Agile

• 
  Chris Spagnuolo's Edgehopper

• Help me name my new blog

  chris@edgehopper.com (Chris Spagnuolo)

  10 Nov 2009 | 5:19 pm

  Hi. Yes, it’s been a while since I’ve written…ANYTHING.  Well, the time has come to start writing again.  But I’m not sure how much I’ll be writing here on Edgehopper for now (however, I might surprise myself and everyone else if I did start writing here again).  To catch you all up, I lost my job a few months ago and had an epiphany of sorts, mostly about what’s important in life and what makes me happy.  I’ve taken the time-off as kind of a blessing in disguise.  It allowed me to spend time with my family, watch my little ones smile, and enjoy…

• Facebook Lite Goes Live

  chris@edgehopper.com (Chris Spagnuolo)

  10 Sep 2009 | 3:43 pm

  After much rumor and speculation following Facebook’s acquisition of FriendFeed, Facebook officially launched “Facebook Lite” today. There had been rumors circulating for the past few weeks that Facebook was testing a lite interface and now you can get yours today. It’s essentially a stripped down version of Facebook, and quite frankly, I like it.  It’s simpler, easier to use, and not as cluttered as the original Facebook was becoming.  Check out the light box below featuring screenshots from the new Facebook Lite (click on a thumbnail to open the light box and…

• The US Open: How to “Grand Slam” an iPhone App

  chris@edgehopper.com (Chris Spagnuolo)

  9 Sep 2009 | 9:20 am

  A few years ago I was in Melbourne, Australia at the time the Australian Open was being played at Rod Laver Arena. I wasn’t a big fan of fuzzy yellow balls and rackets, but quickly became one after attending a match in the fabled arena. A few years later and I’m finding myself following tennis as much as I can. And now, the US Open has made it easier to follow the tournament with possibly one of the best sporting event iPhone apps yet. The 2009 US Open iPhone app has just about everything you need to follow the tournament except for live video coverage. Other than that, you get…

• Crowdsourcing Journalism: Help A Reporter Out

  chris@edgehopper.com (Chris Spagnuolo)

  2 Sep 2009 | 10:02 am

  Let me just say that I love crowdsourcing and crowdsourced projects. With all the things that are being crowdsourced today, one of the most interesting is the trend toward crowdsourcing journalism. On the forefront of this effort is HARO….or Help A Reporter Out. HARO is the brainchild of Peter Shankman, an entrepreneur and the CEO of The Geek Factory, a PR and Marketing boutique firm in New York City. Essentially HARO connects journalists who have questions or queries for their stories with YOU. It’s such a simple but amazing way to connect journalists with the widest possible…

• Just Launched: Five Hens Mommy Blog

  chris@edgehopper.com (Chris Spagnuolo)

  1 Sep 2009 | 2:24 pm

  Well, in the last few weeks of being technically “unemployed” I’ve been helping some very cool Northern Colorado moms start their very own mommy blog called Five Hens. It’ written by five moms who have a wide range of kids from 3 to 15 and who have widely varied backgrounds. They’re all awesome writers and I have a sneaking suspicion that this is going to be one great blog to follow. Speaking of following, you can follow the Five Hens on Twitter too. The are fivehens on Twitter. So, take a look, leave a comment or say hello to the Five Hens, and let me know what…

• 
  Agile Blog

• What’s Driving YOU to Better Testing? Consider the Story of Amy and Morgan

  Jean Tabaka

  19 Nov 2009 | 3:25 am

  Don't let this be your user! Recently, my Rally colleagues Ben Carey and Ryan Martens delivered a great webinar about testing and quality.  What particularly struck me about the session was how Ben set up why we should, at a very personal level, care about testing and quality. Enter Amy and her daughter Morgan. As Ben told the story, Amy was a back office admin in a physician’s office. It was her responsibility to get billing out to insurance companies for the practice, and on one particular day, things were not going well. She kept getting cryptic error messages. The batch just…

• My Experience with PDCA – Beyond Basic Inspect and Adapt

  Ryan Martens

  11 Nov 2009 | 9:56 am

  At Rally, we are always working on both maturing and growing our use of Agile. We started with a single development team and over the past 6 years have been through the process of splitting, growing, partnering, and acquiring. We did this while continuing to inspect and adapt our development and our strategy execution processes.  We have teams in various stages of maturity using Scrum and Kanban to run all parts of our company.   As the CTO, I have my focus on our strategic planning and execution process. In 2008, I started to focus on maturing our annual and quarterly planning.  To do…

• How do you Celebrate?

  Ryan Martens

  30 Oct 2009 | 2:42 pm

  I was raised in the land of big software releases. I spent over a decade celebrating the release of software to gold master at five different companies.  These events included plaques and various levels of behavior based on the amount of flesh that was lost in the release.  A few of them were great, but many of them left a bad taste in your mouth based on what was shipped or not shipped. Early on at Rally, it was the same way.  We celebrated releases.  In our case, the numbered releases come about every 6 to 8 weeks.  I can recount having some over-the-top release parties, but mostly…

• Forming, Storming, Norming, and Swarming – The Tuckman Model for Scrum

  Alan Atlas

  29 Oct 2009 | 4:28 am

  I was teaching a CSM course a few months back when a question came up, as one often does, that needed an answer built around the concept of swarming. An extremely creative example of the swarming concept Swarming is something that is strangely alien to many folks in software development, so I’ll explain it here. Also, if I don’t explain it here then I won’t have enough to make a good blog post, and we can’t have that, can we? The idea of swarming is to get the whole scrum team, or as much of the team as possible, to all jump onto a Product Backlog item (PBI) together and get it done…

• Agile Rollout Planning – 5 Must Haves

  Ryan Martens

  26 Oct 2009 | 3:29 pm

  Just published in Dr. Dobb’s is my article on Agile Social Contracts;  It covers the process of Agile rollout planning and the burning need for a clear commitment to your teams and organization.  What is not as well covered are the other four components. I make the argument in the article that Agile enterprise adoption is easy, if you are prepared and crisp with the right structure and discipline. Here are the five items you need to be successful at Agile release planning or Agile Enterprise Rollout planning: Release Planning Structure Agile Enterprise Rollout Structure Team –…

• 
  Managed Chaos

• Simple Regression Testing for Static Web Sites

  Naresh Jain

  18 Nov 2009 | 5:56 am

  For Freeset, I’ve always been in the quest of Simplest Thing that Could Possibly Work. In a previous post, I explained how we’ve embraced an ultra-light process (call it lean, if you like) to build their e-commerce site. In that post, I’ve talked about our wish to create a Selenium test suite for regression testing. But it never got high enough on our priority list. (esp. coz we mostly have static content served from a CMS as of now). While that is something I wanted to tackle, last night, when I was moving Industrial Logic and Industrial XP’s site over to a new server…

• Setting up Tomcat Cluster for Session Replication

  Naresh Jain

  9 Nov 2009 | 4:58 am

  If you have your web application running on one tomcat instance and want to add another tomcat instance (ideally on a different machine), following steps will guide you. Step 1: Independently deploy your web application (WAR file) on each instance and make sure they can work independently. Step 2: Stop tomcat Step 3: Update the <Cluster> element under the <Engine> element in the Server.xml file (under the conf dir in tomcat installation dir) on both your servers with: <Engine name="<meaningful_unique_name>" defaultHost="localhost"> <Cluster…

• Enabling Multicast on your MacOS (*Unix)

  Naresh Jain

  8 Nov 2009 | 10:03 am

  All MacOS kernel are by default capable of sending and receiving multicast datagrams (packets). (So are other kernels in Unix and Linux). However multicasting is not enabled by default. Following are the steps I followed to enable multicast on my Mac (Snow Leopard): Step 1: Check your network interface supports multicast by running the following command in a terminal window: $ ifconfig -a lo0: flags=8049<UP,LOOPBACK,RUNNING,MULTICAST> mtu 16384 inet 127.0.0.1 netmask 0xff000000 inet6 ::1 prefixlen 128 inet6 fe80::1%lo0 prefixlen 64 scopeid 0×1 gif0:…

• Mastery

  Naresh Jain

  7 Nov 2009 | 10:03 pm

  What word/phrase comes to your mind when you think of Mastery? Definitions of Mastery on the Web: Command: great skillfulness and knowledge of some subject or activity Domination: power to dominate or defeat The act of mastering or subordinating someone The position or authority of a master; dominion; command; supremacy; superiority; victory; triumph; preeminence Highest development in any band of the Great Continuum of Consciousness, where an initiate is Divinely empowered to minister to you and guide you The acquisition or the process of acquiring proficiency in an aspect Possession of…

• Fun way to Conserve Energy

  Naresh Jain

  7 Nov 2009 | 7:14 pm

  ”Take the stairs instead of the escalator or elevator and feel better” is something we often hear or read in the Sunday papers. Few people actually follow that advice. Can we get more people to take the stairs over the escalator by making it fun to do? See the results here:

• 
  Scrum 4 You

• CSM Exam Info

  Katrin Dietze

  20 Nov 2009 | 8:34 am

  I want to forward an information from Howard Sublett (Scrum Alliance) to you - to make things around ScrumMaster certification process a bit more transparent to you… “When a student first logs into the site  (scrumalliance.org) and creates a profile, their expiry is set at 90 DAYS from that time for the window to complete the [...]

