and significance of the role. In my family, we rotate who... Visit my blog for the full story, links and lots more content on agile development and agile project management...

• Three Keys to Successful Product Ownership

  Arlen Bankston

  25 Jan 2012 | 2:50 pm

  The Product Owner is both one of the most important roles in Scrum and often the most difficult to fill. In this post, I will explore a few aspects of successful product ownership that are often done poorly or not at all. Manage Both the Big Vision and... Visit my blog for the full story, links and lots more content on agile development and agile project management...

• Committing for the Sprint

  Joe Little

  23 Jan 2012 | 5:02 pm

  This is, to me, still a New Year.  And a friend suggested I talk about New Years' resolutions.  Or something like them, Sprint commitments. Henry Ford said: Whether you think you can or you can't, you are usually right. So, let us work bac... Visit my blog for the full story, links and lots more content on agile development and agile project management...

• Are managers evil?

  Joe Little

  22 Jan 2012 | 7:56 pm

  First, many have said that there are a lot of bad managers in the US, and in the world. Peter Drucker worked on this. W. Edwards Deming had his ideas, and worked on this. And many many business gurus have had their say, trying to improve the manager... Visit my blog for the full story, links and lots more content on agile development and agile project management...

• Modifying Scrum – You THINK you know better…

  Mike Vizdos

  18 Jan 2012 | 2:38 pm

  Visit my blog for the full story, links and lots more content on agile development and agile project management...

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  Agile Software Development

• Daily wallpaper 1.1 for Nokia N9. Knows how to cut and rotate

  Artem

  18 Jan 2012 | 3:23 am

  Direct Nokia Store link - http://store.ovi.com/content/214273 I've released the free Daily Wallpaper for Nokia N9 a couple of months ago. Since that time it enjoyed nearly nine thousands of downloads (quite a number for this platform) and was keeping me personally entertained. Once an hour (or once a day or once a month) it is downloading the fresh cool wallpaper from flickr and every time I unlock the phone I can enjoy a new interesting photo. Since the moment of release, the most popular request (sometimes even causing the low rating in the Nokia Store) was not to rotate the too wide…

• Winter holidays: 50% discount on Easy Discount Calculator for Nokia N9 and Symbian phones

  Artem

  28 Dec 2011 | 6:47 am

  For those too busy to read the whole post: from now and until the end of winter you can get Easy Discount Calculator for Symbian and Nokia N9 for 50% cheaper (1 euro in most of the countries) from Nokia Store at http://store.ovi.com/content/186742 I am a big fan of small utilities tuned for the very concrete purpose. And I don't enjoy messing with the lots of discount calculations. You know, when one headset for my phone was 49 euro and now it it is 33% cheaper, but then there is the other one that used to be 69 euro and now it is 40% cheaper. How much do they actually cost? Simple, elegant,…

• Daily Wallpaper - a top photo & video download for Nokia N9. Free until Christmas 2011

  Artem

  18 Dec 2011 | 1:48 pm

• How to make your QML applications scale to and look nice on Symbian, MeeGo/Harmattan and android

  Artem

  9 Oct 2011 | 7:35 am

  Yesterday I was talking at the 2nd Tampere barcamp about how you can make your application automatically scale to different devices, yet allow for pixel perfect fine-tuning when needed. We used this approach for Easy Discount Calculator that is to my understanding the first real app available simultaneously for Symbian, MeeGo/Harmattan and Android (on some Android devices it runs smoothly, on som it has problems due to bugs in not yet mature the porting technology). Unfortunately the presentation may not make much sense to you if you haven’t been to the barcamp as well, but you may like to…

• Tampere Goes Agile 2011 - conference photos

  Artem

  19 Sep 2011 | 5:58 am

  A couple of days earlier, on Saturday, Sep 17 in a city of Tampere I was co-organizing the conference called Tampere Goes Agile. Conference was a big success, preparations were challenging and interesting and I should really write about it. For now, here is the slideshow for the conference photos. If you want your photos to appear here, tag them on flickr with tamperegoesagile. There are no comments allowed on this blog (until I find time to solve the overspamming problem), but feel free to copy-paste the slideshow code to wherever you like. The best way for providing feedback is a tweet…

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  ScrumAlliance

• Agile Testing: Key Points for Unlearning

  27 Jan 2012 | 10:15 am

  When quality assurance teams and management who have adopted Agile practices first put the ideas to work, they face a significant impediment in unlearning the traditional mind-set and practices that experience in traditional practices has instilled in them.

• Is Documentation Really Wasted Effort?

  24 Jan 2012 | 4:23 pm

  A widespread myth I've noticed in Agile software development is, No documentation in Agile or Documentation is wasted effort. Particularly during a transition from Waterfall to Agile, we appreciate the benefits of adopting typical Scrum practices, such as short iterations, timeboxing, daily scrums, retrospective, and so on. We also try to get away from the tasks and activities that we found monotonous before Agile adoption documentation, writing proper code comments, etc. But is it really correct to completely stop documentation and code comments?

• Waterfall to Scrum: Transitions and Crossroads

  24 Jan 2012 | 4:06 pm

  I was at home a couple of Sundays ago, watching a Chelsea vs. Liverpool football match (soccer, for those Americans reading) a match Liverpool ultimately won. It was during the post-match analysis that I was struck by some parallels between what Chelsea is going through and my own current client engagement to move from Waterfall to Scrum.

• Scrum For All: Deja Vu?

  24 Jan 2012 | 3:49 pm

  I've always wondered -- not just as a developer but as a human being -- why I needed to follow the orthodox methods of typical hierarchical reporting. There was always some middle man confusing the conversation. You can define many roles in a typical hierarchical organization, and

• Tracking Individual Performances in Scrum

  23 Jan 2012 | 7:17 am

  A question I've heard often is: Is it correct, in Scrum methodology, to track an individual's performance? This question has only one answer: No. Tracking and measuring the productivity of a single member of an Agile team is against the spirit of Scrum. The real question should be...

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  agile « WordPress.com Tag Feed

• Planning YAGN (You aint gonna need it)

  tom

  21 Jan 2012 | 4:10 pm

  A tweet from a friend who works as a project manager got me thinking about whether agile planning techniques are applicable in other contexts. We used to have project managers in software development who assumed that creating software was a predictable process, a misconception that stems from instinct rather than anything scientific, and I imagine this misconception exists in other areas. It took the frustration of programmers to apply more scientific methods to their process to change things and they gave us  Agile Software Development that the lucky ones of use today. It turns out that…

• Individuals and Interactions over process and tools

  Jeff Highman

  21 Jan 2012 | 12:56 pm

  I saw a webinar from one a big tool vendor today.  It went like this: Introduction of World changing circumstance giving way to abstract hyperbole followed with specific scary things for which, you the CIO should be very, very afraid. Real world scary dramatic examples of requirements failures, testing failures, and security failures pitted against the backdrop of inglorious humanity. Executives like you are being rebuked on social media. Then a lark, a ray of light peeked through the “clouds” and a vibrant engineer took the microphone for some down to earth colloquial data-center…

• Agile is more than just...

  vinylbaustein

  21 Jan 2012 | 11:21 am

  … I love that video! It’s an expression of what lot’s of people think Agile is about. To speak freely, there are lot’s of people who have no clue that working with Scrum or Kanban has nothing to do with being Agile. In addition, doing a daily meeting has nothing to do with Scrum! Agile is a buzzword First, let’s have a look at the term Agile. Most common, Agile is used as a generic term for Agile practices for Software Development like Scrum, Kanban, TDD or XP to name some of the most popular. Some people also include Lean. In my opinion, this is not correct as I…

• Actors involved in Anarchic Methodology

  junior mayhe

  21 Jan 2012 | 11:08 am

  Today we are going to present the Actors involved in Anarchic Methodology in a simple diagram as seen below. There some important points that must be remembered: Stakeholders name a responsible for gathering all business requirements to compose a request document. This document is presented to the Anarchic Team. Anarchic Team is composed by Great Leader and Great Fellows. The Great Leader removes impediments, communicates issues to Stakeholder representative, translates requests into small application features with the development team. The development team is also known as Great Fellows,…

• Lean Startup Machine is almost here - there are a few spots left!

  dpwhelan

  21 Jan 2012 | 10:52 am

  Lean Startup Machine is coming to Toronto on January 26 -29. There are still a few spots left and you can register at http://lsm-toronto.eventbrite.com/ – hope to see you there!

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  scrum « WordPress.com Tag Feed

• Scrum and New Year Resolutions

  sprahalad

  10 Jan 2012 | 7:51 am

  New year resolutions are like a Release in the Waterfall model. Planning up front, execution there after, no mid term review, stays alive for anything from a few hours to a max of 6 months. Drifting a little, Scrum in a nutshell is about Frequent small releases Review at the end of each Sprint Continuous process improvement Now, back to bridging the two… Here is how we can make the resolutions last longer, make them more predictable and that much more achievable. Extending the principles of Scrum to New Year resolutions, I suggest having new Resolutions each month. In January, I shall…

• Mission Accomplished

  leostera

  9 Jan 2012 | 7:43 pm

  I first dived into Python when I started this project mentioned here 18 days ago, on December the 22th. For my little sister Santa brought toys but my gift was a more profound one. It was a challenge: “Hey, Leandro, can you build a Django powered website? Can you learn and improve or will you just remain the same stubborn coder you were last year?” Before planning what the site would require to be functional and usable, I already wanted to do it like a pro. Having read a bunch of Scrum, TDD and Agile books, I decided I was going to use some sort of Scrum (more like Kanban) and TDD the…

• PMI-ACP(Agile Certification). Results of the Pilot phase announced. :o)

  sprahalad

  9 Jan 2012 | 6:00 pm

  Small Update.. Got my results from PMI (Project Management Institute) for the PMI-ACP (Agile Certified Professional) certification exam. Cleared the Certification exam. Proud to say that I am among the first batch of people in the world to be PMI-Agile Certified and among the first 50 in India. Here are some details about the certification: http://www.pmi.org/en/Certification/New-PMI-Agile-Certification.aspx This certification was in the pilot phase till Nov 30th. The exam will resume in the from the end of this month. Some insights into the PMI-ACP Certification exam At 30,000 ft, the exam…

• Notes for the daily scrum meeting.

  sprahalad

  9 Jan 2012 | 5:38 pm

  I had this discussion yesterday where one of the managers asked for Note taking during the daily scrum meeting so that it can be referred to at a later point of time. Seems like a good idea, but here are my points. Scrum is for the team. Anyone outside the delivery team who wants to know what is happening should attend the daily scrum and HAS to be a chicken. Also, as a necessary good practice, Chickens (people who are not part of the delivery team) should make it a point to keep silent.   Any team member attending it daily will be aware of any key decisions taken or progress made.  If the…

• Scrum and Training: How do you train the training department?

