Deborah Hartmann Preuss is an Agile Effectiveness Coach, Life Coach and Open Space Facilitator living in Karlsruhe, Germany. Deb is passionate about making teamwork valuable and rewarding, and has mentored colleagues and improved software teams throughout her 25-year journey from programmer to coach. She injects excitement and laughter into everything she does. Deb developed and led the InfoQ/Agile editorial team until 2009, and continues to provide active leadership in local and international Agile communities.
Elisabeth Hendrickson describes the Agile Alliance Functional Testing Tools Group (AAFT) as a community that is helping to foster and create the next generation of functional testing tools. In this interview at Agile 2008, she tells us about the current state and the current needs of the Agile community around functional testing tools beyond FIT and FITNesse.
Real Options, a decision-making process based on Financial Option mathematics, was mentioned by Kent Beck in his 1999 "white book," Extreme Progamming Explained. More recently, Agilists have been exploring how Real Options intersects with Agile. Now Chris Matts and Olav Maassen specifically address the Lean Software community, proposing that application of Real Options improves Lean Development.
Michael McCullough and Don McGreal, creators of the Tasty Cupcakes teaching games website, have published an article on "Fun Driven Development." The economic downturn hasn't squeezed these games out of our training programs - in fact, they've become a staple where Agilists gather to exchange ideas. Here's a little history and some starting points for using games with your teams.
Kanban workshops, courses and conferences are springing up, and practicing Agilists are investigating what this method, adapted from Lean, offers their teams. Attractive benefits are cited, from revealing bottlenecks to happy teams experiencing more "flow". But thought leaders warn that Kanban's laid back approach is "kryptonite" to Scrum's call to resolve impediments immediately.
Traditional management models don't tell leaders how to support their Agile teams without undermining their emerging self-organisation. Allusions to musical performance and "conducting the orchestra" abound - but not all are in agreement. Is the "conductor" model a good practice or an anti-pattern? In his TED talk, conductor Itay Talman shows that it may depend on what we think a conductor does.
The Agile “self organising team” paradigm demands new skills of team members – including the people skills for which they may once have depended upon their Project Managers. Far from being redundant, management can now play an important role in helping teams learn new ways to communicate and collaborate. This article proposes some strategies for imparting new skills and suggests some resources.
Do "empowered" organizations outperform their command-and-control competitors? Business school dean Roger Martin saw this promising approach fail too frequently. His diagnosis: he calls it the Responsibility Virus, and offers tools to help those who would treat the Virus in their own workplace. Reviewer Deborah Hartmann found this book a good explanation of why process is not enough.
At Agile2007's Google reception, the audience voted to make the (very sad) clip "Developer Abuse" the number 1 video, thereby making "Matthew" (name changed to protect the innocent) this year's AgileAdvert famous Agilist. Five more videos were also recognized, sporting singing, dancing, a beating, "outside the box" thinking, expletives (deleted), and charming children (not all in one video!)
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.
In this interview with Jeff Patton at Agile 2008, he talks about three strategies that can help product owners do their job more effectively by embracing the inherent uncertainty in all software development. Namely they are understanding the ultimate goals of the project, delaying decisions until the last responsible moment, and scaling up by building quality.
Pollyanna Pixton tells us that within a culture of trust leaders must stand back and if they don't then they are hampering and restricting the productivity and the creativity and the innovation of teams. She discusses how leaders can foster a culture of trust and what they must do to get the most out of Agile teams.