• KnowledgeToGo | Rebecca Saxe | Mind Reading | TED

  Boris Gloger

  16 Nov 2009 | 11:19 pm

  Rebecca Saxe, PhD [1], Assistant Professor of Cognitive Neuroscience, did a wonderful talk about the behavior of kids in a moral riddle. She shows in this talk how kids learn the ability to read peoples mind and that the body builds this ability by creating a special area in the brain. It is very [...]

• Flow vs. Rhythm, or Kanban vs. Scrum!?

  Boris Gloger

  14 Nov 2009 | 6:32 am

  Whenever I read articles or twitter comments about Kanban in Software Development, I have the feeling that most authors do not understand the topic about  they write. The famous Kanban system of Toyota was inspired by the way supermarkets supply their customers. “At Toyota, when a process goes to the preceding process to retrieve parts, it [...]

• Scrum Gathering Review Article from Brazil

  Katrin Dietze

  11 Nov 2009 | 1:27 am

  A very nice article written by two brazilian speakers and participants of the Scrum Gathering in Munich em portugues on INFOQ. Obrigados e cumprimentos ao Rafael Sabbagh e Marcos Garrido. http://www.infoq.com/br/news/2009/11/scrum-gathering-alemanha

• Scrum and its success - 60000 CSMs

  Boris Gloger

  5 Nov 2009 | 7:16 am

  Last week the Scrum Alliance published the number [1]. We are now more than 60000 Certified ScrumMasters. This year around 22000 ScrumMasters have been to classes and got the certification (of attendance). That is a bit more than last year, but not a jump like the years before. So the market starts to consolidate! Bad news [...]

• 
  Agile Software Development Made Easy!

• Agile Software Development Teams Need Managers Too!

  18 Nov 2009 | 8:00 am

  Mike Cottmeyer recently wrote an interesting article about whether or not managers can lead agile teams? Organisations do need managers, for a wide variety of reasons. And let's face it, the roles of Product Owner and Scrum Master are management roles.They may not be management roles in the traditional sense, but management roles they are.The Product Owner is there to manage stakeholders, manage incoming requests and prioritise work for the team. This is management.The Scrum Master is there to deal with any issues that are impeding the team's progress, facilitate communication, orchestrate…

• Agile Software Development Made Easy! Shortlisted in Computer Weekly Blog Awards

  16 Nov 2009 | 4:39 am

  I'm delighted that Agile Software Development Made Easy! has been shortlisted again in this year's Computer Weekly blog awards.Computer Weekly is one of the original trade magazines for IT professionals, so it's quite an honour to be highlighted by such an important brand.There are some other really good blogs in the shortlist too! Click here to see the shortlisted blogs in the Project Management category.The results will be announced on 25th November, so if you like my blog, vote now!Kelly.Photo by eecue

• Agile Project Management: Avoiding The Waterfall

  15 Nov 2009 | 12:06 pm

  This is a guest blog post by Richard Revis from The Plan Is"Agile project management can be hard to implement successfully because even once you have good practices in place the way projects are run can revert to the old methodology quickly. I would like to share three reasons that I have come across for the reappearance of waterfall project management in an organisation and look at some ways to address this.The first reason is the sponsor's view of how a project should operate. A client, internal or external, probably has a mental model in his head of how things will happen when…

• eBook - Agile Software Development Made Easy!

  30 Oct 2009 | 6:00 am

  Many thanks to everyone who has bought my ebook - Agile Software Development Made Easy! so far. It's gone fairly well and that gives me all the extra encouragement I need to finish my paper book! It probably won't be ready until next year some time, but my intention is to produce a product that allows you to take away all the best content from this blog and read at your convenience.Thanks again to all those who've bought the ebook in the meantime. That really is much appreciated!Kelly.

• Lean and Scrum - Chicken and Egg

  29 Oct 2009 | 9:00 am

  Here is a really interesting post from John Scumniotales, one of the inventors of Scrum. Here he sets the record straight about whether or not Scrum was based on the concepts of Lean manufacturing, as pioneered by the likes of Toyota and Honda...Lean and Scrum - Chicken and EggWhilst this is clearly admirable for the inventors of Scrum, they clearly share some similar principles and philosophies. But in some ways I was disappointed to hear this. The idea that Scrum was based on the widely celebrated principles of Lean manufacturing really added some credibility to Scrum and other agile/lean…

• 
  Agile Software Development

• What's the ideal Sprint length

  jackMilunsky

  19 Nov 2009 | 10:00 pm

  Introduction I may have blogged about this previously. I have written so many blogs, I can't recall any more. However questions regarding Sprint length surface on the forums regularly. As per usual, the answers one must give always depends on the context and every context is different than the next. So let me start with the context - this is an excerpt of a post on the scrum development group on Yahoo. Incidentally, Yahoo groups is a good place to hang out. You learn a lot from all the questions and the different contexts facing teams around the world. The Context A team of 5 members…

• Agile Project Management Questions Answered

  kswaters

  16 Nov 2009 | 12:27 pm

  I was asked recently to answer 5 questions about agile project management for a feature on PM Boulevard. I thought you might appreciate seeing them here too... 1. How has the Agile practice evolved over the last two years? I don’t personally think that agile practices have particularly changed in the last two years, however there is clearly a stronger emphasis on some elements more than others now.Scrum certainly seems to have crossed into the mainstream since I started my blog. Even though it was less than 3 years ago, Scrum still felt quite new and innovative in the UK at that time. I…

• Product Owner vs Product Manager

  jackMilunsky

  5 Nov 2009 | 10:00 pm

  Introduction Based on a recent post on yahoo forums, seems like there may still be confusion out there as to what the differences are between these two roles. Questions like, is there overlap? can the Product Manager take on the responsibilities of the Product Owner? what are the specific requirements for either role? pop up all the time. There was a really good discussion on the Scrum Development Yahoo group on this topic and some really good points were made. So I'll try to distill this for you here and of course put my own twist on this. I think that the founders of Scrum purposely chose a…

• Switching stories mid sprint

  jackMilunsky

  23 Oct 2009 | 11:08 pm

  Introduction I blogged about this some time ago and then posted the blog on various agile forums to judge peoples responses. Most of the responses were well reasoned, however, one of the responses I received shocked me somewhat and so I feel that it's worth blogging about this particular situation once more. The response I received was "You're not serious you're going to ignore the PO" and "You can't be a slave to the process" In all fairness, there are many situations under which the need to switch stories arise. And the specifics were not really provided. For example: How long are the…

• State of Agile

  jackMilunsky

  8 Oct 2009 | 11:00 pm

  Introduction Seems like there's lots going on in the agile world right now. Lots of talk about Lean and it's impact on Agile. Lots of attacks going on at the CSM certification. Kanban is all over the news these days. And just last week, I read about a new Agile methodology called Stride. So how do we make sense of this all? My opinion is that there is value in each of the methodologies (for the purposes of this blog I'll refer to them all as methodologies even though some of you might not think of them as such). It's real important to read about them all so that you are armed with enough…

• 
  Agile Thinkers: Members Blog Posts

• Agile Organizations

  Henrik Sternberg

  Principles over practices The agile methods and practices are built on a common philosophy and common principles for good system development. These principles are described in the agile manifesto. When agile methods and practices are implemented, it’s often from the wish of a more efficient development process, but equally often without knowing if the organizational conditions for such a renewal are present or wanted. Often we see that agile attempts, typically in larger organizations resulting in resistance against, isolation of or even expulsion of the attempt. Agile methods have…

• How Agile Practices address the Five Dysfunctions of a Team ?

  TV

  Since times immemorial, ideas, objects and experiences of grand stature and lasting economic, social and emotional value have been created by men and women working together in teams. Granted that some extraordinary work in the fields of arts, philosophy and sciences was done by truly exceptional individuals, apparently working alone, I suspect that they too were ably supported by other selfless and unsung individuals (in the backoffice, perhaps) who all worked together as a team. Right from the great wars, social upheavals, political resistance, empire building, freedom struggles and forming…

• Scrummy?

  Peter Ellis

  I came across this website completely by accident via stumbleupon: scrumy.com hell if the video doesn't convince you I don't know what will ;-) lol

• Survey: What are your thoughts on this recession?

  Rachel Pagdan

  Hello Agile Thinkers! Currently, Neuron Global is creating a Special Report on the Current Economic downturn. I am writing you today because we are still in the process of finding out what issues and fears are at the forefront of people’s minds and we very much need help in collecting this research. We aim to develop a timely white paper, available online, that answers critical questions like: 1. What lessons from economic downturns in the past can be applied to today? 2. What information do I need to know to survive & thrive in a prolonged recession? 3. What are things that I can do to…

• Self managing/organising teams: Hey Scrummaster, let the team decide!