  austinkirkbride

  9 Jan 2012 | 7:16 am

  In 2011, a Financial Services firm asked if a small training consulting firm could provide Scrum Masters for their learning and development department to learn about and potentially transition to the Scrum methodology. Ultimately, five Certified Scrum Masters with many years of experience in applying Scrum – albeit to IT departments – took on the personal challenges of applying Scrum to a whole new industry – learning and development. Ultimately, many lessons were learned and many opportunities for improvement were revealed and the pilot was deemed a success. The Scrum Masters, although…

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  Managing Product Development

• Agile Lifecycles for Geographically Distributed Teams, Part 2

  Johanna

  25 Jan 2012 | 10:06 am

  Example 2: Using a Project Manager with Kanban, Silo’d Teams This is a product development organization with developers in Italy, testers in India, more developers in New York, product owners and project managers in California. This organization first tried iterations, but the team could never get to done. The problem was that the stories were too large. Normally I suggest smaller iterations, but one of the developers suggested they move to kanban. The New York developers had a problem biting off more than they could chew. So nothing moved across their board. The Italy developers had a…

• Agile Lifecycles for Geographically Distributed Teams, Part 1

  Johanna

  24 Jan 2012 | 7:09 am

  I’ve been working with geographically distributed and dispersed teams for the past couple of years. Some of them on quite large programs, some of them reasonably small. What they all have in common is that they all want to transition to agile. Most of them start this way: someone takes a Scrum class, gets all excited. This is good. Then reality hits. Scrum is meant for collocated geographically cross-functional teams. Uh oh. Almost all of these teams are separated by function: the developers are in one place, the testers are in another, the business analysts are in a third place, the…

• Drum Roll: Public Workshop April 17-18, 2012

  Johanna

  20 Jan 2012 | 8:04 am

  I’m so pleased to announce that Shane Hastie and I are leading a workshop on Working Effectively In Geographically Distributed Agile Project Teams, April 17-18, 2012 in Pleasanton, CA. Yes, that is Elisabeth Hendrickson’s Agilistry Studio. Shane and I first delivered this workshop last year in Australia, when I was there for Software Education‘s SDC. We had a great time, and so did many of the participants. We have since evolved the workshop, to address the needs of the participants who did not have a great time, and to make sure we covered the topics we need to cover. This…

• Pragmatic Manager and InfoQ Video Posted

  Johanna

  19 Jan 2012 | 6:51 am

  I have posted last week’s Pragmatic Manager, Are You Being Guilted Into Doing More?. At Agile 2011, I had a great video conversation with Shane Hastie about agile project portfolio management. The chair is big, I’m not so short. The chair is big, I’m not so short. How many times do you think I have to say that to make it true? The chair is big, I’m not so short. That ought to do it.

• Who’s Playing Agile Schedule Games Posted

  Johanna

  11 Jan 2012 | 6:18 am

  My new Gantthead column is up, Who’s Playing Agile Schedule Games? If you liked the schedule games from the more traditional projects, you’ll love the agile schedule games. Please comment over there.

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  Insights You Can Use

• Command & Control: Let’s talk about power

  Esther Derby

  2 Jan 2012 | 7:47 am

  Command and control isn’t just a mindset and a style of management (though it is both those things). What we don’t often talk about is the power that rests with people in management roles. Traditional managers have power, and that power comes from different sources. Part of what rankles people in traditional organizations is the way managers wield power. I’m not suggesting throwing out all managers or eliminating all controls–controls help ensure a system is functioning within appropriate boundaries. That’s the case whether we are looking at the financial system,…

• Agile Teams at Scale: Beyond Scrum of Scrums

  Esther Derby

  27 Dec 2011 | 10:15 am

  Agile methods depend on effective cross-functional teams. We’ve heard many Agile success stories…at the team level. But what happens when a product can’t be delivered by one team?  What do you do when the “team” that’s needed to work on a particular product is 20 people?  Or 20 teams? There are no simple answers. But there are design principles for defining workable arrangements when the product is bigger than a handful of agile teams. Some principles and practices to guide scaling Agile teams. Agile Teams at Scale: Beyond Scrum of Scrums View more…

• Trifecta of Doom: How Expectations for/about Managers Stymie Learning

  Esther Derby

  19 Dec 2011 | 8:53 am

  When I was promoted to a management role, I realized that the skills that made me standout as a programmer were not the skills I needed in my new role. I started reading. I found a mentor. I applied for a graduate program in leadership. But I was something of an exception. Many managers feel too busy to read. Many don’t have good role models within their companies. I meet many people in management roles who have never picked up a serious management book. Some managers I meet express relief that they no longer have to keep up with evolving technical trends–they can relax and stop…

• Hiring for an Agile Team: 4 Reasons to Up Your Hiring Game

  Esther Derby

  9 Dec 2011 | 10:41 am

  Most companies have policies that govern the selection and hiring process for new employees. Not a bad thing.  But I’ve noticed that in many of the companies I visit–especially the big ones–the guidelines put far less rigor around hiring people for dev teams than for management roles. (Occasionally, I see the opposite. Might write about that at some point in the future.) I agree with the need for due deliberation in hiring managers at any level.  Managers can have a big impact, and it makes sense to hire carefully.  Many companies take a broad stripe approach to hiring…

• Building Effective Teams: Miss the Start, Miss the End

  Esther Derby

  28 Nov 2011 | 7:15 am

  (This article originally appeared on Gantthead.com) “The beginning is the most important part of the work.” Plato, Greek philosopher and writer, 429–347 B.C.E. I’ve written several articles about a manager’s relationship with a team that has already formed. A manager’s relationship with a team as they work is essential for cultivating a self-organizing team and maintaining a link with the organization. But a managers role in growing effectives teams starts long before the work actually begins. The 60-30-10 Principle J. Richard Hackman, has been studying teams…

• 

  Agile Management | NOOP.NL

• Intrinsic Desires in Tel Aviv (video)

  Jurgen Appelo

  27 Jan 2012 | 5:56 am

• You're Not a Complexity Thinker When...

  Jurgen Appelo

  24 Jan 2012 | 11:41 am

  You’re not a complexity thinker when… you claim your interpretation of complexity is correct, while others’ are wrong. Because, among scientists, there is no consensus about complexity. You’re not a complexity thinker when… you predict someone else’s approach to generating change will be wrong, because complexity theory denies predictions based on earlier events. You’re not a complexity thinker when… you complain your model is misunderstood or misrepresented by many people because the point of your model should be to enable sense-making. You’re not a complexity thinker…

• They're Different, in Paris! (video)

  Jurgen Appelo

  19 Jan 2012 | 12:15 pm

• Stoos Network (part 7): What's Next?

  Jurgen Appelo

  16 Jan 2012 | 6:21 am

  I had promised a 7-part series with my reflections on the Stoos Gathering. Now I promise that this will be my last post on this topic for a while… I have discussed the goals & outcomes of the event in Stoos, the name & identity, the core idea, and the stakeholders. Now it’s time to consider what comes next. Allow me to suggest the following steps, which can be picked up by anyone in the bigger network. Including me. :) 1) Stakeholders I think a little more work is needed to identify the groups of stakeholders. We’ve already made progress, and received some comments. But it would…

• Stoos Network (part 6): Goal & Outcomes

  Jurgen Appelo

  13 Jan 2012 | 7:54 am

  The original announcement for the Stoos Gathering started as follows: At the Stoos Gathering we will discuss how to accelerate change in management and organizational transformation. In my interpretation, our goal for the gathering was to achieve an understanding of the problem, an agreement on the desired future, and at least some suggestions for how to get there faster. The Problem The participants defined the problem in the form of “a fifty-dimensional mind-map”, as Steve Denning calls it. It is rather comprehensive in terms of root causes and consequences. But we intentionally call it…

• 

  Scaling Software Agility

• Computerworld Article: John Deere Plows in to Agile

  Dean Leffingwell

  26 Jan 2012 | 5:16 pm

  With Deere’s permission, we’ve chronicled Deere’s Intelligent Systems Group  agile-at-scale, and all-in-really-fast transformation on this blog. There’s another post or two in process. In the meantime, this Computerworld article adds to the story. Pretty cool, really. Great to see a 150 yr old plus company taking the plunge to the latest methods of software development.

• Agile Portfolio Management Keynote Video Now On Line

  Dean Leffingwell

  25 Jan 2012 | 6:38 am

  In December, Rally sponsored a series of keynote presentations in conjunction with the product launch of Rally’s Agile Portfolio Manager. One such session was in Dallas in December. There, I gave a talk entitled Agile Portfolio Management with the Scaled Agile Framework. The video of that talk is now posted on line here. (The slides from that talk were posted previously here). It’s a serious and deep topic, suited for those project, program, development, line of business managers and other executives who share responsible for Strategy and Investment Funding, Program Execution and…

• New Nav Icons on Scaled Agile Framework

  Dean Leffingwell

  21 Jan 2012 | 11:40 am

  Since the Scaled Agile Framework is both broad and deep, we’ve been working on Navigation icons to help keep the user from getting “web vertigo” when they navigate the framework. Here’s an example for the Agile Team icon. See them all at scaledagileframework.com.  

• Upcoming Lean|Agile Leadership Workshop in Melbourne, Australia and Wellington, New Zealand

  Dean Leffingwell

  21 Jan 2012 | 11:32 am

  A reminder that I’ll be delivering a rare, open-enrollement version of my Lean|Agile Leadership workshop in Melbourne, Australia, February 14-15, and Wellington, New Zealand, Februrary 28-29. You can register through Agile University here. Here is an overview of the workshop. Leading the Lean|Agile Enterprise: A Two-day Workshop for Leaders, Managers, and Executives. Overview By Dean Leffingwell While working with a number of software enterprises in the throes of large-scale Lean|Agile rollouts, one thing is increasingly clear: these rollouts will not reach their full potential until…

• Announcing Scaled Agile Partners

  Dean Leffingwell

  6 Jan 2012 | 12:31 pm

  As readers know, I am typically engaged in a number of simultaneous, larger-scale Lean|Agile rollouts, applying my experiences, my book, Agile Software Requirements, and now the synthesized, and public-facing Scaled Agile Framework to these initiatives. But since my clients are scaling, and agile is increasingly crossing the chasm  from “early adopters” to the “early majority”, I needed to scale myself, too. To this end, we recently formed Scaled Agile Partners, (a DBA for my consulting company, Leffingwell, LLC) and with my partners Alex, Drew, Armond and Colin, we have a…

• 

  Mike Cohn's Blog - Succeeding With Agile®

• Rotating the ScrumMaster Role

  Mike Cohn

  26 Jan 2012 | 9:18 pm

  Some teams that struggle with choosing the best ScrumMaster decide that an appropriate strategy is to rotate the role among all team members. I don’t advocate this, as I don’t think it demonstrates an appropriate respect for the challenges and significance of the role. In my family, we rotate who cleans the table and loads the dishwasher. Any of us can do that job. We do not, however, rotate who cooks dinner. My wife is a far better cook than anyone else in the family. We want the cooking to be the best it can be, so we don’t rotate that job. If you want your Scrum team to be the best…

