Tracking change and innovation in the enterprise software development community
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
Rule your SOA
with CentraSite
standards-based
registry/repository
Terracotta:
Scale your
Apps w/ease
Offload the DB:
Learn More!
The Agile “self organising team” paradigm demands new skills of team members – including the people skills for which they may once have depended upon their Project Managers. Far from being redundant, management can now play an important role in helping teams learn new ways to communicate and collaborate. This article proposes some strategies for imparting new skills and suggests some resources.
Sustainable Pace is a well known XP practice however, different people relate to it in different ways. Could an Agile team increase its sustainable pace by working longer? An interesting discussion on the Scrum Development group tries to debate the correlation between the number of work hours per week and sustainable pace.
Most Scrum adopters have their first doubt in terms of its scalability. Tobias Mayer suggests that before looking into quick solutions for complex problems, adopters should focus on understanding the principles of Scrum. Once the foundation is correctly laid, Scrum will take care of scaling itself.
Greg Smith offers an in-depth practical perspective on making your agile transition just as much about culture change as it is about process change.
Your organization is adopting Agile Development and your Managers are trying to find their new role. Prior to the adoption Agile perhaps management was involved in the production specifications and assigned the tasks. Now that teams are self organizing and the stories (instead of specs) come from the product owner, what does management do?
What does it take to create a high-performing team? According to Doug Shimp and Samall Hazziez, a "Well Formed Team" exhibits the following characteristics: follow Agile and Lean principles, use an adaptive system with a feedback loop, are focused on the business vision, are passionate and hyper-productive.
When Agile teams get stuck in the just-average Norming stage, rather than continuting to the exciting, high Performing stage of teamwork, sometimes they're suffering from an invisible "learning bottleneck" that stunts team performance. Agile practices require us to take time to reflect and learn - and a team that learns quickly succeeds.
Scrum creator Jeff Sutherland guesses there are 120,000 Scrum teams holding standup meetings on any given working day. But how many are really doing Scrum? At QCon London 2006 he talked about "the Nokia test" which he likes to use to distinguish whether teams are doing Agile or only iterative process - or neither! He also revealed the connection between Scrum and the Mars robots.
David Hussmann "Agile Geek at Large" spoke with InfoQ about his approach to coaching teams adopting Agile, including how to customize it for different kinds of organizations, and some common factors to retain, to achieve lasting success.
Scrum, arguably the fastest-growing Agile methodology, is well described in the original Scrum books, which tend to be read once and put aside. The SPRiNT-iT coaches have abstracted the basics to produce a compact reference to help teams facilitate all Scrum meetings and create the Scrum artifacts. The book doesn't teach Scrum, but offers trained teams confidence to run their first successful Sprints - successes that will increase the acceptance of Scrum in their organization.
