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Addressing another Agile Myth (we don't need no analysts!), Shane Hastie, Chief Knowledge Engineer at Software Education, outlines how the Business Analyst can help Agile teamwork - when properly aligned with the business, rather than the development team.
Following on from the discussion of the various flavours of Unified Process, there is some debate about the OpenUP process framework - is it Agile, or a reactionary result of the move to lighter processes?
The Rational Unified Process(RUP) was developed through the 1990's as a framework for software engineering best practices. Features such as iterations, simplicity, focus on value and regular feedback were identified as being important for Asuccessful software engineering. A number of authors have built methodologies that adapt UP to different project domains. This article examines some of them.
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
Stuart Wray wrote a paper analysing how pair programming actually works in team environments and identifies four mechanisms that can be applied to improve the effectiveness of pair programming, and why it results in better quality products.
Software engineers frequently take issue with the sequential development processes that are believed to be at the core of civil engineering – in answer to the “why can’t you build software like they build bridges” criticism sometimes levered at software development. The reality is that civil engineering projects frequently apply approaches that Agilists will recognise.
Formalised social contracts provide a structure to help reduce the fear, uncertainty and doubt associated with organisational change, and can enable an Agile transition to go more smoothly. Israel Gat provides an example of the social contract he used at BMP Software.
In a recent LinkedIn discussion the question was asked "Should we have an individual recognition reward on a Scrum team". This prompted some intense debate with points both for and against.
Jean Tabaka spoke at the Agile Australia 2009 conference in Sydney on 15+16 October. Her keynote talk titled "12 Agile Adoption Failure Modes", in which she identified a dozen common roadblocks that can prevent effective transformation to Agile techniques in organizations.