• Please Help Me List the Problems with Using Agile or Scrum

  Mike Cohn

  3 Jan 2012 | 4:03 pm

  I’m trying to create a list of the biggest, most common, or hardest to overcome problems that a team might face when adopting Scrum or agile. I could really use your help by contributing to the list by adding a comment to this post. I’m thinking of things like: We have five product owners. What do we do? We drop work from every sprint. How do we get out of that habit? We can’t ever get things “potentially shippable” at the end of a sprint. How can we? We spend forever in planning meetings. How can we spend less time doing that? etc… So, what problems have…

• Recommendations not Rules

  Mike Cohn

  2 Jan 2012 | 11:24 am

  I seem to be encountering more and more people who want to codify agile into a set of rules. I’ve seen this lately in authors of books, blogs or PDFs about agile or Scrum that say “You must do this” or “If you don’t do this or all of that then you’re not doing it right.” Over the last few months I also encountered this in conversations with a few Project Management Offices (PMOs). That leads me to my new year’s resolution for 2012 and one that I hope a lot of others will make with me: make recommendations not rules. There are very few…

• New Planning Poker Card Design

  Mike Cohn

  4 Dec 2011 | 9:01 am

  I’ve wanted to update the design of our Planning Poker cards for quite awhile, and we finally got the chance. The new cards feature an all-new back design to go along with the same faces we’ve used for years. There are 56 cards in the deck. Thirteen estimating numbers are provided in four colors, each with a matching back as shown above. Additional cards include instructions on how to estimate with Planning Poker and feature full-color photos of goats on the back. The cards are still the same high quality we’ve always provided. Our cards are manufactured by the same company…

• In Defense of Large Numbers

  Mike Cohn

  28 Nov 2011 | 10:15 am

  People are often surprised that I allow (or even encourage) people to estimate with story points as large as 20, 40, and 100. We include these values in the decks of Planning Poker cards that we sell and give away in classes and at conferences. Yet many people tell me they start out my taking the 20, 40 and 100 cards out of the deck and throwing them away. I find this unnecessary and, in some cases, detrimental to good planning. These large numbers can play a role in estimating and planning on some projects. Let’s see how. Suppose your boss wants to know the general size of a new…

• 

  James Shore

• April 23rd to 27th in New York City: The Art of Agile (Training)

  26 Jan 2012 | 2:02 am

  26 Jan 2012 James Shore/Calendar Diana Larsen and I are partnering with Cyrus Innovation to deliver our acclaimed "Art of Agile" training course in New York City from April 23rd to 27th. There's also an option to attend just the planning or delivery section of the course if your schedule doesn't permit you to attend a full week. For details and registration, visit the Art of Agile NYC web site. Comments

• April 11th and 12th in Philadelphia, PA: Emerging Technologies Conference

  26 Jan 2012 | 2:02 am

  26 Jan 2012 James Shore/Calendar I'll be speaking at the Philly Emerging Technologies conference taking place on April 11th and 12th. The title of the talk is "Kanban, Lean, and Large-Scale Agile." Here's the blurb: Agile methods work beautifully for a single team. But what do you do when you have multiple, interdependent teams, all working on a single product or product suite? How can Agile scale without losing sight of its core principles? In this session, we'll examine how to apply Lean and Agile principles to the problems of large-scale Agile. We'll combine a pinch of theory, a dash of…

• Let's Play TDD #159: How Do We Store Data?

  17 Jan 2012 | 2:01 am

  17 Jan 2012 James Shore/Blog/Lets-Play The source code for this episode is available here. Visit the Let's Play archive for more episodes! Many thanks to Danny Jones for figuring out the HD Youtube embed code. Comments

• Let's Play TDD #158: writeFile() and readFile()

  12 Jan 2012 | 2:01 am

  12 Jan 2012 James Shore/Blog/Lets-Play The source code for this episode is available here. Visit the Let's Play archive for more episodes! Many thanks to Danny Jones for figuring out the HD Youtube embed code. Comments

• Let's Play TDD #157: Datum

  10 Jan 2012 | 2:01 am

  10 Jan 2012 James Shore/Blog/Lets-Play The source code for this episode is available here. Visit the Let's Play archive for more episodes! Many thanks to Danny Jones for figuring out the HD Youtube embed code. Comments

• 

  David J. Anderson and Associates

• Kanban Weekly Roundup - Jan 25, 2012

  dominica@djandersonassociates.com

  25 Jan 2012 | 4:57 pm

                                                                                                                              By Dominica DeGrandis The number of #kanban tweets continues to grow with the expansion of kanban use in areas outside of software development.  From the…

• How do Teams Continue to Win during Times of Turmoil and Uncertainty?

  dominica@djandersonassociates.com

  22 Jan 2012 | 8:29 pm

                                                                                                                              By Dominica DeGrandis We had a big snow this week.  Twelve inches total, a forty-three year record in our part of Puget Sound country.  We lost power for…

• Kanban Weekly Roundup - Jan 17, 2012

  dominica@djandersonassociates.com

  18 Jan 2012 | 3:32 am

                                                                                              By Dominica DeGrandis It is fun to discover articles sprinkled with Kanban properties, even though they don’t specifically mention Kanban. I stumbled across several good ones this week. News “The Rise of the New Groupthink” is a must read.  The author discusses how…

• Kanban Weekly Roundup - Jan 10,2012

  dominica@djandersonassociates.com

  11 Jan 2012 | 5:24 am

                                                                                              By Dominica DeGrandis The New Year has people experimenting with new ideas and challenging popular arguments. This week, we check out ideas and arguments across four different countries. News Mike Burrows (@asplake) continues his series of “Real Kanban Questions” with a…

• Kanban for IT Services & Operations - Dearborn, MI Mar 12-13, 2012

  dominica@djandersonassociates.com

  6 Jan 2012 | 6:18 pm

  David J. Anderson’s An Official “Kanban - Successful Evolutionary Change for Your Technology Business” Class                                                                                                                 with Dominica DeGrandis (instructor) Because software only has a chance of being valuable…

• 

  The Agile Management Blog

• A Musical Approach to Agile Development Teams – Part 1 of 2

  Steve Ropa

  26 Jan 2012 | 7:55 am

  <Adapted from my article in CM Crossroads article titled, “Making Beautiful Music Together”> Have you ever watched a jazz combo? The performance starts with the leader counting off the rhythm, then stepping away. Then the drummer begins to lay down a beat. Even at this stage, the audience can feel a groove hit the room. Soon, the piano joins and adds both melody and harmony to the piece. Energy is flowing from the chords as the team starts to see and feel the direction of the piece. Now it’s time for the other instruments to join in the fun. A typical combo will have a couple of…

• Waterfall? Get Over it Already!

  Steve Ropa

  20 Jan 2012 | 9:08 am

  Is it fair to call Quasimodo ugly? Earlier this year, on the LinkedIn Agile and Lean Software discussion group, someone posted the question, “Is it fair or accurate to malign the waterfall process as is rote when people push agile and Scrum?”  The original question drew a lot of discussion, and then it seemed to die down.  All of a sudden it has reared its ugly head again, and really requires a more thorough response. When I first saw the post, I laughed.  Here was a guy posting in the Agile and Lean Software group a question which implied that any negative talk about waterfall was…

• Everything I learned about Scrum Teams I learned from M*A*S*H

  Steve Ropa

  13 Jan 2012 | 7:58 am

  I like to participate in discussion groups.  I enjoy the discussions themselves, and I also like “meeting” the folks who are participating.  There are a lot of questions that get repeated in those groups, but I personally feel that the conversations are various enough that this is a good thing.   There is always enough of a twist on each one that I learn something new. One question that comes up a lot is, “Who should be the Scrum Master?”  Sometimes it is as simple as, “Hey, we are starting to do Scrum, so we need a Scrum Master. Who should we get?”…

• Part 2 of 2: Kanban vs Scrum Myths & Hype

  Michael DePaoli

  10 Jan 2012 | 6:12 am

  In the first part of this post we established a context about Kanban as an agile software tool (not to be confused with the manufacturing term, kanban).  I also explored some of the key myths and hype behind Kanban vs Scrum.  Now I’ll discuss the realities of implementing Kanban and some of the fundamentals that hold back both Kanban and Scrum implementations. On paper, Kanban is certainly easier to kick-start from a change management perspective because you can leave current roles and processes largely intact; you just need to get commitment from the business to adhere to three basic…

• Part 1 of 2: Kanban vs Scrum Myths and Hype

  Michael DePaoli

  6 Jan 2012 | 8:44 am

  It's usually about degrees for true and false Recently, I heard folks at a few of my clients and at a couple conferences talking about why they are considering moving to using Kanban vs. Scrum.  I have no preference to either method other than choosing the right agile development tool for the job.  My concern derived from what I have heard identifies the beginnings of some myths and also demonstrates some of the hype around Kanban. First, a clarification; Kanban with a capital (K) is the term David Anderson coined with respect to an agile development approach to driving change based on…

• 

  manage well

• Time to throw away your Talent Pyramid

  TV

  25 Jan 2012 | 11:24 am

  Ask any HR Manager on talent profile for their organization and you will get a ‘talent pyramid’ – an odd-looking ‘pyramid’ that is supposed to reflect the talent profile of the organization. Ask them further – what is the measure of ‘talent’ in this pyramid, and chances are 9 on 10 that the answer will be ‘experience’. This experience is typically the number of years of (supposedly relevant) experience in the workforce, and pretty much determines how roles, and consequently the compensation are derived out of it. Question is – is that the right measure of talent?

• Inexperience is the new Competency?

  TV

  19 Dec 2011 | 8:44 pm

  Past experience is often considered to be a proxy for future performance. After all, when there is no single perfect way to forecast someone’s future performance, the best you can do is to look at the past track record and extrapolate it! However, experience will only tell that if the given person were to undergo similar experience once again, would they achieve similar results? But, how do you know that experience is not really getting in the way of future success?

• Notes from 4th International PMO Symposium

  TV

  30 Nov 2011 | 4:26 am

  I had the wonderful opportunity to attend recently concluded 4th International PMO Symposium at the beautiful Loews Royal Pacific Resort in Orlando, Florida from 6th to 9th Nov 2011. I was invited there as a speaker. PMO Symposium is organized annually by the PMI PMO COP and is the largest and surely the best such event globally. This year saw over 435+ attendees – double from the last year!

