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  • Q&A on The Agile Mind-Set

    Gil Broza explores agile values, beliefs and principles, and explains how they can be used to drive agile adoption in his book The Agile Mind-set. The book provides ideas, examples, and anecdotes that organizations can use to make a shift to agile.

  • Q&A on Kanban Change Leadership

    In the book Kanban Change Leadership Klaus Leopold and Sigi Kaltenecker explore how Kanban can be deployed to get change done in organizations and to build a culture of continuous improvement. An interview on doing change in small steps, solving problems, using WIP limits, priorities and classes of service in Kanban, using the Theory of Constraints with Kanban, and getting results with Kanban.

  • Author Q&A on Agile Value Delivery - Beyond the Numbers

    Larry Cooper and Jen Stone have written a book which provides advice and techniques for blending agile practices with portfolio, program and project management, taking a value focused approach to managing the outcomes of initiatives rather than focusing on the activities and practices which are the center of many methodologies. They spoke to InfoQ about the book and the ideas behind it.

  • Probabilistic Project Planning Using Little’s Law

    When working on projects, it is most of the time necessary to forecast the project delivery time up front. Little’s Law can help any team that uses user stories for planning and tracking project execution no matter what development process it uses. We use a project buffer to manage the inherent uncertainty associated with planning and executing a fixed-bid project and protect its delivery date.

  • Using Experiments and Data to Innovate and Build Products Customers Actually Use

    An interview with Jan Bosch, professor of software engineering and director of the Software Center at Chalmers University of Technology, about the benefits that companies can get from increasing delivery speed, the next steps that organisations can take after adopting Agile and DevOps, using experiments to innovate, practices for experimentation and how organisations can become more innovative.

  • Evo: The Agile Value Delivery Process, Where ‘Done’ Means Real Value Delivered; Not Code

    Current agile practices are far too narrowly focused on delivering code to users and customers. There is no systems-wide view of other stakeholders, of databases, and anything else except the code. This article describes what ‘Evo’ is at core, and how it is different from other Agile practices, and why ‘done’ should mean ‘value delivered to stakeholders’.

  • #NoEstimates Project Planning Using Monte Carlo Simulation

    Customers come to us with a new product idea and they always ask the questions - how long will it take and how much will it cost us to deliver? Reality is uncertain, yet we as software developers are expected to deliver new products with certainty. This article shows how to do planning using reference class forecasting with the #NoEstimates paradigm which promises more accuracy in forecasts.

  • Tradeoffs: Giving up Certainty

    While organizations operate under an illusion of certainty, tradeoffs are inevitable. Giving up certainty does not mean giving up predictability. This article examines four flow choices for software delivery and presents three choices for IT Delivery: Throughput, Flexibility and all out speed.

  • Interview and Book Review: Specification by Example

    Gojko Adzic has written the book Specification by Example, explaining the set of techniques for describing the functional and behavioural aspects of a computer system in a way that they are useful to the development team (expressed ideally as executable tests), understandable by non-technical stakeholders and maintainable to remain relevant despite changing customer demands.

  • Agile Strategy Manifesto

    A successful business strategy starts with unique value creation. But for an organization to realize the full benefit of it’s business strategies it must develop and maintain them using an Agile approach. An Agile mindset and careful application of feedback provided by an iterative implementation will help retain value and turn good business strategies into great business strategies.

  • Agile Finance: Story Point Cost

    This article ties a rather abstract and developer centered concept (story points) to the real world of business (spreadsheets and ledgers). Making this connection is essential for management.

  • Who Moved my Product Value?

    At the outset, it seems like agile is all about short-term focus and a product life cycle is typically the polar opposite – it runs the total gamut in the spectrum that is the life of the product, starting from incubation to end-of-life. So, how does one attribute the relationship between the two? This is where product value comes in.

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