James shares his experience as one of the Agile Manifesto co-authors, fathering the original Agile estimating game (which became Planning Poker) and how Agile methods fit with embedded software development. James also discusses his new book, Test Driven Development for Embedded C, while sharing some surprises, such as his recommendation that teams stop using Planning Poker.
Simon Baker from Energized Work talks about past, present and future of Agile in his paper "No bull". The publication covers Baker's 12 years of experience with different teams and companies.
Design thinking is about creating vision of the future, not just managing the present. Bill Burnett from Stanford University recently spoke about design thinking and what questions we need to ask to shift from design to design thinking.
Mike Cohn recently suggested that the Daily Standup (or Scrum) is not a status meeting for the Scrum Master, but a forum where team members are synchronising their work. Techniques such as breaking eye contact are helpful for Scrum Masters to fix this anti pattern in their teams.
Steve is interested in uncovering better ways to deliver successful projects regardless of whether or not those ways are ‘agile’. After reading "Influencer, the Power to Change Anything" he found a set of behaviours and influence strategies that are helpful for giving projects the best chance for success and also for helping teams transition to agile.
In the last couple of years terms like Specification by Example, Executable Specifications and Feature Injection have showed up quite frequently in the community, often in relation to Behaviour Driven Development (BDD) or tools like Cucumber or SpecFlow. InfoQ have talked to some of the leading experts in this domain about what these practices are and how they relate to BDD.
Laurent Bossavit discusses the importance of learning from history and reflects on the historical influences that have contributed to emergence of agile practices and techniques. He examines the impact agile approaches are having and the emergence of the new discipline of agile software development, and calls for formulation of a new generation of more inclusive Agile institutions.
Adrian Howard advises designers to cooperate with developers from the early stages of a project in an attempt to create a product that more closely reflects the designer’s vision.
Jason Ayers share the observations he made watching a team of developers collaborating in real time on the same code base, pushing XP, pair programming and continuous integration to their extremes.
In this interview, Jesper Boeg, author of the new InfoQ book – Priming Kanban, discusses the keys to using Kanban effectively, and how to get started if you are currently using other approaches. Jesper also discusses the benefits of integrating elements of Kanaban into existing Scrum teams and what can be achieved from the team seeing the entire value chain and owning the whole process.
In Agile, adoption and transformation are typically viewed as one big event. Mike Cottmeyer provides a holistic perspective that looks as adoption as the implementation of practices, and transformation along two dimensions, organizational and personal. Mike discusses how they are a means to an end, and how to avoid the trap of focusing on practice adoption as a goal.
This mini-book offers an easy to follow 10 step guide to taking the initial plunge and start using Lean principles to optimizing value and flow in your system. Each step consists of a section explaining “why” followed by examples of specific tools, practices and rules that have helped other teams better understand and optimize their system.
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.