• Seeking submissions on New Product Development and Product Management in Agile world for #AgileIndia2012

  TV

  27 Aug 2011 | 12:20 pm

  We are seeking perspectives, experiences, insights and groundbreaking ideas from practitioners and thinkers on how they have applied the spirit of agility to create new products that have led to unprecedented and extraordinary market success compared to their previous conventional practices. Specifically, we are looking for proofpoints from the marketplace to demonstrate how software team’s agility was directly visible in business results.

• What are the program management competencies?

  TV

  23 Aug 2011 | 6:33 pm

  Program managers are the glue that bring your best people and teams together to collaborate like never before. They crack the hardest problems by cutting through the red tape in your organization and aligning them to the single goal. Clearly, a lot depends on having the right program manager in place. How do you hire or groom good program managers?

• 

  Learn Software Development

• Not pushing the team too hard – a fine balance that can be easy to miss – Part 3 ..

  ashish

  23 Jan 2012 | 1:14 pm

  This is a series of posts that I am writing about the dynamics of a team, and how it came to be that we started getting push back from the team about pushing them too hard, which lead to a series of introspective discussions (Pushing the team too hard) about whether we had gone too far, and what should be the next steps. In the previous post, I started writing about how the team was being pushed to be more aggressive, and this in turn was causing additional risk to projects that the team was taking up. In this post, I will be talking about the problems that an aggressive manager was…

• Not pushing the team too hard – a fine balance that can be easy to miss – Part 2 ..

  ashish

  17 Jan 2012 | 9:34 am

  The previous post (Pushing the team, maybe too hard) detailed some of the problems that a team that was under-performing started experiencing when it decided that it would not longer under-perform and started to move up the performance chain, but in the end, the focus on productivity started taking a toll on the team members. There were a number of factors that were not considered when it started becoming a bit more clear that the team was getting fatigued. One of the biggest factors that we had to re-consider was the notion that we would not say no to a request or a project without doing a…

• Not pushing the team too hard – a fine balance that can be easy to miss – Part 1

  ashish

  13 Jan 2012 | 8:44 am

  The topic for this post came up from a recent discussion that we started having. The managers of the team were astounded when, at yet another weekend, when members of the team were called for work (since yet another milestone was approaching), almost 90% of the team came up with excuses individually, and finally, the managers were shocked and decided to not call the team for the weekend. This particular episode led to some soul-searching about what is the right thing to do, and what this mean for the future, since the team is in a group which believes that hard driving is something that is…

• Bug ageing – why it is important to follow in a software project – Part 4

  ashish

  11 Jan 2012 | 1:35 pm

  In previous posts (bug ageing and processes), I have been talking about the importance of bug ageing, and in the previous post, I talked about some of the reasons for tracking bug ageing and ensuring that bugs do not delayed in terms of when they are finally seen by the development team. In this post, I will talk about more reasons for ensuring that bug ageing is critical to monitor for the team: - Morale. We have found that it makes a lot of difference to the overall morale of the team, and specifically of the QE members of the team. Consider the case where a member of the team does his /…

• Bug ageing – why it is important to follow in a software project – Part 3

  ashish

  8 Jan 2012 | 1:20 pm

  In the previous 2 instances of this post (Bug ageing and software processes), I have been talking about the need to measure how much time it takes for the bugs generated by the QE team to get fixed, and to see whether taking more time for fixing such bugs is seen as a problem. In almost every case, you need to ensure that these bugs get fixed within a definite period of time and not keep on lingering on. One of the important questions is about how soon bugs should be fixed and not kept hanging. It is not easy for a group to define the time period within which bugs should be fixed, and not…

• 

  Atlassian Blogs » Developer

• (Guest blog) On the Redistribution of Testing – Part I

  Ly Nguyen

  25 Jan 2012 | 6:30 pm

  This is a guest blog post by Paul Gerrard, a Principal of Gerrard Consulting Limited and is the host of the UK Test Management Forum. It is Part 1 of a two-part blog series on the future of QA testing. Recently, there has been a spate of predictions of doom and gloom in our business.  Conference talks have had titles such as ‘Test is Dead’ and ‘Death to the Testing Phase’. ‘Testing has contributed little to quality improvement in the last ten years’, and even being a tester is a ‘bad thing’ – are all keynote themes that circulated at conferences, blogs and YouTube in late…

• (Guest blog) Finding the Right Foot: Testing Efficiency Through Engineering Efficiency

  Ly Nguyen

  24 Jan 2012 | 11:06 am

  This is a guest blog post by Catherine Powell, a principal at Abakas, a software consulting company. At Abakas, she provides engineering management, development, testing, and process consulting services.  Ahh, the glories of software creation. We have an idea, and an idea turns into a list, and a list turns into code plus more lists, which turns into more code and new machines in production ready to share our great new software with the world. And there are a few caffeine-fueled late nights, and there are a few company-sponsored lunches and demos. And then we’re ready… just as…

• Anatomy Of An Atlassian FedEx Day Win

  Wesley Walser

  19 Jan 2012 | 8:00 am

  Atlassian Fed What? At Atlassian, we work hard to ship great products to our amazing customers. Another thing we like to do is set aside some time to let our brains run wild. Every last employee has some idea in the back of their mind about a product improvement and we think it’s critical to give them time to make those ideas a reality. FedEx day is a day, once a quarter, where we all set aside our day to day and run a 24 hour gauntlet to see what we can deliver in that time frame. It’s also a great kick in the pants to finally build that thing you’ve been saying would make…

• Modern Principles in Web Development

  Rich Manalang

  18 Jan 2012 | 5:52 pm

  I’ve been kickstarting a bunch of small web apps lately. It seems like every time I start a new project, theres’s always something new that causes me to adjust my development principles. I thought it might be good to take a snapshot of what’s “in” today. I like to think of web development phases starting from idea to delivery… all of it backed by strong principles of how to build great apps. The following are my core web development principles today: Designing for mobile first (even if you’re not building a mobile app) Build only single page apps Create and use your own REST API…

• 13 Steps to Learn & Perfect Security Testing in your Org

  Mark Hrynczak

  18 Jan 2012 | 12:08 pm

  Intro It is becoming more common for software applications to be written using web technologies, and for users to want to access them from anywhere, using an internet connection. Security of browser-based applications is very different from how things work with traditional thick-client architecture. There are far fewer boundaries between different web sites inside the browser than between different pieces of code that run on your computer under the control of the operating system. Security testing is therefore a very important part of testing web applications, which means that these skills…

• 

  Agile Software Development

• Online Burndown Charts

  26 Jan 2012 | 9:08 am

  This free online tool provides simple service that allows you to create and edit your Scrum burn-down charts.

• Sprintometer 6.50 Adds Project BurnDown Chart

  25 Jan 2012 | 6:44 am

  The new version v6.50 of freeware tool Sprintometer for Scrum and XP project management has been released on Jabuary 21, 2012. Everybody knows Sprint Burn down chart used in Scrum projects but very often managers need to know situation with the whole agile project and specifically they are intereste ...

• Parasoft Advances Static Analysis for Security, Accelerates Desktop Analysis

  25 Jan 2012 | 5:57 am

  Monrovia, CA – January 24, 2012 Parasoft Corporation, industry leader in automated defect prevention and detection, today introduced a new release of Parasoft Jtest: the industry's most comprehensive Java testing solution. Parasoft Jtest automates static analysis, unit testing, coverage an ...

• Key Dimensions of User Stories

  23 Jan 2012 | 3:37 pm

  Dealing with a large amount of user stories (more than your fingers and toes can account for) is not easy, most often they sit one after the other in your product backlog, or they are shuffled on a story map.

• Implementing Scrum: How Does the Project Manager Fit In?

  23 Jan 2012 | 2:43 pm

  There is no such role as project manager in Scrum. But there are project managers in the organization. So what is the project manager supposed to do when the team is transitioning to Scrum? The easy part is that this question has already been asked and answered so many times. The hard part is that t ...

• 

  Agile Voices - Extreme Programming, Scrum, Test Driven Development & Lean aggregator

• Michael Dowling's Whispers: My first blog post on Scriptogram

  10 Dec 2012 | 11:00 pm

  Scriptogram? Hello! This is my first blog post, hosted by Scriptogram. Let's see how it goes!

• Michael Dowling's Whispers: My first blog post on Scriptogram

  28 Jan 2012 | 3:54 am

  Scriptogram? Hello! This is my first blog post, hosted by Scriptogram. Let's see how it goes!

• IceScrum: Défauts connus sur la R4#3

  28 Jan 2012 | 2:29 am

  Voici les défauts connus sur la R4#3 :read more

• Agile Philly: Agile Teams - Chili Cook Off Contest

  27 Jan 2012 | 2:16 pm

  It's winter here in PA and nothing goes better with lousy weather than a bowl of chili.  We have a very competitive group and we do not need much motivation to turn anything into a compitition.  One week prior to cooking day we gathered all the teams and unveiled the event and rules. The feedback from teams and tasters was that it was a rousing team building success.. One team took it as far as to execute a prototype and feedback session every morning to dial in…

• Eric Lefevre-Ardant on Java & Agile: Cleaning up test code

  27 Jan 2012 | 11:52 am

  My former colleague David just posted an example of verbose test code on his blog (the parts in French have been translated to English by myself):read more

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  Scrum Planet - Agile Software Development Project Management Feeds aggregator

• Scrum Alliance: Agile Testing: Key Points for Unlearning

  27 Jan 2012 | 10:15 am

  When quality assurance teams and management who have adopted Agile practices first put the ideas to work, they face a significant impediment in unlearning the traditional mind-set and practices that experience in traditional practices has instilled in them.

• Rally Agile Blog: Tractors and Agile Development?

  27 Jan 2012 | 8:00 am

  read more

• Mike Cohn's Blog - Succeeding With Agile™: Rotating the ScrumMaster Role

  26 Jan 2012 | 9:18 pm

  Some teams that struggle with choosing the best ScrumMaster decide that an appropriate strategy is to rotate the role among all team members. I don’t advocate this, as I don’t think it demonstrates an appropriate respect for the challenges and significance of the role. In my family, we rotate who cleans the table and loads the dishwasher. Any of us can do that job. We do not, however, rotate who cooks dinner. My wife is a far better cook than anyone else in the family. We want the cooking to be the best it can be, so we don’t rotate that job.read more

• Scrum Expert: Agile Project Rescue

  26 Jan 2012 | 3:23 pm

  This video tells the story of a project that was in a bad shape after a first waterfall attempt and 2 months of Scrum that failed to deliver any working code.read more

• The Agile Management Blog - VersionOne: A Musical Approach to Agile Development Teams – Part 1 of 2

  26 Jan 2012 | 7:55 am

  <Adapted from my article in CM Crossroads article titled, “Making Beautiful Music Together”>read more

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  Software Development Musings from the Editor of Methods & Tools

• Software Development Conferences January 2012

  The Editor

  26 Jan 2012 | 3:00 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: Scandinavian Agile Conference, March 8 2012, Helsinki, Finland EclipseCon 2012 North America, March 26-29 2012, Reston, USA Agile ALM Connect, March 26-29 2012, [...]