  Peter Janssens

  A self-organizing team is a powerful concept. But what if the team collectively decides to go into a direction that you as a Scrum Master know for sure that they will hit problems. (or at least you think) F.i. they decide to abandon retrospectives. Will you respect their decision or will you try to change it? Would you go for option 1) respect the team or 2) try to convince the team away from their decision. May I ask you, intelligent agilist, to provide examples of similar conflicts you encountered in real life. If you solved the situation, please let us know how. If not, just post the…

• 
  ScrumAlliance

• Are you ready for Agile?

  19 Nov 2009 | 6:25 am

  A Checklist of Questions to Consider Before Starting a Large-Scale Agile Adoption By Ramesh R. Donnipadu, Bala Kishore, Pete Deemer Abstract The ability to deliver business value earlier and more often, increase productivity, and improve employ...

• On Empirical Research Into Scrum

  10 Nov 2009 | 10:24 am

  The agile methods, such as Scrum and Extreme Programming (XP), have been a topic of muchdiscussion in the software community over the last few years. While the proponents of the agilemethods have articulated convincing arguments for their methods, usually within a context ofsmall-to-medium size projects with significant requirements volatility, opponents have expressedserious concerns about the appropriateness and effectiveness of the methods. The researchproject described in this report is three-pronged effort to investigate the issues associated withScrum adoption. First, the practices that…

• How Effective is your Agile Team?

  10 Nov 2009 | 8:00 am

  How Effective is your Agile Team? By Rowan McCann, Bright Green Projects Introduction Back in the '90s, self-managed teams were gaining popularity, but they had a high rate of failure mainly because team members lacked people sk...

• Global Delivery Model - Agile Practices in Defect Fix Phase

  9 Nov 2009 | 4:26 pm

  Integration Testing Phase I am sure most of us have gone through a rough development phase during which we would have considered implementing agile methodology. It is very disheartening to see our favorite project being trapped in the testing pha...

• Orlando Banner Graphic (horizontal)

  6 Nov 2009 | 8:23 am

  Spread the word about the upcoming Orlando Gathering using these banners on your website. Click Download Now for full resolution.

• 
  Agile Alliance: All

• Programs

  29 Oct 2009 | 10:53 am

  The Agile Alliance conducts much of its work via programs proposed by members. Some examples of past programs are topic-focused workshops, local Agile conferences, and academic research projects. Our current programs are listed below. The primary requirement for any program is that it supports the values, goals, and purpose of the Agile Alliance: a) To provide an unbiased forum within which the community can freely work to discuss, promote, and improve agile development processes; b) To encourage scientific research in current and potential uses of agile processes; c) To share information…

• Agile Alliance Home

  4 Sep 2009 | 3:11 am

  Wondering what agile software development is, start here. Agile practitioners can login to this site to find articles and keep track of agile events and news. Join the over 4000 supporters of agile development become a member Join now! Interested in learning more about participating in future Agile conferences, click here Agile 2010—Nashville, USA Previous Conference Sites

• Agile Development

  13 Aug 2009 | 7:07 am

  Download Agile Magazine The old Agile Times Download Sample AgileDevelopment Magazine was published by Agile Alliance on a quarterly basis from Spring 2006 until 2007 Summer. Its authors share successes and challenges with Agile projects, explain various methods and tools, and provide insights into new research. What is agile software development? AgileDevelopment was delivered quarterly as a downloadable PDF file. It doesn’t need to be printed out; you can read it easily on your computer screen. And you want to use it on your computer screen, because it is highly interactive. That…

• Public Resources

  17 Feb 2009 | 12:32 am

  Agile Times Newsletter The Agile Times newsletter was our member newsletter written by and for members from 2003 to 2005. Past issues are available for download here. The newer e-magazine Agile Development for members only was produced through Summer 2007. Agile User Groups This page contain an index of independent agile user groups worldwide. Application forms for support for user groups can be found here. Carnival of the Agilists Agile happenings in the blogosphere. Agile Journal The Agile Journal publishes original content articles on a wide variety of Agile topics and is directed by Liz…

• Next To Map

  19 May 2008 | 12:37 pm

  Join the Agile Community With more than 4261 members located around the globe, the Agile Alliance is driven by the values and principles of the Manifesto for Agile Software Development We support those who explore and apply Agile principles and practices to make the software industry productive, humane, and sustainable.

• 
  Object Technology Jeff Sutherland

• AgilePalooza, Charlotte, NC, 13-14 Aug 2009 slides and papers

  Jeff Sutherland

  13 Nov 2009 | 6:10 am

  The presentations below make a good introductory workshop on Scrum. All slides and reference papers are provided.AgilePalooza, Charlotte, NC, 13-14 Aug 2009Day 1 – Wells Fargo KEYNOTE 8:45 – 9:45 amAgile Software Development in the EnterpriseJeff Sutherland, Ph.D.Scrum started in small companies and achieved dramatic results with hyperperforming teams. This presentation will show how several companies have used hyperproductivity to generate extraordinary financial returns. It will also describe how Scrum scales up for large companies and outsourced, distributed teams and…

• Microsoft NE R&D Center 6 Aug: Practical Roadmap to a Great Scrum

  Jeff Sutherland

  19 Jul 2009 | 2:31 pm

  I'll give a presentation on "Practical Roadmap to a Great Scrum" for New England Agile Bazaar in August at the new Microsoft site in Cambridge.Date: Thursday, August 6thTime: 6 - 9pmWhere: Microsoft New England R&D Center, 1 memorial Drive, Cambridge, MARSVP: Register at agilebazaar.orgCost: Free!  Food will be provided thanks to our sponsorsSponsored by:Version One     http://www.versionone.com/Rally           http://www.rallydev.com/Microsoft      …

• Beyond Java: Ruby on Rails with Scala backend

  Jeff Sutherland

  10 Apr 2009 | 5:06 am

  Programming in ScalaTwitter on ScalaA Conversation with Steve Jenson, Alex Payne, and Robey Pointerby Bill VennersApril 3, 2009SummaryThree Twitter developers, Steve Jenson, Alex Payne, and Robey Pointer, talk with Bill Venners about their use of Scala in production at Twitter. Twitter is a fast growing website that provides a micro-blogging service. It began its life as a Ruby on Rails application, and still uses Ruby on Rails to deliver most user-facing web pages. But about a year ago they started replacing some of the back-end Ruby services with applications running on the JVM and written…

• ATT charges over $20000 for three days of Gmail in Iceland!

  Jeff Sutherland

  4 Dec 2008 | 3:55 am

  The Darth Vader of USB Modems. ATT USB 881. It will suck all your money out of your wallet!Digg this post!Evidently, deceptive business practices are the norm for ATT and the iPhone. William Gillis in San Diego is already suing Apple for false advertising.Is it OK for vendors to blatantly lie about their products? It is very difficult to introduce Agile practices based on truth, transparency, and trust when vendors are constantly lying.Evidently there are laws against this.Prohibited Practices: Federal Communications CommissionOvercharging or engaging in other unjust or discriminatory…

• Arduino: Open Source Hardware

  Jeff Sutherland

  26 Oct 2008 | 12:04 pm

  Build It. Share It. Profit. Can Open Source Hardware Work?By Clive Thompson Wired Magazine 10.20.08A circuit board for the masses: the Arduino microcontroller.Photo: James DayCheck this out," Massimo Banzi says. The burly, bearded engineer wanders over to inspect a chipmaking robot—a "pick and place" machine the size of a pizza oven. It hums with activity, grabbing teensy electronic parts and stabbing them into position on a circuit board like a hyperactive chicken pecking for seeds. We're standing in a one-room fabrication factory used by Arduino, the Italian firm that makes this circuit…

• 
  Google News: Agile

• Layoffs Announced At Kellogg's Cary Bakery - MyNC.com

  20 Nov 2009 | 8:04 am

  News & ObserverLayoffs Announced At Kellogg's Cary BakeryMyNC.comIn a written statement, Kris Charles, spokesperson for the Kellogg Company says it has begun a program called K-LEAN or Kellogg's Lean, Efficient, Agile Employees to be cut at Cary Kellogg'sabc11.comKellogg's cuts Cary work forceNews & ObserverCato Corp. reports big jump in earningsCharlotteObserver.comMSN Money -News & Observerall 9 news articles »

• outsystems Updates Agile Platform - Dr. Dobb's Journal

  20 Nov 2009 | 7:17 am

  outsystems Updates Agile PlatformDr. Dobb's Journaloutsystems has announced availability of version 5.0 its Agile Platform. Based on Agile methodologies, Agile Platform addresses the lifecycle of delivering

• CA, Inc., Salesforce.Com Partner to Provide Agile Development on Force.Com ... - TMC Net

  20 Nov 2009 | 6:33 am

  CA, Inc., Salesforce.Com Partner to Provide Agile Development on Force.Com TMC NetThrough this partnership, both the companies will launch CA Agile (News - Alert) Planner on Force.com, which will let small businesses and big enterprises Agile methodology not just for app developmentITWorld Canadaall 2 news articles »

• emergn Builds Blueprint for British Airways' Agile Enablement - SYS-CON Media (press release)

