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Lean Start-Up, and How It Almost Killed Our Company

The theory of Lean start-up with its focus on product, small bets, customer validation and pivot points, has become almost universally accepted within software development and businesses in general. In this article Helen Walton offers a provocative critique of its suitability to many business contexts, as well as recounting why the method proved almost fatal for one particular start-up – her own.

Helen Walton
on May 14, 2015
Why Companies Need to do a Better Job of Prioritizing Features

When everything is high priority, nothing is high priority, and we fall into a miasma of finger pointing and misplaced expectations. Here is why companies need to do a better job of prioritizing features. Wikipedia defines diffusion of responsibility as "... a sociopsychological phenomenon whereby a person is less likely to take responsibility for action or inaction when others are present

Tirrell Payton
on Apr 29, 2015
Total Talent Management: A Systems Approach to Agility

With increasing corporate reliance on contract and temporary workers come more challenges for HR departments. Core HRM responsibilities like training/development, compensation/benefits, and mobility normally apply solely to standard company employees. Total talent management aim to do HRM for the total workforce, including temporary workers, contractors and consultants.

Jas Chong
on Apr 27, 2015
A Tester’s Perspective on Agile Snags

Priyanka presents some of the advantages and challenges that agile adoption brings for testers and testing and presents some ideas on how to overcome the obstacles and leverage the advantages. She discusses the agile tester mindset and how the role of someone doing testing in an agile environment changes.

Priyanka Hasija
on Apr 18, 2015
Impediment Busting: Designing an Impediment Removal Process for Your Organization

Lean Product Development takes an end-to-end focus on the flow of work through a system. Rather than focus on traditional measures such as capacity utilization, it proves more effective to focus on how work is moving through the system. This article discusses what impedes the flow of work, and how we manage impediments to the flow of work.

Ken Power
on Apr 15, 2015
Inviting over Imposing Agile

We are at a crossroads in the agile-adoption narrative. Early in the story teams were the “bottom-up” vector for agile spread. Next the way agile spread started to shift away from teams to executives and “management”. Recent developments move us towards consultancy for bring agile to larger enterprises that struggle with change. Which way is agile going to go next?

Daniel Mezick
on Apr 11, 2015
Culture & Methods

Enterprise Agility Through Culture

Culture plays an important role in organizational change. Successful agile adoption tends to depend on the ability to change the culture. Making the culture explicit and becoming more conscious of the existing culture is important in agile transformations according to Olaf Lewitz and Michael Sahota. Giving attention to culture can increase the agility of an organization.

Ben Linders
on Apr 06, 2015
Creating a Creative and Innovative Culture at Scale

King Digital Entertainment needs to foster a creative and innovative culture with engaged and motivated people to create fun games. They have established an environment with freedom and trust, with space for experiments, exploration, and learning, to make people happy. Experiments and lessons from the engineering organization showing continuous improvement of HR-related processes and topics.

Matti Klasson
on Mar 31, 2015
Making Agile Deliver Good Software

Programmers and business people should invest time and energy to understand each other and work together to fix problems in software delivery. Nic Ferrier talks about deploying agile effectively, the need for managers or Scrum masters in agile, how focusing on architecture can improve collaboration and how technology can help us to avoid some of the organizational problems that teams experience.

Ben Linders
on Mar 27, 2015
Q&A on Conscious Agility

The book Conscious Agility (Conscious Capitalism + Business Agility = Antifragility) by Si Alhir, Brad Barton and Mark Ferraro describes a design-thinking approach for business to benefit from uncertainty, disorder, and the unknown. An interview about conscious agility and antifragility, increasing business agility, dealing with uncertainty, and the three phases of a conscious agility initiative.

Ben Linders
on Mar 16, 2015
Q&A with Andy Singleton on Unblock! A Guide to the New Continuous Agile

The book Unblock! A Guide to the New Continuous Agile by Andy Singleton provides ideas and practices for doing distributed cloud-based development with continuous delivery. It describes how you can build, test, and frequently release code, and how continuous agile can be used with strategies for managing teams, products, and enterprises in a continuous delivery environment.

Ben Linders
on Mar 10, 2015
Perspectives On Agile Software Testing - Book Review

On the occasion of Selenium's 10th Birthday Celebration, a bunch of ThoughtWorkers have compiled an anthology of essays on testing approaches, tools and culture. This anthology of essays is available as an eBook, titled - "Perspectives on Agile Software Testing".

Savita Pahuja
on Mar 03, 2015