• Software Development Linkopedia January 2012

  The Editor

  18 Jan 2012 | 7:20 am

  Here is our selection of interesting knolwedge material on programming, software testing and project management: Web Site: Understanding JavaScript OOP Web Site: Cherry Pop – Development Diary Web Site: Mikado Method Blog: Diversity Imbalance Blog: Kicking ass together: How to improve coding skills as a group Blog: Tips for Testing Database Code Article: Creating Your [...]

• The Meaning of Agile Certification is Money

  The Editor

  9 Jan 2012 | 2:58 am

  On page 483 of their book ” Practices for Scaling Lean & Agile Development“, Craig Larman and Bas Vodde discuss about the quality of code and certification, mainly in within the CMMI context. They refute the link between good code production and certification and wrote “Do not believe that an appraisal, rating, or certification in [...]

• Software Development Conferences December 2011

  The Editor

  27 Dec 2011 | 2:58 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: SCALE, January 20-22 2012, Los Angeles, USA EclipseCon 2012 North America, March 26-29 2012, Reston, USA Agile ALM Connect, March 26-29 2012, Reston, [...]

• Agile Culture, Scrum, User Experience and Software Architecture in the Winter 2011 issue of Methods & Tools

  The Editor

  21 Dec 2011 | 8:48 am

  Methods & Tools – the free magazine for software developers, testers and project managers – has just published its Winter 2011 issue with the following articles that focuses mainly on agile project management, software architecture and user experience. In addition, four open source software development tools are presented, two for software testing and two for [...]

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  Richard Lawrence

• New Story Splitting Resource

  Richard Lawrence

  27 Jan 2012 | 12:41 pm

  More than two years after I originally published it, “Patterns for Splitting User Stories” remains one of the most visited posts on my blog. Splitting user stories continues to be one of the areas where the teams I work with most often need coaching. To support the teams I coach, I’ve created a flow chart that goes through the questions I’ll ask when I’m helping a team split their stories. I was going to keep this resource for my coaching clients, but I’ve decided to share it here for free. Click the thumbnail below to download the full-size PDF version.

• Coaching Surgeons, Cyclists, and Software Teams

  Richard Lawrence

  11 Jan 2012 | 11:26 am

  Atul Gawande is a surgeon and author who has written some excellent books and New Yorker articles reflecting on the state of modern medicine. Recently, his writing has gone beyond medicine in interesting ways. As he looks for lessons for medicine from other disciplines, he ends up with things to teach both medical professionals and skilled knowledge workers more generally. His book The Checklist Manifesto manages to be a riveting 224 pages on what ought to be one of the least interesting topics possible: the checklist. So I was intrigued to see a link to a New Yorker article from Dr. Gawande…

• Cucumber Tip: IRB From Inside a Step Definition

  Richard Lawrence

  7 Dec 2011 | 2:05 pm

  Most Ruby programmers know about Ruby’s interactive console, IRB. (If you don’t, stop right here, open up a command window and run irb. Type some Ruby code. See how it returns the result of each line right away.) IRB is great for poking around with unfamiliar libraries. Suppose you’re using Capybara with Cucumber for the first time. It would be nice to use IRB to experiment with what Capybara can do on a particular page. You could launch an IRB session and duplicate all the Capybara setup from your Cucumber support/env.rb file. But wouldn’t it be nice if you could just…

• Building a Useful Task Board

  Richard Lawrence

  21 Nov 2011 | 10:42 am

  The task board is a simple, yet powerful, tool for Scrum teams. As a coach, I can tell a lot about a team just by looking at their task board in the middle of a sprint. If your Scrum team is in the same location, I can’t think of a good reason why you wouldn’t want to build and use a task board. Here’s how to build a basic task board, various ways to enhance it to convey more information, and some analysis of the many things you can learn from this simple tool. Supplies Required A black or blue poster marker A black fine tip marker 3 inch square Super Sticky Post-It notes in…

• Cucumber Tip: Key-Value Tables

  Richard Lawrence

  27 Oct 2011 | 4:38 pm

  You may not realize this: Tables in Cucumber steps don’t have to have a header row. Sometimes it can work really well to use a headerless table of key-value pairs. Let’s look at an example. Suppose we have a scenario that fills out an advanced search form to search for medical providers matching certain criteria. A mockup of the form looks something like this: If we were using the recently deprecated web steps generated by cucumber-rails, we might write steps to perform a search like these: 123456Given I'm on the advanced search page And I select "Endocrinology" from…

• 

  Agile Web Development & Operations

• Optimizing Offshore Software Development with Agile

  Dan Ackerson

  11 Jan 2012 | 12:04 am

  This is a guest post by Prasad Chaudhari, freelance java consultant. He was appointed as a project manager for the project mentioned below and played a role of ScrumMaster. mattwilde66 The first prerequisite to going agile offshore is a mature and realistic understanding of agile at home. We’ve been practicing scrum on-site for several years including trained Product Owners (POs) and ScrumMasters, both of whom employ and leverage scrum artifacts. Locally, we have six scrum teams: five software development teams, and one IT operations team. Each team has a sprint backlog, scrum board and…

• DevOps is NOT a Job Description

  Matthias Marschall

  8 Dec 2011 | 12:35 pm

  Wonderlane The DevOps hype produces some strange effects. Not only do tool vendors try to jump on the DevOps band wagon by declaring their products “DevOps inside” or listing DevOps as a feature, but companies start to look for a “DevOp” in their job ads. Don’t be misled! Here’s what DevOps is really about: DevOps Is About Culture The fundamental basis for successful DevOps is a culture of trust and a feeling of fellowship. Everything starts with how people perceive each other: Is it an “us vs them” culture or is it a “we”-culture? I…

• DevOps – Break Down The Wall

  Matthias Marschall

  24 Nov 2011 | 3:07 pm

  | spoon | Instead of escalating wars between departments by driving them to ever more ambitious, local goals, we need to break down the wall between development and operations. Defining overarching goals which resonate for both departments creates an environment where DevOps collaboration may thrive. Dev and Ops are separate departments Organizations typically divide their teams by type of work. They create development departments for writing software. And, because running software quickly and stably requires a different set of specialization, they create a separate operations department.

• Cross-dysfunctional Teams and the Story Point Fight

  Dan Ackerson

  17 Nov 2011 | 12:34 am

  Claudio Gennari Agile developers know how to estimate story points for customer features. And while transferring this knowledge over to the project team can take a few sprints, it is speedily adopted and velocity becomes a focal point of the sprint planning games. But, if the all the project participants aren’t officially on the team, a growing gap will appear between where the team wants the project to go and where the other participants thinks it should go. Story points quickly become a source of frustration and conflict instead of helping to gel the project team. In my case, the core…

• Where Agile Falls Short

  Matthias Marschall

  13 Oct 2011 | 3:00 am

  Seattle Municipal Archives It’s amazing. Talking to a bunch of fellow CTOs I heard a lot of them saying: “We introduced Scrum and it works really well” and “we’re too slow to bring new features to our customers”. This piqued my curiosity. Scrum is supposed to speed up feature delivery through short iterations. How can an organization claim to run Scrum successfully but not deliver customer value fast? The Curse Of Sub-Optimization For me, that sounds like a typical case of sub-optimization. You optimize only one part of a value stream but not others. While…

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  Agile Project Management

• Story Point accounting – I am on the fence on this one folks...or am I?

  Jack Milunsky

  22 Jan 2012 | 2:42 pm

  Firstly, I'd like to say thanks to everyone for the wonderful comments received in regards my writing. Frankly, I am flattered. I'd also like to apologize again for not writing more regularly. It seems like I just never get the time these days with my busy life. The scenario I want to specifically talk about today is as follows: You plan a Story into a sprint, let’s say an 8 point Story, but the team doesn’t get to finish the Story. How should you account for the Story Points in the current and subsequent Sprints? Let’s just say for explanation's...

• New Found Respect for Story Points

  Jack Milunsky

  24 Mar 2011 | 7:43 pm

  I gotta tell you, I have been using Story Points with teams for quite some time now. But recently, working with onboarding more than 9 teams at one company in the space of 3 months, I have learned to appreciate what Story Points really mean and the effect that they have on making teams successful. With each new team that is getting up to speed with Scrum, the hardest transition is figuring out how to estimate in Story Points. There are many ways to help teams do this, including starting them off with 1 story point = 1 ideal day....

• What’s in a Story – Breaking things down

  Jack Milunsky

  6 Dec 2010 | 7:36 pm

  When I think back on my Scrum experiences I keep coming to the same conclusion - that the mechanics behind “Stories” has to be the most important aspect of the process. If your “Stories” are properly “designed” then you have the best shot at succeeding with Scrum. So when I say “designed” what do I really mean? Let me explain …. For starters while I believe that the format of the Story is important (I wrote about this some time back that the format is not the most important thing though) when I say design I mean the careful thought...

• User stories: Does the format matter

  Jack Milunsky

  22 Nov 2010 | 7:00 am

  We are all familiar with the suggested format of a user story "As a I want so that " What's great about this format is that you capture a great deal of context for the developer with very little information presented. And while I believe this context is important, I don't believe the specific format is the most important thing to worry about. First off, when you take a look at many backlogs the repetition of "As a blah ..." can drive you nuts. Second, most backlogs you see, stories are written - "As a user blah...

• Whose doing your Sprint demos

  Jack Milunsky

  16 Nov 2010 | 8:33 pm

  Ok, this has to be the shortest blog post ever. But just maybe it's something useful you can try. So this is more of a tip than a blog post. Typically during the Sprint demos the devlopers do the dog and pony shows. They coded it and so they generally like to do the demos. What we tried out at my last gig, was for the QA folks to do the demos. What's good about this is that it really shows the chickens and pigs that the loop has been closed. As we all know, it's acceptance tested stories that...

• 

  Agile Bob on Making Agile a Reality » Agile Bob’s Blog

• With apologies to Bill Engvall, ScrumMasters, here’s your sign!

  Bob Hartman

  3 Jan 2012 | 11:48 am

  Have you ever had one of those days when you wondered if your ScrumMaster was on crack? Or maybe you’re the ScrumMaster and the you wonder why you are doing what you’re doing! I think we’ve all been there, so this post is for when you are having one of those days. A little bit of humor to brighten things up (while also being somewhat serious at the same time). Bill Engvall is one of my favorite comedians. The guy just cracks me up every time I watch or listen to him. His most famous line is “Here’s your sign.” So here are a few “sign” stories…

• Agile Practitioners Aren’t Supposed to Use Flamethrowers – Are They?