  20 Nov 2009 | 1:23 am

  emergn Builds Blueprint for British Airways' Agile EnablementSYS-CON Media (press release)By realwire News Distribution London - 19th November, 2009: emergn, a specialized consultancy enabling lean and agile principles across the value chain,

• Martin's bar fight: art vs. science - San Diego Union Tribune

  20 Nov 2009 | 12:08 am

  Martin's bar fight: art vs. scienceSan Diego Union TribuneAmanda Morrow and Tom Zohar in the New Village Arts Theatre's production of “Picasso at the Lapin Agile.” Adam Brick Steve Martin's “Picasso at the Lapin Of goofy geniuses and a phony foreignerGay and Lesbian Timesall 2 news articles »

• 
  WordPress Tag: Agile

• Project Demotivator Checklist

  Bruce Carney

  20 Nov 2009 | 2:55 pm

  Here is a useful checklist I found in the book eXtreme Project Management. Reasons for low desire Re

• Os Melhores Podcasts de Tecnologia para Desenvolvedores

  Rodrigo Ribeiro

  20 Nov 2009 | 7:45 am

  Post excelente escrito pelo André Faria Gomes. Muito bom mesmo! Podcasts sem dúvida são um dos meios mais indicados para adquirir conhecimento em tecnologia, ainda mais quando você está antenado no que Martin Fowler, Kent Beck, Rod Johnson entre outros estão falando. Retirado do andrefaria.com. Um dos maiores problemas da sociedade moderna é a dificuldade de locomoção diária, a maioria das pessoas passa horas em seus carros, ou em meios de transporte públicos para irem de lugar a outro. Há alguns anos atrás quando morava na zona norte de São Paulo e trabalha na zona sul, essa…

• Os Melhores Podcasts de Tecnologia para Desenvolvedores

  andrefaria

  20 Nov 2009 | 6:32 am

  Um dos maiores problemas da sociedade moderna é a dificuldade de locomoção diária, a maioria das pessoas passa horas em seus carros, ou em meios de transporte públicos para irem de lugar a outro. Há alguns anos atrás quando morava na zona norte de São Paulo e trabalha na zona sul, essa era minha realidade. Uma vez que naquela época passar por isso era inevitável procurei formas de fazer com esse tempo pudesse de alguma forma torna-se produtivo, foi então que comecei a ouvir à podcasts. iPod FM radio remote por dan taylor De acordo com a Wikipedia, Podcasting é uma forma de…

• Agile (ex Eutelia). Come licenziare 9000 persone senza che nessuno se ne accorga

  nove2nove1

  20 Nov 2009 | 4:52 am

  E’ iniziato il licenziamento dei primi 1200 lavoratori di diverse aziende. Stiamo parlando di OLIVETTI,GETRONICS, BULL, EUTELIA, NOICOM, EDISONTEL. Tutti confluiti in: AGILE s.r.l. ora Gruppo Omega Agile ex Eutelia è stata consegnata a professionisti del FALLIMENTO. Agile ex Eutelia è stata svuotata di ogni bene mobile ed immobile. Agile ex Eutelia è stata condotta con maestria alla perdita di commesse e clienti . Il gruppo Omega continua la sua opera di killer di aziende in crisi, l’ultima è Phonemedia, 6600 dipendenti che subirà a breve la stessa sorte. Stiamo parlando…

• Italian Agile Day live on Twitter #iag09

  PierG

  20 Nov 2009 | 4:20 am

  Follow #iad09 mlanzil Many Sourcesense developers today at #iad09, thanks to @capotribu for the organization 16 minutes ago from web capotribu Lots of people tweetting from the Italian Agile Day. Follow the #iad09 tag for more! 17 minutes ago from twibble piraccini Sviluppo software sostenibile, mi piace! #iad09 21 minutes ago from twidroid rainbowbreeze "scambiando il valore del coraggio per il valore dell’incoscienza" cit jacopo #iad09 22 minutes ago from web andreabalducci parlo di SCRUM perché SCRUM è nel mio Kernel… sala 1 #iad09 23 minutes ago from TweetDeck…

• 
  WordPress Tag: Scrum

• Was Our Velocity Seriously Zero?

  Hemant Naidu

  20 Nov 2009 | 12:43 pm

  Two Sprints ago something happened for the first time since I have been a Team Lead – my team’s velocity was a big fat zero. As a team we are fairly experienced in Agile and Scrum and quite self-organizing, yet somehow our Scrum board was portraying us as a rookie crew. The first question that may come to your mind is, “did you guy’s have to deal with a lot of production bugs or injected stories?” Sadly the answer would be, no. The team obviously wanted to get to the bottom of this anomalous Sprint so performing a root cause analysis seemed like the right thing…

• Os Melhores Podcasts de Tecnologia para Desenvolvedores

  Rodrigo Ribeiro

  20 Nov 2009 | 7:45 am

  Post excelente escrito pelo André Faria Gomes. Muito bom mesmo! Podcasts sem dúvida são um dos meios mais indicados para adquirir conhecimento em tecnologia, ainda mais quando você está antenado no que Martin Fowler, Kent Beck, Rod Johnson entre outros estão falando. Retirado do andrefaria.com. Um dos maiores problemas da sociedade moderna é a dificuldade de locomoção diária, a maioria das pessoas passa horas em seus carros, ou em meios de transporte públicos para irem de lugar a outro. Há alguns anos atrás quando morava na zona norte de São Paulo e trabalha na zona sul, essa…

• Definition of... User Stories

  Gunther

  19 Nov 2009 | 1:36 pm

  Over various projects I have applied a set of Agile practices from eXtreme Programming and Scrum. Adding personal insights to specifically handle fixed price (-negotiable scope) projects resulted in my My.Fragility framework. The framework includes a Product Backlog Estimation model, for which the main estimation process steps were highlighted as part of my Definition Of Agile Planning. Furthermore does the model at least imply an understanding of my definition of a User Story: A User Story describes a feature from an end-user perspective. It is independent of software layers or parts of the…

• Velocity: Tracking productivity instead of time

  cgrant

  19 Nov 2009 | 8:49 am

  One of the most interesting parts of Agile project management is watching the velocity of a team increase over time. As a team works together their productivity tends to increase. Agile represents the amount of work a team produces in a metric called velocity. Frequently teams new to agile will size the work in a time based unit such as hours or days. This is a common carry over from traditional project management. While Agile does manage time and resources, the time is fixed not variable. In Agile an iteration or sprint is a fixed length of time typically between two or four weeks. A chart…

• Velocity: Tracking productivity instead of time

  cgrant

  19 Nov 2009 | 8:05 am

  One of the most interesting parts of Agile project management is watching the velocity of a team increase over time. As a team works together their productivity tends to increase. Agile represents the amount of work a team produces in a metric called velocity. Frequently teams new to agile will size the work in a time based unit such as hours or days. This is a common carry over from traditional project management. While Agile does manage time and resources, the time is fixed not variable. In Agile an iteration or sprint is a fixed length of time typically between two or four weeks. A chart…

• 
  Atlassian Developer Blog

• Tools for stand-ups in agile and scrum teams

  Benjamin Naftzger

  18 Nov 2009 | 5:46 pm

  If you are using scrum and agile within your organization, you already know about the daily stand-up meeting and the value its brings to the team. Many organisations who have not fully adopted scrum still find the stand-up meeting to be extremely useful when done properly. Pyxis Technologies have just released a really neat iPhone/iPod Touch app - the _agilely Timer. The application allows you to efficiently facilitate daily stand ups, roundtable discussions and manage simple timeboxes. It costs $1.99 with all monies raised going to FIAN - FoodFirst Information and Action Network. As Francois…

• And the winners of Codegeist IV are...

  Jens Schumacher

  17 Nov 2009 | 4:04 pm

  We have announced the winners of our 4th annual Codegeist competition live on stage at a fantastic Atlascamp yesterday. And now it is time to reveal the results to the rest of the world. But before we announce the winners, let's take a quick look at what the contestants were coding for. This years competition had prizes valued at over $54,000 USD up for grabs including $5,000 in cash, a MacBook Pro, an Amazon Kindle, free conference passes and a whole bunch of software from Atlassian and our generous sponsors. This year, in addition to the Grand Prize, we've divided Codegeist into four…

• Code Review in Agile Teams - part I

  Wojciech Seliga

  16 Nov 2009 | 4:25 pm

  At Atlassian we believe in "agile" development (similarity to a very popular buzzword recently unintended). We strive to be as agile as possible and clearly see the benefits. Sure, there are teams who are "more agile", there are teams who are less. Almost every team applies different agile practices. That's OK as we believe in self-organisation and bottom-up evolution. Still we all believe in the 4 fundamental principles of agile philosophy, which are compatible with our company values. When Crucible became part of the Atlassian suite, a lot of us wondered how code review would match our…

• Automated performance testing using JMeter and Maven

  George Barnett

  2 Nov 2009 | 5:39 pm

  When I think of Agile, I tend to think of the awesomeness it can bring me as a performance engineer. I see short cycles where the code is usually always stable and features are delivered incrementally. I get to watch the performance of the system evolve over time. Unfortunately, this means I'm testing software all the time. Thats fine though - none of this is by hand - this kind of repetitive task is perfect for automation. It's clear that automating testing is important - automated tests mean you have more time to do investigation while you make your build system do the repetitive tasks, and…

• Great new tutorial on REST plugins

  Jonathan Nolen

  30 Oct 2009 | 10:14 pm

  Jonathan Doklovic, creator of the JIRA Workflow Designer, just published a great tutorial about developing and testing REST plugins in Atlassian applications. If this is something you're working on, go check it out -- it might save you some time!

