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One of the great things about working as a consultant is the ability to try out many different ideas and adapting your personal favorite process to include things that work. This article gives the details about user story estimation techniques that Jay Fields has found effective.
TargetProcess has released a free 5-user Community Edition of its Agile project management software. The Community Edition contains the same features as the full edition of the product with two limitations: a maximum 5 users, and no support.
On April 15th Thoughtworks will release Mingle 2.0, nine months after the initial release of Mingle. InfoQ got some time with product manager Adam Monago to talk through the new functionality provided by Mingle 2.0.
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.
SOA aims at making the entire enterprise agile by using services as the building blocks for applications. Agile software development aims at making organizations agile by introducing practices that increase communication and feedback. Which is right? Which is better? Are we comparing apples and oranges? Can they be used together, and if so, how? Join us in the discussion!
Management consultant Johanna Rothman helps her clients manage risk: be it risk in a project's people, risk in how the people are managed, or the risk in the projects themselves. In this interview she talked about strategies for risk reduction, useful for teams in all stages of agility, contained in her new book "Manage It! Your Guide to Modern Pragmatic Project Management."
In this short InfoQ interview, Nils Haugen spoke with Floyd Marinescu about the "Planning Poker" technique he relies on to improve team estimates. Having consciously experimented with it for a while, he described this simple practice and why it works: by making space for team members to each contribute their own perspective. In this way, it's good for estimates and for teambuilding.
Of course, "anything more than 'barely sufficient' process is waste," but what does that mean for your team, or my next project? In this 60 minute presentation from the APLN Leadership Summit at Agile2006, Todd Little shared a model to help choose the right "flavour" of Agile for different kinds of projects, and discussed the importance of 'steering' throughout the project's duration.
Scrum co-creator Ken Schwaber spoke at Agile2006 on code quality as a corporate asset. InfoQ presents video of his talk, The Canary in the Coalmine. Schwaber discussed how a degrading core codebase paralyses a team and negates any Agility gained through process improvement. He proposed strategies for management to identify, track and stop this downward spiral.