  Bob Hartman

  22 Dec 2011 | 11:38 am

  Have you ever been in a flamethrower war? I sincerely hope you have never been in one like the picture, but if you have been there serving for the US armed forces, then thank you for what you did for our country! Most of us have not been in a literal flamethrower war, but some of us have been in our share of them in the virtual world. I may be showing my age, but we used to have a phrase for arguments on message boards: flame wars or flaming. They were all the rage when a social network was really a Usenet newsgroup. Now we’ve grown up to using fancy mailing lists from Google and Yahoo…

• As a ScrumMaster silence can be golden!

  Bob Hartman

  19 Dec 2011 | 11:10 am

  I love it when someone who was in one of my workshops sends me a message saying something from the workshop worked well for them. Recently I have started telling people in my Certified ScrumMaster training workshops that far too many ScrumMasters talk too much. I tell them they need to learn a new skill – being silent! The graphic makes the point perfectly. In fact, it adds that if you can’t stay quiet, buy some duct tape! Below is a message from a recent workshop attendee that really hit home and made me realize adding this little segment to the CSM workshop was well worth it!

• An Agile Merry Christmas 2010!

  Bob Hartman

  24 Dec 2010 | 12:35 pm

  Are you feeling the Christmas spirit yet?  I know not everyone celebrates Christmas, so if that isn’t the holiday for you, think about your equivalent, or just think about going to your personal happy place.  Are you feeling it yet?  I know I’m in the Christmas spirit.  I can see it in the eyes of my children as we spend this week in a beachfront condo in Florida.  I think it is pretty funny to see people bundled up in scarves and parkas when the temperature hits 55 degrees, but it also reminds me that it really is Christmas time.  On to the point of this blog post… I…

• Overdue Agile and Scrum Thanks

  Bob Hartman

  23 Nov 2010 | 11:30 am

  Last year around this time I wrote a blog entry “New to agile? Give thanks!”  That was written from the perspective of an agile team member.  This year I want to get a little more personal and give thanks to the people who have helped me get to where I am today in the Agile and Scrum communities.  So, to everyone listed below, thank you from the bottom of my heart.  You have each helped me become who I am and I am grateful for the help and inspiration you gave me along the way.  In no particular order I want to send that message to: Richard Lawrence – Richard has been a…

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  LeadingAgile

• InfoQ Interview with Mike Cottmeyer – Agile Adoption and Transformation

  Mike Cottmeyer

  6 Jan 2012 | 12:09 pm

  This got published today… here is a link to the interview:                   http://www.infoq.com/interviews/Mike-Cottmeyer-Agile-Adoption-Transformation Take a look and tell me what you think.  Here is just a little more about the talk: Summary In Agile, adoption and transformation are typically viewed as one big event. Mike Cottmeyer provides a holistic perspective that looks as adoption as the implementation of practices, and transformation along two dimensions, organizational and personal. Mike discusses how they are a means to an end,…

• Merry Christmas from LeadingAgile

  Mike Cottmeyer

  24 Dec 2011 | 11:00 pm

      We just wanted to take a moment to wish you and yours a very Merry Christmas.  Hope you’re having a great day surrounded by the people you love! - Mike, Dennis & Peter   Related Posts:InfoQ Interview with Mike Cottmeyer – Agile Adoption and TransformationNew Agile Content Aggregator: BlogNotionsLeadingAgile Welcomes Dennis Stevens and Peter SaddingtonHappy New Year 2011!TAG Product Management Talk

• Are You Intentional?

  Mike Cottmeyer

  23 Dec 2011 | 11:00 pm

  Intentional. One of my favorite words as of late… and a theme I am constantly preaching to my clients. Mirriam-Webster defines intentional as being done by intention or design. Dictionary.com defines intentional as being done with intention or on purpose. Google suggests several synonyms for intentional including deliberate, willful, or purposeful. Intentionality implies we have thought things through, we have chosen a course of action, and we are willing to accept the consequences of those actions. If we are going to succeed, we don’t want to succeed by accident. If we are going to…

• The Problem with Precision

  Mike Cottmeyer

  21 Dec 2011 | 11:00 pm

  I think engineers are interesting people… especially software engineers. Given what I do for a living, I get to work with a lot of software companies, and that means I get to spend time with a lot of software engineers. If you spend enough time, in enough software companies, with enough software engineers, some patterns start to emerge. One of the patterns that I see quite a bit is that software engineers like things to be really precise. Being precise is a good quality for software engineers… it helps them build software that doesn’t break. Sometimes broken software kills…

• Kanban Isn’t the Answer to Bad Product Ownership

  Mike Cottmeyer

  20 Dec 2011 | 11:34 am

  The Scrum Product Owner has a tough job. Translating business strategy into product strategy and ultimately into teeny-tiny user stories takes a ton of time and effort. Most Product Managers don’t have the time or inclination to be a good Product Owner and most Business Analysts, the people most likely to fill the gap, don’t actually own the product. I almost always recommend to my clients that a team of people work together to fill this role. I don’t really care about the whole ‘single wringable neck’ thing… all I want is well groomed prioritized product…

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  The Agile Executive

• “Big Agile”

  israelgat

  22 Jan 2012 | 10:51 pm

  On January 30, 2012 12:00 pm EST, colleague and friend Hubert Smits and I will be doing a Cutter webinar entitled “Big Agile” is More than Just a Software Method.  We will follow on in February with a “Big Agile” issue of the Cutter IT Journal [CITJ] for which I am the guest editor. Coming April we are likely to discuss the topic some more in the Cutter Summit. The heart of the webinar can be summarized in the following words: Small is beautiful in software. While big software might not be beautiful, more often than not, it’s in the nature of what needs to be…

• When Technical Debt Meets “Life”

  israelgat

  18 Dec 2011 | 2:04 pm

  I will have the distinct pleasure of leading a roundtable discussion on the subject in the forthcoming Cutter Summit. Here is the general direction we will jointly explore: A technical debt assessment is often relegated to the “strictly for geeks” category. Supposedly, no sober executive wants to hear about metrics like Afferent Coupling or Distance from the Main Sequence, let alone learn and track them. Right? Wrong! In this round table discussion, Israel Gat will lead a discussion about the “life-view” that technical debt assessments reveal. Time and time again, we…

• Agile 2.0 in the Cutter Summit

  israelgat

  8 Dec 2011 | 11:12 pm

  I will be presenting on the Agile 2.0 subject in the forthcoming Cutter Summit. The premise of my presentation is that markets nowadays are vastly different from those we used to compete in ten years ago. The changes in the markets pose new challenges to software methods. Insofar as Agile methods are concerned, we are starting to see a new generation methods. I perceive these methods as Agile 2.0. Here is the abstract of my presentation: Agile, the software method that was conceived as a way to cope with change, is itself dramatically changing. What we are now witnessing is the emergence of…

• Reflections on Due Diligence

  israelgat

  27 Nov 2011 | 9:51 am

  I still remember the reception committee from the due diligence on Tideway I did for Apax Partners some seven years ago. The folks were awesome. I am fairly certain they could convince birds to fly off the tree if they chose to apply their very many talents toward this end. I really don’t know whether Apax (who invested in Tideway) and BMC (who acquired Tideway at a later time) consider their investments in Tideway successful. But, take it from me: even the Royal Shakespeare Company would have been hard pressed to stage such a terrific act as the one played by Tideway for my…

• Flashbacks from Boulder, CO and Kent, OH

  israelgat

  20 Nov 2011 | 9:37 am

  I was on some business trip to the lovely city of Boulder, CO. My gracious host took me to dinner at the Q’s Restaurant in the classic Hotel Boulderado. We talked about our kids, software, soccer and classical music. And we talked about the University of Colorado campus in Boulder, CO. Q's Restaurant, Hotel Boulderado According to my host, as part of their orientation, students in Boulder, CO get lectured on the need to abide by the law. He mentioned a student in his class (or maybe it was his son’s class) who got a citation for driving his bicycles on the wrong pavement, or…

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  Software Configuration Management and Agile Software Development

• Why Would Anyone use Git in their Enterprise?

  thinds

  26 Jan 2012 | 8:26 am

  The secret’s out – AccuRev is releasing a seamless security and compliance related solution for the Git community called Kando on January 31st. To get a first look at Kando, register here for the webinar on 1/31/2012, at 1:00 PM EST. You might be asking yourself, “Why in the world would a company focused on providing software development tools to enterprise organizations with mission-critical software development environments produce a solution for an open source version control tool?” I’ll tell you! Git is increasing in popularity among developers working in small groups or…

• SCM Software: Optimizing the Software Development Process

  clucca

  20 Jan 2012 | 11:10 am

  The enterprise software development arena can be a harsh and unrelenting environment – not a place for the faint-of-heart to work. Fortunately, software configuration management (SCM) software can make it not only more tolerable, but more efficient and, yes, even more successful. SCM software is not a luxury, nor just another layer of technology to be added to an already complex process. SCM software is a necessity for development teams working concurrently and in parallel on development projects, especially those employing agile processes to deliver higher quality software more rapidly.

• Agile vs. Waterfall: We’ve Been Doing it Wrong for How Long!?

  clucca

  16 Jan 2012 | 3:56 pm

  I was browsing reddit.com the other day and ran into this post: Yup. It’s true. The tried and true development approach of Waterfall that we’ve been using for years was an example of what NOT to do for software development. From the Wikipedia article: The first formal description of the waterfall model is often cited as a 1970 article by Winston W. Royce,[3] though Royce did not use the term “waterfall” in this article. Royce presented this model as an example of a flawed, non-working model (Royce 1970). This, in fact, is how the term is generally used in writing about…

• Buying Software Tools is like Buying New Sneakers for Your Development Team

  clucca

  16 Dec 2011 | 12:27 pm

  SCM tools have a profound effect on the day to day life of a developer. These types of systems have either helped or hindered development teams deliver software. SCM systems are like the “hub” of a development team. It’s where teams artifact important work, integrate changes, save important ideas and add features for customers. It’s the center of our development universe! It’s all about the developers. They need to be free to innovate and get changes out the door quickly. But they can’t if they are stifled by tools that get in the way. Tools need to be able…

• Three Surprises in Software Development in 2012

  lorne cooper

  8 Dec 2011 | 10:01 am

  ‘Tis the season to make unsupportable predictions for the future.  Despite my prior record (and I remain surprised that we don’t yet have personal jet packs) I’d still like to share a long-range weather forecast for the software industry. You’ve been warned.  From here on, you’re on your own. Prediction 1: Everyone Will Claim They Are Agile And 50% of them will be wrong, just based on the Nokia test.  And of the rest, half won’t get any value from it. There are a lot, and here I really need to underline a lot, of bad development practices out there.  For every…

• 

  Learn Software Development

• Not pushing the team too hard – a fine balance that can be easy to miss – Part 3 ..