• 
  Agile Software Development

• QA Engineer, Rally Software Development, Boulder, CO

  19 Nov 2009 | 10:08 am

  Rally is seeking a motivated QA Engineer with an innate curiosity about how things work and the drive to improve them. This is a key role on the engineering team helping to guide development and define acceptance tests.

• OutSystems Releases Agile Platform 5.0 with New Business Process Technology

  18 Nov 2009 | 2:33 am

  SAN RAMON, CA, 17th November, 2009 - OutSystems®, provider of the Agile Platform, today announced the immediate availability of the new Agile Platform 5.0. Based on customer requests and feedback, the addition of new business process technology to the award-winning Agile Platform integrates the ...

• Ranorex 2.2 released with Firefox Test Automation Plug-In

  18 Nov 2009 | 2:11 am

  Based on the flexible plug-in mechanism, the Ranorex tool set functionality grows constantly, and is now capable of identifying web applications in Firefox version 3.X. Unique identification of web elements, enables execution of the same test scripts in Internet Explorer and Firefox.

• Replay Solutions Eases Windows 7 Migration Challenges

  18 Nov 2009 | 2:01 am

  Redwood City, Calif. - November 16th, 2009 - Replay Solutions, a leader in application problem resolution, today announced support for the Microsoft Windows 7 operating system. The patented record and replay technology in ReplayDIRECTOR™ allows QA teams to quickly and accurately identify and r ...

• dynaTrace Launches Free AJAX Performance Diagnostic Tool

  18 Nov 2009 | 1:57 am

  Boston/Linz – November 17, 2009 – dynaTrace software, the innovator and emerging leader in application performance management (APM), today announced the general availability of dynaTrace AJAX Edition, a free tool to diagnose and resolve complex AJAX performance problems. The release of t ...

• 
  AgileVoices.com

• Danube: Too Much Meeting and Discussion, Not Enough Coding

  20 Nov 2009 | 1:22 pm

  Hey Mike, I just finished enjoying the excellent webinar that you hosted today. My team has been tasked with being the first team to go through our company’s transition to 100% Scrum environment and have been through our first two sprints. So far, my experience has been that we seem to spend way more time in meetings/discussion [...]

• More Agile Than Agile: Agile Just Don’t Go ’round Here

  20 Nov 2009 | 12:30 pm

  One of my favourite scenes from Tombstone is when Ike Clanton says to Wyatt Earp, “Listen, Mr. Kansas Law Dog. Law don’t go around here. Savvy?”  After Wyatt replies that he’s retired, Ike reiterates “Yeah, that’s good, Mr. Law Dog, ’cause law don’t go around here.”read more

• Agile Projects and Portfolios - Jochen Krebs: Selecting the Best Fitted Scrum Course

  20 Nov 2009 | 10:15 am

  There are many different Scrum courses offered in the agile community and I am receiving inquiries about the courses I am offering through Incrementor and how they differ from other agile trainings. So, I thought I would give some guidance to folks who are currently in the Scrum training orientation jungle.  In terms of Scrum, there are two major categories of Scrum training; certified and non-certified. I am not aware of any online agile courses, so they are all instructor-led classroom courses. That makes in my opinion perfect sense.read more

• Agile Philly: John Goodsen, Mitchell Cojocariu, Bill Shadish and 1 more joined Agile Philly

  20 Nov 2009 | 9:43 am

  John Goodsen, Mitchell Cojocariu, Bill Shadish and 1 more joined Agile Philly

• Scrum 4 You: CSM Exam Info

  20 Nov 2009 | 8:34 am

  I want to forward an information from Howard Sublett (Scrum Alliance) to you - to make things around ScrumMaster certification process a bit more transparent to you… “When a student first logs into the site  (scrumalliance.org) and creates a profile, their expiry is set at 90 DAYS from that time for the window to complete the [...]

• 
  ScrumPlant.com

• Danube: Too Much Meeting and Discussion, Not Enough Coding

  20 Nov 2009 | 1:22 pm

  Hey Mike, I just finished enjoying the excellent webinar that you hosted today. My team has been tasked with being the first team to go through our company’s transition to 100% Scrum environment and have been through our first two sprints. So far, my experience has been that we seem to spend way more time in meetings/discussion [...]

• More Agile Than Agile: Agile Just Don’t Go ’round Here

  20 Nov 2009 | 12:30 pm

  One of my favourite scenes from Tombstone is when Ike Clanton says to Wyatt Earp, “Listen, Mr. Kansas Law Dog. Law don’t go around here. Savvy?”  After Wyatt replies that he’s retired, Ike reiterates “Yeah, that’s good, Mr. Law Dog, ’cause law don’t go around here.”read more

• Scrum 4 You: CSM Exam Info

  20 Nov 2009 | 8:34 am

  I want to forward an information from Howard Sublett (Scrum Alliance) to you - to make things around ScrumMaster certification process a bit more transparent to you… “When a student first logs into the site  (scrumalliance.org) and creates a profile, their expiry is set at 90 DAYS from that time for the window to complete the [...]

• Scrum FTW! - Richard Kronfält: Agile projects are never late

  20 Nov 2009 | 8:18 am

  In the post I want to talk alittle about "late projects". It is a topic that is somewhat current for me and I have spent some time pondering about this phenomenon :-).The question I ask is: What does it mean for a project to “be late”?Well, in my view, in order to “be late” there has to be a target-date or a target-state (e.g. deadline or a certain scope or both) that the project’s current state is compared against, and the result of the comparison is that the state is such that either expected date or expected scope isn’t achievable.read more

• Johanna Rothman : Management Debt, Technical Debt, and Decision-Making

  20 Nov 2009 | 8:01 am

  Dave and Bob have great comments on my post, Might Three Backlogs Be Better Than One?. Dave is describing situations where management is making reasonable decisions, not incurring management debt, and by extension, technical debt. Bob and I have experience with significant management debt.read more

• 
  From the Editor of Methods & Tools

• Linkopedia November 2009

  The Editor

  12 Nov 2009 | 5:12 am

  AltNETpedia Software Process and Measurement Cast COBOL on Cogs Perspectives – One Size Does Not Fit All Article: Mastering Grails: Mock testing with Grails Article: The Tao of Screen Design Article: The Clojure programming language JRaptor – a Java MVC framework Approval Tests – an assertion-based testing framework for C#, Java, Ruby Video: Talking Architects with Len Bass Video: Test Driving GUI with Approval Tests Video: Building Applications in the Cloud Find more interesting links on the software development links directory, the software development tools directory, the…

• Report on the Agile Tour in Geneva

  The Editor

  4 Nov 2009 | 1:41 am

  I participated on October 12 to the Geneva stage of the Agile Tour which was a great success. There were more than 100 participants announced to this free event. Here is a small feedback for three interesting presentations that I attended. Yves Hanoulle presented about the tips for creating a self-organizing team. In the part that I followed, Yves explained how to build trust, giving examples from his business and family experience. Here are the main points of his presentation: - be straight: 60% of the people think that their bosses are lying to them - respect: observe how people handle…

• Domain-Specific Modeling

  The Editor

  28 Oct 2009 | 10:38 am

  Domain-specific modeling (DSM) is an approach articulated around three elements: a specific modeling language, code generation and a domain framework. The book authors work for a company that has been proposing a DSM tool since the last century. This make them first-hand experts on the topic, but you have also to remind which side they are when they talk about DSM compared to other approaches. The authors are conscious of this and discuss it openly, so that the reader can be aware of the situation. This being said, this book is an excellent and convincing presentation of what is…

• November Software Development Conferences

  The Editor

  26 Oct 2009 | 8:04 am

  Here is a list of software development related conferences that will take place in November and that have media partnerships with Methods & Tools: * ApacheCon US 2009, November 2-6 2009, Oakland, USA * IT Leadership Forum, November 2-4 2009, Phoenix, USA * Agile Development Practices Conference, November 9-13, Orlando, USA * Devoxx, November 16-20 2009, Antwerp, Belgium * ProjectWorld & World Congress for Business Analysts, November 16-18 2009, Anaheim, USA * Handcrafted Bulletproof CSS, November 23 2009, London, UK * Agile Specifications, BDD and Testing eXchange, November 27 2009,…

