In this interview, Jeff Patton discusses the Product Owner role and points out that Agile has never been very focused on the customer. While Agile development excels at “delivery”, it struggles to support “discovery” (i.e. defining what the customer really needs). Also discussed are techniques such as Lean Startup and story maps and the importance of defining business value in an Agile context.
IEEE announced that the Hans Karlsson Standard Award 2012 has been given to Paul R. Croll for dedicated leadership of the IEEE Systems and Software Engineering Standards Committee, and for his diplomacy and collaboration in facilitating the development of a collection of high-quality standards.
Recently on the Agile Leaders mailing list Dan Mezick initiated a discussion on the need for Agile Coaching Ethics.
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.
Ken Howard and Barry Rogers have written a book that focuses on the first value from the Agile Manifesto. They provide advice, tools and techniques to help teams and individuals improve their communications and interpersonal interactions. The book presents a set of tools that work together more effectively. They provide guidelines for a workshop to put the techniques into practice.
Joe Kuemerle introduces the developer to the business side of development starting from the premise that it is not enough to be technologically savvy to be successful in a software organization.
John Allspaw presents technical, cultural, and process related lessons learned at Flickr and Etsy.com from the collaboration between the operations and development teams.
Linda Cook, a well-known agilist, and board member of both the Agile Alliance and the Agile Leadership Network, discusses the agile coaching profession. Among other things, she covers servant leadership, being as a role model, types of individuals appropriate for the profession, and the differences between being an external coach versus being an internal employee in the coach role.
Roy Osherove talks about the challenges and opportunities of being a software team leader. He shares his hard won experiences in growing teams, their members and influencing behaviour. Being a software team lead is about getting out of your comfort zone, creating trust and commitment in your team but also about knowing about team maturity levels and the different approaches needed.