  ashish

  23 Jan 2012 | 1:14 pm

  This is a series of posts that I am writing about the dynamics of a team, and how it came to be that we started getting push back from the team about pushing them too hard, which lead to a series of introspective discussions (Pushing the team too hard) about whether we had gone too far, and what should be the next steps. In the previous post, I started writing about how the team was being pushed to be more aggressive, and this in turn was causing additional risk to projects that the team was taking up. In this post, I will be talking about the problems that an aggressive manager was…

• Not pushing the team too hard – a fine balance that can be easy to miss – Part 2 ..

  ashish

  17 Jan 2012 | 9:34 am

  The previous post (Pushing the team, maybe too hard) detailed some of the problems that a team that was under-performing started experiencing when it decided that it would not longer under-perform and started to move up the performance chain, but in the end, the focus on productivity started taking a toll on the team members. There were a number of factors that were not considered when it started becoming a bit more clear that the team was getting fatigued. One of the biggest factors that we had to re-consider was the notion that we would not say no to a request or a project without doing a…

• Not pushing the team too hard – a fine balance that can be easy to miss – Part 1

  ashish

  13 Jan 2012 | 8:44 am

  The topic for this post came up from a recent discussion that we started having. The managers of the team were astounded when, at yet another weekend, when members of the team were called for work (since yet another milestone was approaching), almost 90% of the team came up with excuses individually, and finally, the managers were shocked and decided to not call the team for the weekend. This particular episode led to some soul-searching about what is the right thing to do, and what this mean for the future, since the team is in a group which believes that hard driving is something that is…

• Bug ageing – why it is important to follow in a software project – Part 4

  ashish

  11 Jan 2012 | 1:35 pm

  In previous posts (bug ageing and processes), I have been talking about the importance of bug ageing, and in the previous post, I talked about some of the reasons for tracking bug ageing and ensuring that bugs do not delayed in terms of when they are finally seen by the development team. In this post, I will talk about more reasons for ensuring that bug ageing is critical to monitor for the team: - Morale. We have found that it makes a lot of difference to the overall morale of the team, and specifically of the QE members of the team. Consider the case where a member of the team does his /…

• Bug ageing – why it is important to follow in a software project – Part 3

  ashish

  8 Jan 2012 | 1:20 pm

  In the previous 2 instances of this post (Bug ageing and software processes), I have been talking about the need to measure how much time it takes for the bugs generated by the QE team to get fixed, and to see whether taking more time for fixing such bugs is seen as a problem. In almost every case, you need to ensure that these bugs get fixed within a definite period of time and not keep on lingering on. One of the important questions is about how soon bugs should be fixed and not kept hanging. It is not easy for a group to define the time period within which bugs should be fixed, and not…

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  Agile Complexification Inverter

• A Splendid Mirror

  David :^{)} Koontz

  22 Jan 2012 | 7:01 am

  Oh the irony of a Pigs & Chickens paradigm.If you know of the Scrum parable of the pig and chicken.  Then you may find this story humorous.   I'm working with a group trying to teach them just enough Scrum to form a project team.  Trying to facilitate just enough team formation to allow them to self organize.  We planed a 3 day workshop, to be immediately followed by sprint one.  It went well.  Although some troubling patterns were apparent, we summoned up the courage to keep moving forward.Fast forward to…

• Dragonvale, bringing the Fun; yet a poor simulation of markets

  David :^{)} Koontz

  2 Jan 2012 | 4:15 pm

  I had a wonderful Christmas.  My nephews got me addicted to the Dragonvale game.  A land where one breeds dragons of various types - did you know, dragons are very hybidizable (I'm sure that's not a standard dictionary word). Dragonvale - iOS simulation game.To build up to a high enough level to purchase a breeding cave one must build treat farms, dragon habits and grow crops.  For this there is an internal game monetary market.  The prices of these goods are set by the game designers (I'm assuming it is not a true "free market").  The game does…

• Focus on the Customer

  David :^{)} Koontz

  18 Dec 2011 | 8:29 pm

  What does it take to have a first rate customer experience when there are more customers than sales representatives?  Yes, this means there is going to be some form of wait, a queue.  Here is my comparison of experience at the Apple Store to that of the restaurant, CheeseCake Factory which we went to right afterwards.At the Apple store we were put on a wait list to see a representative (the greeter used a text description and my wife's name to put her on the list explaining that the next available person would find us, as we browsed).  I asked what the…

• Visualize Your Problem Domain

  David :^{)} Koontz

  14 Dec 2011 | 9:42 am

  Do you innovate new ways to visualize your problem domain?The health care field is constantly using technology to visualize their problem domain.  They teach with color coded pictures, pink muscles, red arteries, blue veins, yellow nerves, etc. Yet the actual patient doesn't arrive on the surgens table with this color coding - YET.  They can do quite miraculous tricks with imaging (x-Ray, CT Scans, MRI, etc) and some imaging techniques are in real time.  Here is a video of the latest technique I've seen.  To visualize…

• Yes - You Need a Full Time Scrum Master

  David :^{)} Koontz

  13 Dec 2011 | 10:47 pm

  Many organizations adopting Scrum ask these questions.Do we need a full time Scrum master for each team?Why do we need a full time Scrum master, can't they do other roles also?Now allow me to give you the answers: Yes, you need a full time Scrum Master.Why - watch the video.Let me explain:Yes, you need a full time Scrum master, because they will be constantly watching for the actions of the team.  Making sure that the team member are working in flow as often as possible.  This is a full time job.Why can the scrum master not do other roles on the team? Because of the human…

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  Boost Blog

• Business Analysts and Scrum projects: A short case study

  courtney

  25 Jan 2012 | 9:15 pm

  In a recent post I discussed the question “Are user stories the same as use cases?”. This is a question that frequently arises in our Writing Great Agile User Stories workshop, and it’s often asked by business analysts. I’ve also been in Agile/Scrum training courses with BAs, who at a certain point in the day start worrying about where the BA role fits in a Scrum project. The quick answer is: there is no Business Analyst role in Scrum – just like there isn’t a DBA role or a SysAdmin role or a designer role. You’re either the Scrum Master, the Product…

• Use cases vs user stories in Agile development

  courtney

  17 Jan 2012 | 5:01 pm

  TL;DR – User stories aren’t use cases. By themselves, user stories don’t provide the details the team needs to do their work. The Scrum process enables this detail to emerge organically, (largely) removing the need to write use cases. Are user stories the same as use cases? When running our Writing Great Agile User Stories workshop, I’m frequently asked “So – are user stories the same as use cases?”. Often it’s a business analyst who asks the question; they’re accustomed to working with use cases, and are wondering where use cases fit in a…

• Tina Fey’s Four Rules of Improv, as applied to Scrum

  courtney

  10 Jan 2012 | 11:08 pm

  Driving home for Christmas, I listened to the audiobook version of Tina Fey’s Bossypants.* Listening to her read the chapter Rules of Improvisation That Will Change Your Life and Reduce Belly Fat, it struck me that the four rules of improv that she describes translate well to the spirit of Scrum projects. 1. The first rule of improvisation is AGREE. Always agree and SAY YES. This rule for me is about openness and the willingness to engage with new ideas and new practices. As Fey explains it: When you’re improvising, this means you are required to agree with whatever your partner has…

• Scrum, a beginners experience

  Kirstin

  23 Nov 2011 | 8:15 pm

  I recently joined Boost after spending over a decade in the UK.  Having worked within a traditional project management process over the last 5 years, I was very keen to learn about the benefits of Agile project management, specifically the benefits of Scrum and the comparison with my previous experience of web development projects. What I found after a week of observation was that unlike my previous experience of web development projects, an ‘us and them’ (supplier v client) situation causing conflict and resentment is less likely to arise under Scrum.  This is due to the scrum itself…

• Agile coaching: I thought I was, but I wasn’t

  Nathan

  20 Nov 2011 | 7:27 pm

  I’ve been coaching members of the Boost team in Agile off and on over the last few years, and by and large it has been useful and well received. But attending The Coaching Stance class run by the Agile Coaching Institute last week has really opened my eyes and made me reconsider what coaching means in the Agile context. My own personal experience of coaching is firmly grounded in the sports world. The coach evaluates an area of performance, makes a teaching point or two, sets up a drill, evaluates whether the drill is correcting the weakness or fault, and then sets homework for the…

• 

  Agile Ottawa

• January 2012 Agile Thursday Meetup – The Survival Guide For New Agile Coaches

  daverooneyca

  19 Jan 2012 | 10:13 am

  The next Agile Thursday meetup will be held on January 26, 2012 with “The Survival Guide for New Agile Coaches”. (Please note that this session applies to ScrumMasters as well, and in fact anyone who is involved in Agile projects or product development!) You know Agile Software Development reasonably well, using it on a few [...]

• Slides from January 2012 – Agile Goes Way Beyond Software

  daverooneyca

  11 Jan 2012 | 7:58 am

  Thanks again to Dan Murphy for his presentation last night! Dan’s slides are now available for download (PDF 1.2 MB). See you all on January 26th for Agile Thursday… details to follow.

• January 2012 Meetup: Agile Goes Way Beyond Software

  Glenn Waters

  14 Dec 2011 | 12:53 pm

  ** NOTE ** This is the rescheduled November 2011 event that had to be canceled last minute Date: Tuesday, January 10, 2012 Time: Networking 6:00-6:30PM , Meeting 6:30-8:00PM Location: The new Agile Tuesday location is Mercury Grove on 738A Bank St. between First & Second Ave. RSVP: http://www.meetup.com/Ottawa-Scrum-Users-Group/events/44942252/(Requested by not required, Free) Agile Methods have been used for [...]

• Lightning Talks

  Glenn Waters

  8 Dec 2011 | 4:08 pm

  Date: Tuesday, December 13, 2011 Time: Networking 6:00-6:30PM , Meeting 6:30-8:00PM Location: Momentous, 26 Auriga Drive, Ottawa, ON Canada K2E 8B7 RSVP: http://www.meetup.com/Ottawa-Scrum-Users-Group/events/16291877/ (Requested by not required, Free) Note that a hot meal will be provided! While we say registration requested but required it will help with food planning if you keep your meetup status up to date. This month [...]