• Linkopedia October 2009

  The Editor

  14 Oct 2009 | 10:25 am

  Top 10 reasons why teams fail with Acceptance Testing Software quality metrics and model Comparing Open Source Agile Project Management Tools Icon Search Engine Refractor – Diagrammer for .Net Assemblies, also support for Javascript. KanbanFX – A JavaFX implementation of a Kanban board Article: The Clojure programming language Article: Scrum in old fashioned software environments? Video: The Myth of the Genius Programmer Video: What are the Roles In Scrum Video: Top 10 Things in Ruby that Every .NET Developer Needs to Know Find more interesting links on the software development…

• 
  Richard Lawrence

• WatiN Patterns #3: Don’t Over-specify

  Richard

  30 Oct 2009 | 8:20 am

  After a long hiatus, I’m resuming the WatiN Patterns series. Pattern #1 covered why and how your tests should clean up after themselves. Pattern #2 covered how you should name your tests and why they should only assert one thing. Pattern #3 is about keeping your tests maintainable by specifying just enough in your element selectors. If you’re using WatiN, you’re probably also using ASP.NET Web Forms, which means your controls get IDs like this: ctl1001_Content_Content_txtUsername. Though you gave your username text box the ID “txtUsername”, ASP.NET prepends the…

• Patterns for Splitting User Stories

  Richard

  28 Oct 2009 | 7:04 am

  Good user stories follow Bill Wake’s INVEST model. They’re Independent, Negotiable, Valuable, Estimable, Small, and Testable. The small requirement drives us to split large stories. But the stories after splitting still have to follow the model. Many new agile teams attempt to split stories by architectural layer: one story for the UI, another for the database, etc. This may satisfy small, but it fails at independent and valuable. Over my years with agile, I’ve discovered nine patterns for splitting user stories into good, smaller stories. (Note: As with any pattern…

• Cuke4Nuke: Cucumber for .NET Teams

  Richard

  19 Sep 2009 | 5:16 pm

  If you’ve read this blog for a while or talked with me about functional test tools, you’ve heard me talk about Cucumber. It’s my favorite ATDD tool because it’s so good at mapping stories and acceptance criteria to automated functional tests. Product Owners and BAs write acceptance criteria in natural language. Developers and testers unobtrusively automate tests for them. Anyone on the team can run the tests and see the current state of the system. Here’s a simple example: Feature: Google search In order to find things on the web As a user I want to search for web pages containing…

• Resources from our Agile 2009 Presentation

  Richard

  2 Sep 2009 | 10:46 am

  For those who attended my Agile 2009 presentation with Bob Hartman, “The 7 Deadly Sins of Almost Being Agile,” here are the slides and handouts. Slides Evaporating Cloud Cheat Sheet Handout Evaporating Cloud Template Handout Related posts:Slides and links from my CU ACM chapter presentationHow Multitasking Guarantees Low Customer Satisfaction

• How to Give a Great Sprint Demo

  Richard

  24 Apr 2009 | 7:03 pm

  Exciting. Entertaining. Do these words describe your sprint demo meetings? Or are boring and unfocused more accurate? I can’t believe how many times I’ve come in to coach a team and they’ve been surprised when I actually expected to see a software demo in the sprint demo meeting. As the agile principle says, “Working software is the primary measure of progress.” Let’s see some software! Why are so many agile teams so hesitant to do demos? Why are demos so lifeless? Sometimes, the team’s not actually done. That makes a demo awkward. Other times, they…

• 
  Agile Web Operations

• Kanban WIP Limits – The Fine Art of Focus

  Matthias Marschall

  13 Nov 2009 | 1:49 pm

  If you want to get things done, focus is the key. Single piece flow (focusing on only one task at a time) might be too extreme, but limiting your work to your capacity is mandatory. No matter whether we’re talking about a team, an organization or about your personal productivity. Kanban For Personal Productivity If there are multiple things to be done (and hey, when is this not the case?) it always helps me to put it all up to a Kanban board. For my personal stuff I don’t use a physical whiteboard, but an electronic version (LeanKit Kanban or Agile Zen). By using one of those…

• Simulating a Scrum And a Lean Project In The Classroom

  Matthias Marschall

  9 Nov 2009 | 10:06 pm

  I will continue my course about agile methodologies at the University of Augsburg with both a Scrum and a Lean project simulation. The Scrum simulation will introduce the students to concepts like User Stories, Backlog, Iteration, etc. After doing lots of Gantt Charts, Use Case Diagrams etc. in the waterfall simulation, it’s time now to break down the requirements into small and independent User Stories. The User Stories shall then be sorted by priority: The Backlog comes into existence. Iterations Now the teams will have to do a planning game: Estimate the most important stories…

• Back to the roots: Bridging the Deployment Gap

  Dan Ackerson

  3 Nov 2009 | 11:45 am

  Matthias and I started this blog over a year ago because we had first-hand experiences with the rift between developers and sysadmins. We knew this was a lose-lose situation not only for those directly involved, but the companies they were working for as well. We’ve described many real-life examples of how to overcome this rift, but were never sure how these ideas were resonating out there with our fellow colleagues. How many developers had moved into the operations realm? How many sysadmins knuckled down and wrote end-user code in a pinch? Enter Patrick Debois and devopsdays. What…

• Simulating a Waterfall Project In The Classroom

  Matthias Marschall

  24 Oct 2009 | 8:10 am

  The first simulation in my course about agile methodologies will be waterfall style. Here’s how I plan to do it. Before we go into the details of the waterfall simulation, I want the whole group (around 20-30 people) to come up with requirements for the product to build: an online office suite (maybe the most boring but also the most well known thing in the world). I plan to gather the requirements upfront because I do not want to burden the first simulation with this additional task – all simulations should start mostly from the same starting point. The team will be free to…

• Kanban vs. Iterative Development

  Matthias Marschall

  16 Oct 2009 | 11:49 pm

  Agile methodology builds on the concept of iterations – time boxes – in which you create a piece of working software. Each iteration starts with a planning meeting where the team takes stories from the backlog and commits to the sprint goal. If you use a tool like Pivotal Tracker, you even get emergent iterations – the tool automatically cuts your backlog into iterations based on your team’s velocity. In my post Agile on steroids I described how our team slowly dropped most of the agile estimation and planning practices in favor of optimizing cycle time of stories. Now…

• 
  The Agilebuddy Blog

• What is a Spike in Scrum

  Jack Milunsky

  16 Nov 2009 | 12:07 pm

  This question comes up time and time again and the Spike is often confused with the Tracer bullet. Adam Sroka posted a great explanation of the difference between the two on the Yahoo Scrumdevelopment group . So I am quoting Adam verbatim here - thanks Adam."The Pragmatic Programmers described something called a "Tracer Bullet" which: 1) Is an experimental solution that cuts through all the "layers" of the architecture. 2) Is not necessarily time-boxed. 3) Is not intended to be thrown away. Eric Evans talks about "Thin, vertical slices," which are the same…

• Do you even need a product backlog?

  Jack Milunsky

  9 Nov 2009 | 10:09 am

  A great question was posted on scrumdevelopment group, worthy of discussion. The question posed ... Summary Their business moves very quickly and, more often than not, any stories that enter a sprint will have been thought up and written up maybe only two or three days before a meeting of the stakeholders and the product owner to decide what the priorities are. Anything that doesn't make it into the list for them to estimate and add to the sprint will go on the product backlog, but will generally not be looked at again for a while, if ever. Question To...

• Remote contract workers

  Jack Milunsky

  4 Nov 2009 | 1:26 pm

  A question posted this morning on one of the Yahoo groups .. " We have a Scrum team in the Silicon Valley and two contractors who work with us remotely. Although they are proficient at what they do, it has been a challenge to get them (understandably so as contractors) to be apart of the team. We have two main issues: 1) They are contractors and don't see Scrum as more than just something to do to keep a contract. 2) Daily meetings and full conversation required for communication saturation are next to impossible over the phone (and really poor...

• State of Agile

  Jack Milunsky

  16 Oct 2009 | 7:47 am

  IntroductionSeems like there's lots going on in the agile world right now. Lots of talk about Lean and it's impact on Agile. Lots of attacks going on at the CSM certification. Kanban is all over the news these days. And just last week, I read about a new Agile methodology called Stride. So how do we make sense of this all? My opinion is that there is value in each of the methodologies (for the purposes of this blog I'll refer to them all as methodologies even though some of you might not think of them as such). It's real...

• Stories - how small is too small

  Jack Milunsky

  6 Oct 2009 | 10:40 am

  Today over on the Scrum Development forum a question was posted by a member. They have a situation where they have mixed some small stories with some larger ones. And the larger one is LATE - Really late. It's now been pushed into the 3rd Sprint and according to her it's still tight. So now they're faced with a situation where the smaller stories that are done can't be deployed as they never branched the code. I find it alarming that folks can't break user stories down further. So many folks say you can't do it when over on the...

• 
  Agile Bob on Making Agile a Reality

• Agile antipattern: Doing Agile!

