Tracking change and innovation in the enterprise software development community
Rule your SOA
with CentraSite
standards-based
registry/repository
Create REST
-enabled Web Apps
with Project Zero
from IBM.
Plan-driven dev
Environments and
Agile tutorials at the
Better Software
Conference & Expo!
Introducing the
SpringSource
Application Platform:
Next-gen Java
AppServer
Terracotta:
Scale your
Apps w/ease
Offload the DB:
Learn More!
In this 90-minute talk from the Agile2007 conference, Lean software thought leader Mary Poppendieck reviewed 20th century management theories, including Toyota and Deming, and went on to talk about "the matrix problem", alignment, waste cutting, planning and standards. She closed by addressing the role of measurement: "cash flow thinking" over "balance sheet thinking".
Many of the Agile community have chimed in on a recent popular discussion regarding success rates of Agile transitions. Responding to Niraj Khanna's question on the subject, Kent Beck, Ron Jeffries, Alistair Cockburn, Chet Hendrickson, and many more debate the value and risk of establishing such statistics.
Danube Technologies has just released the 3.0 Release of ScrumWorks Pro, last mentioned in August 07. ScrumWorks Pro is an Agile Project Management tool that help track team(s) progress through individual iterations and whole releases. In this release changes focused on two areas: usability improvements and the use of MySQL as the backend database.
Ron Jeffries has started writing a series of fictional stories based on his observation of real teams. The first story (Kate Oneal: Productivity) focuses on the character Kate O'Neal (CTO) and one of her teams "Rimshot". In this episode Ron explores achieving and measuring Productivity improvements without formal metrics.
In this InfoQ article, Tamara Suleiman explains AgileEVM, an adaptation of traditional Earned Value Management (EVM) metrics, designed to fit a Scrum project management framework. Compatible with traditional EVM metrics, it allows both Agile and traditional projects to be tracked within a single program, giving important early warnings of trends across the entire product life cycle.
In the spirit of "information radiators and “big visible charts” Kenji Hiranabe proposes using Kanban Boards to organize three viewpoints (Time, Task, and Team) so the whole team understands the current status of the project and can work in an autonomous, motivated and collaborative manner.
Traditional thinking has turned budgets into fixed performance contracts forcing managers at all levels to commit to specified financial outcomes, although many of the underlying variables are beyond their control. In this Cutter Executive Summary, Jim Highsmith offers an alternative for the adaptive organization: a project performance management system and a team performance management system.
Ron Jeffries' upcoming book looks at how tracking "Running Tested Features" is the essential element of Agility, from which all other practices and activities necessarily follow. Deborah Hartmann interviews Ron who takes to the whiteboard to explain how, when supported by XP's "simple design" practice, RTF helps teams deliver consistently without building up costly technical debt.
Agile methods are empirical: plan, do, evaluate how it went, plan the next thing. When these cycles are very short, learning happens quickly and teams can move into high-performance mode. But discipline is necessary - planning must happen continuously to feed the fast-moving team. For 80 minutes David Hussman looks at the Agile practices around planning a project, a release, and an iteration.
This book guides the reader on crafting their own agile adoption strategy focused on their business values and environment. This strategy is then directly tied to patterns of agile practice adoption that describe how many teams have successfully (and unsuccessfully) adopted them. Business values are also a component of these patterns so your adoption is always focused on addressing your particular environment.