• IMPORTANT: November 8, 2011 Meetup Cancelled

  daverooneyca

  8 Nov 2011 | 12:36 pm

  Due to some unfortunate circumstances, we will have to postpone the meetup scheduled for Tuesday, November 8th.  We apologize for the short notice, but we only found out ourselves this afternoon. We will try to rescheduled Dan Murphy’s talk, Agile Goes Way Beyond Software, for later in the season. The Agile Ottawa Team

• 

  Practical Agility

• Agile Transitions and Human Nature

  Dave Rooney

  25 Jan 2012 | 12:38 pm

  Like many people, I've struggled with my weight since my late 20's.  I'm currently in the process of losing weight yet again, and have passed the 20 lb. (approx. 10 kg) mark.  This isn't the first time that I have lost that much weight - I attained a loss of 24 lbs. about 15 years ago, but each time the loss wasn't sustained (or even sustainable). This time, however, feels different and it has

• Riding One Syllable to Success

  Dave Rooney

  17 Nov 2011 | 9:53 am

  Flow.  Play.  Slow. Although I haven't read nearly as much as I would have liked, over the past decade I've spent a lot of time with my nose in a book learning whatever I could about the many facets of XP, Scrum, Kanban and other Agile topics.  Over the past two years, though, my thinking has been markedly influenced by three single-syllable words and the books about them. Back in early 2010,

• What I Do When Coaching

  Dave Rooney

  9 Nov 2011 | 8:51 am

  In the past few months I've seen more and more articles, discussion group entries and blog posts that talk about Agile Coaches using words such as charlatans, snake oil salesmen and '#@$!!!#$%$#' (I'm not exactly sure what that translates to, but I believe I can safely assume it isn't complimentary). Of course, I have no control over what other people do to hang up their shingle as an Agile

• Agile is a Cop-Out?

  Dave Rooney

  13 Oct 2011 | 11:00 am

  In a blog entry entitled "Agile Software Is A Cop-Out, Here’s What’s Next", Forrester's Mike Gualtieri makes some bold statements about what he sees as hype and a lack of empirical evidence of success from the Agile community. Now, Mike's post is bound to raise the hackles of many people in the Agile community, but I do agree he has some good points. He doesn't specifically use the term "hype",

• Great New Scrum Extensions!

  Dave Rooney

  10 Oct 2011 | 10:25 am

  This past week, Jeff Sutherland and Ken Schwaber annouced via Scrum.org that Scrum is now open for modification and extension.  This is good, and an issue that has been simmering in the Scrum community for some time now. Fortunately, there have been some forward-thinking folks who got a jump on the rest of us, and had their extensions ready to go at the time of the announcement: This extension

• 

  BrainsLink

• Think About Software Requirements in More Than One Dimension

  Vin

  26 Jan 2012 | 9:07 pm

  Identifying software requirements without confusing business users. The “user community” for your software project doesn’t know what they want, so how can you? Like it or not, you have to pull ideas out of their heads and move everyone toward a common goal. It’s not easy, but it’s not as tough as it sounds. We know that many software projects fail and that insufficient requirements analysis is the most frequently cited cause. But think about this: Analysis requires collaboration. Developers tend to speak in terse, acronym-filled sentences. Business people tend to…

• Build the Simplest Software That Solves the Business Problem

  Vin

  24 Jan 2012 | 8:45 pm

  Agile software development and feature-driven development (FDD) have much in common. Many agile stories encompass features requested by the software stakeholders and end-users. Yet, staying focused on features and not system architecture can be hard to do. Let’s discuss a simple example. Say your development team is asked to build a simple software application that enables a customer to select a PDF file from a predetermined list of available files and download the selection. In the future, the list may grow, more file types may be added, and we may want to restrict download privileges,…

• It’s Time to Redefine the Scrum Role of Product Owner

  Vin

  22 Jan 2012 | 9:13 pm

  Are we expecting too much from our Product Owners? I’ve read many descriptions of the role and the responsibilities for a Product Owner in Scrum. Some of those descriptions seem over the top and appear to expect too much from the role. Comments like “willing to make hard choices” (ScrumAlliance.org) and “the single person responsible for whether a project sinks or swims” (Top7Business.com) seem excessive. We pitch agile software development as a self-organizing, team activity. So, why do we accept the definition of a powerful, single-person role on Scrum…

• The Daily Stand-Up: Start Time Doesn’t Matter

  Vin

  19 Jan 2012 | 8:32 pm

  What time should your daily stand-up meeting be held? The subject of what time to hold the daily stand-up is frequently asked by software development teams following an agile approach like Scrum, Kanban, Lean or XP. Most teams like to hold the stand-up ‘first thing in the morning’ — whatever that means. Here’s the problem. Some people like to arrive at the office early — at times as early as 6:00am. Others like to arrive later, maybe much later. It’s not unusual to find people starting their day at 10:00am or 11:00am. By the time the latecomers arrive, the…

• Collaborate! Don’t Hide Behind Priorities.

  Vin

  17 Jan 2012 | 8:57 pm

  Picture this — I’ll bet it’s happened to you more than once. Your boss, business stakeholder or customer approaches you and asks you to take on an important assignment. It’s not a major project but it’s not a quick or simple undertaking either. You already have more work in your queue than you can complete anytime soon. Adding this new assignment to the mix only complicates matters. So you ask the obvious question — “What is the priority?”. Should you drop everything and get right on this? Should it become a background activity that you’ll…

• 

  Agile Scout

• ScrumMaster Manifesto?

  peter

  26 Jan 2012 | 7:15 am

  So a ScrumMaster Manifesto has come out. The details of it are below: “WE BELIEVE THE SCRUMMASTER IS A FULL-TIME POSITION FOR ONE PERSON ON ONE SCRUM TEAM” 12 ScrumMaster Pocket Principles Dedicated Delivery Improver Foster Continuous Improvement Help Continuous Improvement Empower Coach Deliver Nurtures The Team Transparent Team Helper Commitment To Excellence Empathetic Evangelistic Guide Resistant Persistent Dedicated Help The Team Awareness Then Improvement Agile Driving Force Top 10 things a ScrumMaster usually forgets to focus on (but is not SOLELY responsible for) Redefining career…

• Jeff Sutherland Responds to the Internet about Frequency Foundation

  peter

  25 Jan 2012 | 7:15 am

  Jeff Sutherland has recently had some of his extracurricular activities looked into, namely the Frequency Foundation (blogged about on AgileForest, Software Architecture Blog, and reported on AgileScout and InfoQ). This initiative has had years of research behind it, and I reached out to Jeff to discuss it a bit. Needless to day, after our discussion, I learned a lot. I asked Jeff if I could republish one of his emails to me.  Details below: Jeff Sutherland <jeff.sutherland@scruminc.com> Tue, Jan 24, 2012 at 11:13 AM To: Peter Saddington <me@peter.ps>   Peter, My stated goal…

• Being Opaque and “Agile” Doesn’t Work in the Agile Community

  peter

  23 Jan 2012 | 7:15 am

  Writing is Hard, Receiving Criticism is Harder, IMPROVING is Hardest This past week has been enough to retrospect on for a month, at least! I spent the weekend seriously considering the net effects of writing and blogging in the Agile community. It has seriously been the biggest pleasure to write in one of the most (personally) rewarding markets and environments in the world. Agile-folk, by-and-large, are some of the best, brightest, and nicest people I have ever met in my entire life. When I started out as a developer in the mid-90′s, I never knew I would evolve and work in such an…

• Jeff Sutherland – Frequency Foundation and Agile and Scrum Implications?

  peter

  22 Jan 2012 | 2:17 pm

  [*Update - See Jeff Sutherlands response to this here] Renee Troughton, author of The Agile Forest has come upon something quite fascinating. So fascinating, I was literally glued to my seat as I read. Here are the top level details of what she found out: Since 2002, Jeff Sutherland (Co-Founder of Scrum), has been a chief proponent of Frequency Application Technology to help heal your body and mind through the Frequency Foundation. This “technology” was founded by Royal Rife and eventually discredited by the medical profession in the 1950′s. Because this is not a proven…

• Agile Games 2012 – Peter Saddington talks with Brian Bozzuto

  peter

  22 Jan 2012 | 7:15 am

  Peter Saddington & Brian Bozzuto – Agile Games 2012 from Agile Scout on Vimeo. The conference is being held Apr 19-21 in Cambridge, MA at the Microsoft New England Research Division (they abbreviate it NERD). People can learn more by going to the event website: http://www.agilegames2012.com/ We have “Super Early Bird” tickets for sale right now until January 27th, this is the absolute lowest price for the conference and we don’t want people to miss out We have an open “call for games” until the end of this month and are welcoming submissions. 3 videos…

• 

  AgileIQ Blog

• When the bottleneck of an Agile team is the team itself

  24 Jan 2012 | 11:01 am

  by Jayaprakash Puttaswamy Most often, we have observed that agile implementations fail in spite of putting efforts towards educating the team about Agile principles, training the team on Agile practices, and getting the right people for Agile roles. Have you ever wondered why? There are chances that the culprit is the team itself.  The team could be plagued with several dysfunctions (refer to  “the five the dysfunctions of team” model from Patrick Lencioni). If you discover this in your teams, how would you go about dealing with it? How can we overcome the dysfunctions…

• Join us in February at Agile India 2012 in Bangalore

  19 Jan 2012 | 3:08 pm

  by Pam Dyer Agile India 2012 is Asia's largest international conference on Agile and Lean software development methods. The conference will held 17th-19th February 2012 at Le Meridien, Bangalore, India. It offers many sessions from Agile experts, including SolutionsIQ CEO Charlie Rudd and SolutionsIQ Agile Consultant/Coach William Rowden: Confronting Business Uncertainty Charlie RuddFriday 17 February at 10:45amWe can never manage uncertainty. Yet in today’s business environment we confront it all the time. This talk explains why Agile principles are needed to make good…

• Reflection Tools for .NET

  12 Jan 2012 | 7:05 am

  by Robert Zormeir For almost as long as there has been a .NET development environment there have been free developer tools that used Reflection to help developers understand the nature of the beast they were dealing with. The tool that almost everyone started with was .NET Reflector, which was originally written by Lutz Roeder. In 2008, Red Gate Software announced they were taking over future Reflector development, and that Reflector would remain free. Early in 2011 Red Gate announced that .NET Reflector would become a paid-for product, and that the free version would no longer be available.

• Mocking Frameworks for .NET

  4 Jan 2012 | 1:07 pm

  by Robert Zormeir The four major competitors in the free/open source .NET mocking framework arena are NMock/NMock2, NMock3, Rhino Mocks and MOQ. NMock and NMock2 were actually built by different teams, but they kept the same design philosophy and are backwards compatible so they can be used almost interchangeably. If you're familiar with NMock/NMock2, you'll see that NMock3 is from the same gene pool, but it starts fresh and has somewhat different syntax from its siblings. All of the major mocking libraries are mature products with a decent-sized user base, so it's not tough to find good…

• Use-It Testing in Agile Software Development

  15 Dec 2011 | 2:13 pm

  by Dan Ebert Agile Coach: “What kind of testing do the developers do?” Development Team Member: “First we create some test data if needed. Then we go to the web page and use the feature to make sure it works.” I call this anti-pattern “Use-It Testing.” I’m always surprised, and disappointed, when I encounter a team that relies solely on Use-It Testing when writing their code. I’d bet everyone who’s written a line of code has done it at least once. You write a bit of code … then use it by running the program, going to the web page,…