  Bob Hartman

  18 Nov 2009 | 12:00 pm

  I spent the past week in Orlando, Florida  at the Agile Development Practices conference and I heard a number of people say “We do agile at our company.”  When pressed further it suddenly became “We do agile at our company except we don’t do …”  To me that sums up the problem of DOING agile versus BEING agile.  It is quite easy to DO agile.  You pick the non-threatening pieces and parts and simply do those.  Then you say you are doing agile and no one is the wiser.  Unfortunately, when pressed you have to admit to not quite doing agile very well. Being agile is completely…

• New to agile? Remember to respect people

  Bob Hartman

  17 Nov 2009 | 12:00 pm

  One of the Lean Principles is “Respect People.”  I think it may be the most important lean principle.  When I teach a course and get to this principle I tell people I have yet to see any organization which does this really well.  They are all shocked to hear this so I go on to tell them why.  First of all, respect of people is not all about making sure employees have sufficient compensation and benefits.  In fact most salary surveys show being able to take pride in their work as the number one job satisfaction criteria.  In other words, respect the employee’s…

• Free Event! Agile Adoption: The Real Story

  Bob Hartman

  7 Oct 2009 | 1:26 pm

  On October 20, the Agile Cooperative will be hosting a free one-day seminar designed to give attendees a lot of information about what is really required to be successful with an agile adoption.  If you are in the Denver area and your organization is giving any consideration to adopting agile you must attend this seminar!  We aren’t going to pull any punches.  We will be talking about real numbers, real needs and real chances for success.  Click HERE for more information and to register. I certainly hope to see you on the 20th! Related posts:Agile Leadership is Overrated –…

• New to agile? Keep it very simple

  Bob Hartman

  6 Oct 2009 | 1:00 pm

  When dealing with an agile implementation, particularly in the case of a new agile team, we often make things too complex and difficult.  We tend to keep putting band-aids on the process until we have something that is overly burdensome and no longer useful.  I’ve now seen enough of this to know there needs to be an intervention!  So take a deep breath, relax and read how to simplify your life on an agile team. The starting point is the 6 basic principles of what I call “Simple Agile.”  I mentioned I was going to be doing a talk for Agile Denver on this topic and I…

• New to agile? What does the ScrumMaster do anyway?

  Bob Hartman

  23 Sep 2009 | 1:44 pm

  I often have people ask me what a ScrumMaster does.  Interestingly, today it came up on a mailing list I read on a regular basis.  So, naturally that means it is time for a blog entry to talk about it! I am a big believer in simplifying things, so let’s start with an overly simplistic definition for what the ScrumMaster does: “A ScrumMaster removes impediments for the team” It seems many people believe this to be the only thing a ScrumMaster does.  Maybe it was the way they were taught.  Maybe they misinterpreted something.  This is definitely not all a ScrumMaster…

• 
  Leading Agile

• What We Call Stuff Matters...

  Mike Cottmeyer

  12 Nov 2009 | 4:39 am

  In my post 'Organizational Myopia' we talked about an increasingly common problem with the language we use. We 'talk' quite often like we are delivering a cross-functional end-to-end feature of the overall system, when in reality... we are really only delivering a subset of the solution. We are delivering a 'feature' that has to be integrated with other 'features' in order to deliver real customer value. Why does this matter? It matters because when we allow ourselves to only care about... only track progress on... only get better at our little slice of the world... we risk investing money…

• Reuse Creates Bottlenecks

  Mike Cottmeyer

  9 Nov 2009 | 5:10 am

  Here is something to think about. Is re-use always good? Is it always a good idea to have shared services and rely on common components? I jotted down a great quote at Oredev this week but can't seem to recall who said it. "Reuse Creates Bottlenecks". Isn't that what we have really been talking about over the past few weeks? When you have a team... or a department... or a division... or a business unit that has everything it needs to deliver... it sure does make planning easier. Why? Because you reduce dependencies on the rest of the organization. There is less coordination... there are less…

• Interesting Post... 11/1/2009 through 11/8/009

  Mike Cottmeyer

  8 Nov 2009 | 1:40 am

  Got a interesting story for you guys...Arrived in the Copenhagen airport today for my 11:10 AM flight back to Atlanta. I looked up on the board... no flight to Atlanta. I went over to the Information Desk and the lady tells me that there was a flight on the 7th... and another scheduled for the 9th... but no flight on the 8th. Hmmmmmmmm. Since Delta does not have local gate agents, we head over to the servicing organization that handles Delta ticketing. Apparently, Delta has decided that they aren't going to fly direct from Copenhagen to Atlanta on Sunday anymore. Kimi and I are booked on the…

• Organizational Myopia?

  Mike Cottmeyer

  5 Nov 2009 | 12:09 am

  Okay... I want to write a quick little post here to point out something that is becoming increasingly obvious to me. I've talked quite a bit over the past year about the ongoing feature team/component team debate. We talk about how agile teams are supposed to deliver an end-to-end cross-functional slice of the application architecture. When applications get big, I've talked about how sometimes we have to organize around large scale system components or services. So here is the deal... I think that in practice... most people actually get this. It seems that the more I talk to people doing…

• Velocity in the Enterprise, Part 7

  Mike Cottmeyer

  2 Nov 2009 | 12:07 pm

  Okay... we've been going on a while now with this whole Velocity in the Enterprise series. Let's see if we can get things wrapped up with one final post. Last time around we talked about the idea of extending the Kanban metaphor to the enterprise. Just like agile user stories and teams are extended into agile projects and agile project portfolios... Kanban can be extended past the team to drive the flow of value across multiple teams working in concert to deliver multiple projects. Let's explore this a little further... starting with the team... then considering the project... and then…

• 
  The Agile Executive

• Your Investment in Enterprise Software – Guidelines to CIOs and CFOs

  israelgat

  19 Nov 2009 | 7:53 pm

  The overall investment associated with implementing and maintaining a suite of enterprise software products could be significant. A 1:4 ratio between product investment and the corresponding investment over time in related services is not uncommon. In other words, an initial $2M in licensing a suite of enterprise software products might easily balloon to $10M in total life-cycle costs (initial investment in perpetual license plus the ongoing investment in associated services). I offer the following rule-of-a-thumb guidelines to assessing whether the terms quoted by a vendor for an…

• An Update on Agile Business Service Management

  israelgat

  19 Nov 2009 | 4:53 am

  A previous post in this blog defined the demarcation line between The Agile Executive and BSM Review as follows: If software development is your primary interest, you might find my forthcoming posts in BSM Review go a little beyond the traditional scope of software methods. If, however, you are interested in software delivery in entirety you are likely to find good synergy between the topics I will address in BSM Review and those I will continue to bring up in The Agile Executive. Either way, I trust my posts and Cote’s will be of on-going interest to you Since writing these words, I…

• Predictability is Bad for Your Business

  israelgat

  12 Nov 2009 | 2:00 am

  I had the pleasure of meeting some old colleagues a few weeks ago. They work for a software company that pays a lot of attention to software engineering practices and invests heavily in software tools. Financial results, however, have not been great over the past few years. Obviously, the disparity between the strength of the software engineering discipline and the relative weakness of the financial results is due to more than a single cause. One factor, however, was highlighted time and time again by my colleagues: Predictability is killing us! Paradoxical that this observation might…

• Technical Debt: Refactoring vis-a-vis Starting Afresh

  israelgat

  10 Nov 2009 | 4:20 am

  Only three options are available to you once your technical debt overwhelms the development and customer support teams: Continue as is. Start refactoring in earnest to pay back your debt. Switch to a new code base, either by launching an unencumbered development project or through acquiring new software from another company. The first option, obviously, does not solve any problem – you simply continue a struggle that becomes more and more difficult over time. As indicated in the post Elbow Room for Handling Technical Debt, the second option is quite difficult to carry out if it is…

• “How do we move towards an agile procurement or agile development methodology?”

  israelgat

  8 Nov 2009 | 3:15 pm

  Colleague and friend Annie Shum sent me the following excerpt from  U.S. CIO Vivek Kundra’s Friday keynote talk at the University of Maryland’s CIO Forum: Questioned on whether service-oriented architecture still is an emphasis in a federal cloud computing paradigm, Kundra said SOA “absolutely” still matters. “Look at the Social Security Administration and what it’s done with SOA and local government,” he said. “They can build lightweight applications to interact with databases elsewhere.” That embrace of modern development practices extends beyond just SOA or…

• 
  Rod Claar

• Getting Started with Visual Studio Test and Lab Manager

  Rod Claar

  16 Nov 2009 | 9:00 am

  My buddy Charles Sterling, Program Manager at Microsoft has posted a new webcast video showing the basics of how to create a test plan, test case, recording a test, filing a bug and playing back the test using the Beta 2 version of Visual Studio 2010. You can see the video here: How to create record and playback Test Cases in Visual Studio Beta2 This new central place for QA teams to create and manage test plans and tests is a great addition to Visual Studio for traditional QA teams.  However my primary interest is in how could an Agile team use this new tool to move testing forward in the…

• Agile Adoption: The Real Story - Free Event October 20 in Denver

  Rod Claar

  12 Oct 2009 | 11:41 am

  Rod Claar to speak at Agile Adoption: The Real Story.  Rod’s talk will center on the problems of managing the software capiblity portfolio in an Agile organization. “I estimate that 75% of those organizations using Scrum will not succeed in getting the benefits that they hope for from it.” – Ken Schwaber, co-creator of the Scrum framework Ouch! Who wants that? Considering Scrum is the most widely adopted agile process in the world doesn’t this say agile doesn’t work worth a darn? Well, not exactly, and that is what this seminar is about. We want your agile adoption to…

• What is Agile Coaching?

