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.
Non-Functional requirements are often associated with the state of the system and not with the functionality that the system has to offer. General 'ilities' of the system such as scalability, interoperability, maintainability, portability, performance and security fall under this umbrella. Agile teams usually struggle with defining and estimating the non-functional requirements in their projects.
Mike Burrows started a discussion on the Kanbandev group which has led the community to explore the Expand / Collapse pattern. The discussion was covered elsewhere on InfoQ, in an article which followed the viewpoints of many practitioners who see more value in expansion than collapse. However, many people found both aspects of the pattern useful.
Unprecedented levels of change caused by the pace of innovation are stretching traditional contract models to the breaking point. As more organizations adopt Agile and Lean for the development of innovative/complex products and services, new contract models are needed that accommodate change. The Evolutionary Contract Model, based on Agile / Lean principles, offers promise as a possible solution.
The traditional Waterfall model fits nicely with the way companies buy things: requirements are drawn up, a supplier quotes a price, and everyone signs a legally binding agreement. Contracts written this way seldom offer the freedom to work using an Agile approach. This article examines four separate models available to suppliers and customers for establishing contracts for Agile work.
Dirk Willem discusses the changes underway at the BBC, a top 5 destination in the UK. The changes focus on replacing static HTML with dynamic technologies, web/2.0 and social networking, empowering the creative staff to better communicate with their audience. Also covered: techniques used to achieve massive scaling and coping with transaction speeds that exceed relational database capabilities.
This presentation explores how the platform driving the guardian.co.uk, (3 time winner of the 'Best Newspaper' Webby), site was almost completely rebuilt using the principles of DDD. Key evolutions of our model, how DDD encouraged domain experts to greater iinvolvement, and how we maintained a deep, malleable domain model, whilst meeting deadlines are also discussed.
In this interview at Agile 2011, Jez Humble discusses continuous delivery and the deployment pipeline, emphasizing the importance of feedback and automating tests at every level to validate deployments. Gone are the days of massive acceptance test scripts. He also talks about the evils of feature branching, and speaks on the DevOps practices to collaborate all the way through the delivery cycle.
Linda Rising talks about patterns and interacting with customers, the need for a better interaction between developers and customers, how she arrived at these patterns, teaching others how to teach.
Domain Driven Design is a vision and approach for designing a domain model that reflects a deep understanding of the business domain. This book is a short, quickly-readable summary and introduction to the fundamentals of DDD; it does not introduce any new concepts; it attempts to concisely summarize the essence of what DDD is, drawing mostly Eric Evans' book, as well other sources since published such as Jimmy Nilsson's Applying Domain Driven Design, and various DDD discussion forums.
