Tracking change and innovation in the enterprise software development community
Durnall and Parkinson provide a thorough introduction to Lean principles, the idea of "Lean Thinking," and the application of those ideas to software development. IT is viewed as a system, a process, as well as a series of production steps and the presenters show how Lean ideas apply to and can improve each aspect.
A number of commentators have written about the challenges involved in migrating an organisation to an Agile culture. Ken Schwaber has estimated that 75% of Scrum implementations will fail to deliver the anticipated benefits. This article looks at some of the reasons why and what can be done to improve success rates.
Many people playfully credit the 3x5 index card as the "agilist's badge". In many ways though this is not an inaccurate or inappropriate; going through a stack of index cards is a often real hallmark of many agile activities. But what about using index cards to learn and remember agile? With their 'Agile In a Flash' project, Tim Ottinger and Jeff Langr want to help people do just that.
This book is for testers on an agile team, test and quality assurance managers transitioning to agile development, and agile teams learning how to approach testing. The book introduces agile testing, how it's different from testing on a traditional team, and what makes agile testers different. The book contains dozens of stories about the various testing-related issues faced and resolved.
Jay Fields takes a look at pair programming from an adoption perspective. This article is for you if you already know what pair programming is and guidance on how to get to the point of successfully practicing pair programming. Jay goes over everything from an optimal seating arrangement, to effective coaching techniques, to calling out common mistakes to avoid.
In this presentation, Amr Elssamadisy explains how to choose the best practices for your organization depending on its context and it's highest priority business values and/or smells. Amr discusses the importance of starting with business value first, and then presents a set of "maps" that help determine which practices are useful in improving what business value.
Willem and Marc introduce different cultural patterns you can find in software organizations, based on Gerald M. Weinberg's work, and tell how to recognize them, what behavior to expect, and how you can handle unexpected events and change. They show how different agile processes like Scrum, XP, and Lean Software Development fit in, while explaining some common agile failure modes.
Bas Vodde describes strategies for large teams with legacy software to adopt Scrum successfully. Bas discusses communication problems found in most component teams and why and how teams - especially large ones - should make the change to feature teams and how that change affects organizational structure.
Robin Dymond gives an overview of Lean, how it can help take Agile to the 'next level' and why organizations that fail to change will not have successful Agile teams. Robin describes an organizational mismatch between traditional hierarchies and team structures. He believes that organizations will need to reorganize around teams to get the most out of Agile.