  Rod Claar

  7 Aug 2009 | 4:17 pm

  I am asked this question quite often.  What is Agile Coaching and what does and Agile Coach actually do?  When I started thinking about how to answer the question, I found it difficult to put the answer into words because there is no real formula for an Agile Coach to help the team be more effective in product development.  However when I started thinking about some of the coaching situations I have encountered a pattern did start to emerge. Agility in software development is about identifying the roadblocks to effectiveness for the team as well as the individuals that are on the team. …

• Bugs, bugs, BUGS!

  Rod Claar

  7 Jul 2009 | 10:21 am

  I’m sure that you all know the story of how the term “bug” got associated with a computer failure.  It was a moth in a computer which caused a hardware failure.  However, since then the term bug  has become synonymous with a software error.  There is a bug in the program.  Yes, there is a bug in the program, every program.  Many software development organizations spend a large portion of their time and effort finding and fixing bugs.  However the situation rarely improves. This leads organizations to start tracking bugs and applying all sorts of analysis and pressure…

• Do you know your team’s “room tone”?

  Rod Claar

  2 Jul 2009 | 4:29 pm

  I recently sat in on my friend David Bernstein’s new patterns course.David and his wife Staci are also filmmakers and Staci was there to record both days and to create a self-paced version of the course.At the beginning of the second day David told us that we needed to sit quietly for 30 seconds or so while Staci captured the “room tone”.They explained that when during the editing process, when they cut to David’s reactions to questions or to students reactions to David, they would need add in the ambient room noise or “room tone” to make it sound more…

• 
  Radyology

• My New MVC Metaphor: The Command Line

  Ben Rady

  16 Nov 2009 | 2:53 pm

  A useful metaphor for the MVC pattern struck me today: The command line. A command line prompt gives you all the elements of an MVC architecture. The ModelsOn the command line, the model elements are the programs you execute. ls, grep, awk, cat, wget, etc... all of those wonderful tools that actually get things done. The ControllersThe controller elements are the things you use to tie the models together. The pipes, the redirects, the ampersands. All of these things allow you to tie models together in an infinite number of different combinations to do what you want. The proportion of models…

• Kata:Ruby:Prime Factors

  Ben Rady

  13 Nov 2009 | 8:48 pm

  It took me a fair bit of refactoring after I got the last test passing (generate 10 ) to get it this tight, but I like it. def generate(n) return [] if n == 1 factor = (2..n).find {|x| n % x == 0} [factor] + generate(n / factor) end

• svn replacement for git stash

  Ben Rady

  30 Sep 2009 | 6:51 pm

  I had no idea how dependent I'd become on git's stash function until I needed it while working on a project that uses subversion. I needed to make a quick change to a class to support a change to a schema change to a live server (don't ask), but I was already in the middle of working on another task. Thankfully, you can approximate git stash by creating a patch file:% svn diff > WorkInProgress.txt% svn revert -R .<make changes>% svn commit -m "Patched to support server schema change" % patch -p0 -i WorkInProgress.txt% rm WorkInProgress.txt

• New post on Continuous Flow

  Ben Rady

  20 Aug 2009 | 10:09 am

  You're Already Doing Continuous Flow (poorly) This was a fun one to write. One of those blogs that just flows out of you in one pass.

• Survey results posted on feedbackjunkies.com

  Ben Rady

  17 Aug 2009 | 10:07 pm

  I've started a new blog called Feedback Junkies as a home for all my rants on software development. I'm looking forward to talking a lot about Improving Works and the good stuff we're doing with it. As an inaugural post, I've published the results from last week's survey on TDD and automated testing. They were quite surprising, and I hope to do it again soon.

• 
  Agile Dad

• Joy In Reaching the Destination

  9 Nov 2009 | 12:08 am

  It is written that the joy in reaching the destination is in making the most of the journey. Today I propose that the joy should start much earlier than that! When all is said and done, the resounding question should be what drives us to take the journey to begin with? Are we on a mission with a sure-sighted destination? Or are we taking a more casual approach to our travels and meandering to and fro? Do we have deliberate expectations as a result of our journey? Or are we still learning it is ok to expect the unexpected? One thing that I have learned watching organizations transition to…

• The Agile Runway

  3 Nov 2009 | 2:56 pm

  Many teams and coaches profess that Agile means very little up front planning. In many cases, I do disagree with this statement. We do need a place to take off and land when we are intending to fly through our sprints. The question is has your organization discovered who might be responsible for making certain this runway was in place and operating properly? Who sets the tone of evaluating the experience as part of the discovery process to help determine if the flight pattern is one you wish to take again? Most importantly, who is part of the ground crew making certain the team and project…

• Agile in 1948? Agileism?

  26 Oct 2009 | 8:29 am

  I just had a chance to watch a short cartoon about America and how it was back in 1948 and the things they worried and or cared about most. What I found most ironic, is that we are doing the same thing with Agile. When it works, the pieces to be improved become our whipping boy. When it fails, Agile itself is the whipping boy. Yet we allow these snake oil salesman to come into the industry and promote their silver bullet cure all methods of treatment. Take a look at the following video, then leave a comment regarding technical debt, the state of Agile, and the future of making the workplace a…

• Understanding Technical Debt

  22 Oct 2009 | 7:37 am

  No matter how you look at it, debt is debt! Whether we are talking about improving our on personal credit score, or talking about how to decrease technical debt, the theory behind the madness is one in the same.Just as our creditors judge us based on our ability to earn a living compared to our outstanding judgements, we are judged on Agile projects based on our past delivery cycles and the assurance that we will be able to deliver on time in the future.In these tough economic times, many organizations have been forced to scale back spending and in many cases as a result have scaled back the…

• The October Agile Mentor Newsletter

  21 Oct 2009 | 8:21 am

  Just so you are all aware, I am having problems with my FTP server so the Agile Mentor Newsletter for October has been delayed as a result. Crews are working around the clock to get the issue resolved. Thanks for your patience and remember to STAY AGILE! Lee ~ AgileDad

• 
  About Agility

• Taking Agile to the next step...business processes.

  Rodrigo Coutinho

  16 Nov 2009 | 4:34 pm

  Today we released a new version of the OutSystems Agile Platform - 5.0! In this version we're taking agile a step further; not only are we supporting the entire application lifecycle management for web applications, we also added support for IT teams to rapidly develop business processes using agile methodologies.Traditionally, business process development was done at a different pace using different tools than IT used for application development. However, one of the biggest challenges facing the business process world is the integration of business processes with applications; which meant…

• Agile Application LifeCycle Management - A Travel Case Study

  Mike Jones

  10 Nov 2009 | 1:34 pm

  We were all very excited to hear one of our customers, Max Rayner, speak at the recent ALM Expo on how he and his team built and delivered the www.fly.com system using an agile approach. If you're not familiar with it, this is an internet application that's openly available and was built using Agile methodologies, SCRUM techniques and an Agile ALM toolset. Max is the CTO of Travelzoo - a travel publisher with 18 million subscribers and fly.com is an online app that helps you find the exact match to your air travel needs. During the webcast Max discussed the problem space, their agile…

• Driving Agile Success - A CIO's Mandate

  Mike Jones

  20 Oct 2009 | 5:49 am

  The challenge we see in many Enterprise IT shops is that it is hard to get everyone across the business who touches application development 'on board' with an agile approach.  In this blog post I want to share how the CIO of one of our customers has set guidelines which help drive agile project delivery across the business.  The customer is a large Portuguese food distribution and consumer goods manufacturing company, with an international presence.  With nearly 25,000 employees they are used to having huge IT projects, involving multiple departments with complex requirements,…

• Agile Development - A Juggling Act?

  Mike Jones

  13 Oct 2009 | 3:56 am

  We have recently started playing the "Ball Point Game" in some of our informal Agile learning sessions. This is a game played by some scrum trainers. The basic objective of the game is to get as many balls through the team as possible within two minutes. Each ball must be touched at least once by every team member and must end with the same person with whom it began. After two minutes the team is allowed an additional minute to discuss the process and how it could be improved. It is recommended that the game be played a total of five times or sprints. You can learn more about the game in this…

• Who wants to be an Agilionaire?

  Rodrigo Coutinho

  24 Sep 2009 | 10:08 am

  OutSystems is all about Agile - and the same applies to our internal R&D team which has been using Agile since 2002. Because we've been using Agile for so long all the principles are pretty much entrenched in our culture - but as the company and the department grew, we started to feel the need to share our Agile knowledge with newcomers to the team.We considered several ways of doing this. We pondered doing a traditional PowerPoint presentation; we thought about assembling a mandatory reading list; we entertained the idea of adding support on our tools for some of the Agile tenets; and so…