Tracking change and innovation in the enterprise software development community
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Brian Marick talks about several challenges for teams transitioning to Agile and 5 guiding values that successful Agile teams share. The major challenges covered are: courage, working software, naivete, and slicewise design. Successful teams share these guiding values: reactive, ease, solidarity, decency, and joy.
Scrum Certification is one debate that refuses to die down. First, it was about the hollow nature of certification for which there was a comment “Pay the tuition, sit through a couple days of class, and you're in”. Subsequently a new format was devised, which too failed to enthuse the Agilists who were against this certification philosophy. Is there another makeover on the anvil?
In a recent Harvard Business Review article Teresa M. Amabile and Steven J Kramer challenged the commonly held mnagement belief that Recognition is the most motivating and positive factor in the workplace. Their multi-year study tracked the motivation and emotions of hundreds of knowledge workers and identified POGRESS as the single most important factor for individual motivation in the workplace
Vinay Aggarwal shares many instances in life where authority is needed and lack of authority allows for extremely costly mistakes. He then explicitly suggests where authority could and should be used in Agile environments.
Agile is the hand that works in the glove. SOA is the glove, the scope is enterprise wide. Most principles of SOA and Agile are not in conflict. When they are, they keep each other sane. Agile development without a clear vision of the goals and objectives of the company is futile. SOA without a clear vision how to make it real using agile development principles is a waste of time and money.
Don Reinertsen discusses the concepts behind second generation lean product development. He shows some of the quantifiable economic trade-offs associated with queue management, batch size reduction, WIP constraints, cadence, and flow control. He explains why the ideas of lean manufacturing, though perfect for the predictable work of manufacturing, are inadequate for product developers.
Tamara Sulaiman presents experiences in implementing Agile in teams across different time zones in large companies. She shares the pleasure and the pain, ideas that worked as well as ideas that didn’t. She also shares the critical success factors in making program level implementations successful and sustaining.
Mary-Lynn discusses how Fearless Change presented patterns focused on the evangelist and the introduction of new change ideas into an organization. She goes on to note how the sequel, tentatively titled More Fearless Change, adds patterns that focus on gaining the necessary emotional and personal commitment to making change happen. She also talks about Agile and its adoption.
Henrik Kniberg discusses the differences among different Agile processes such as Scrum, XP, and Kanban. He shares the thought that processes wars are meaningless and we need to see each process as a tool; there are no bad tools; just tools used for the wrong purpose.
Scrum and Kanban are two flavours of Agile software development. So how do they relate to each other? Part I illustrates the similarities and differences between Kanban and Scrum, comparing for understanding, not for judgement.Part II is a case study illustrating how a Scrum-based development organization implemented Kanban in their operations and support teams.
For those getting started with Agile, this book offers a detailed first-person account of how one Swedish company implemented Scrum and XP with a distributed team of 40 people, and how they continuously improved their process over a year’s time.
This book guides the reader on crafting their own agile adoption strategy focused on their business values and environment. This strategy is then directly tied to patterns of agile practice adoption that describe how many teams have successfully (and unsuccessfully) adopted them. Business values are also a component of these patterns so your adoption is always focused on addressing your particular environment.
Domain Driven Design is a vision and approach for designing a domain model that reflects a deep understanding of the business domain. This book is a short, quickly-readable summary and introduction to the fundamentals of DDD; it does not introduce any new concepts; it attempts to concisely summarize the essence of what DDD is, drawing mostly Eric Evans' book, as well other sources since published such as Jimmy Nilsson's Applying Domain Driven Design, and various DDD discussion forums.
Scrum, arguably the fastest-growing Agile methodology, is well described in the original Scrum books, which tend to be read once and put aside. The SPRiNT-iT coaches have abstracted the basics to produce a compact reference to help teams facilitate all Scrum meetings and create the Scrum artifacts. The book doesn't teach Scrum, but offers trained teams confidence to run their first successful Sprints - successes that will increase the acceptance of Scrum in their organization.
