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.
Tony Wong, a project management blackbelt, enumerates some practical points on individual procutivity. This article wonders how well these apply to software development and contrasts his list with that of other lists.
The Amplifying Your Effectiveness (or AYE) Conference took place this year in Cary, North Carolina...
Velocity, the measure of work completed by the team divided by the time taken to complete it, is increasingly being used to manage the productivity of a team and as a comparison between teams. Jim Highsmith, Mark Levison, and Scott Ambler discuss the misuse of velocity as a productivity measure.
In a recent presentation at SATURN 2011 Eric Richardson has drawn some analogies between architects in an agile environment and hurricane meteorologists. For example, both produce various forecasts respectively documents, use many kinds of data sources as inputs, and employ different techniques to acquire data. The question arises is: what can architects learn from meteorologists?
For Agile developers only familiar with Scrum or XP, it may be unclear how Lean relates to what they do. This article introduces Lean Thinking and how it enhances software development. Ning Lu of ThoughtWorks China identified the biggest obstacle to Lean or Agile as the mind-set developed during the period of large-scale manufacturing.
The discussion of applying lean principles to software development has largely focused on identifying and eliminating waste (in Japanese: muda). Lean Thinking equally aims to remove overburden (muri) and unnecessary variation (mura). Roman Pichler discusses the relationship of the "three M's" and proposes to eliminate overburden as the first step toward a leaner process.
The 'Retrospective Prime Directive' is a practice used by many teams as part of their continuous improvement cycle. As outlined in Norm Kerth's book, it is intended to foster the deep learning that is the heart of a retrospective. This article is an enlightening conversation, captured by Linda Rising, between senior practitioners on the benefits and the challenges of using this practice.
In this InfoQ article Kenji Hiranabe applies lessons learned while working with Japanese manufacturers. While many Agile teams are optimizing only a portion of the value stream, Hiranabe proposes a simple way to adapt lessons from Lean Manufacturing's "Kanban" visual tracking system to make process visible to more of the organization, for better communication and process improvement.
