InfoQ Homepage Adopting Agile Content on InfoQ
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Scrum Extensions Update - 4th Quarter 2011
This is the 4th quarter 2011 update of scrum extensions. InfoQ will be looking at proposed and approved extensions each quarter to see how scrum changes and evolves.
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Is Velocity Killing Agile?
Velocity, the measure of work completed by the team divided by the time taken to complete it, is increasingly being used to manage the productivity of a team and as a comparison between teams. Jim Highsmith, Mark Levison, and Scott Ambler discuss the misuse of velocity as a productivity measure.
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The Questions when Measuring Agile Adoption
There have been numerous attempts over the years to determine the best way to measure the effectiveness of an Agile adoption. Some recent articles have reignited the debate around the most useful metrics.
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Sustainable Pace – What’s it mean and how to achieve it?
The Agile Leaders newsgroup recently had a discussion on establishing and maintaining a sustainable pace of work, often in the face of organizational pressure for teams and individuals to work longer and longer hours. The contributors provided some concrete ideas and specific advice, as well as discussing why this situation occurs.
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Steve Denning on Customer Delight at Agile 2011
Steve Denning gave two talks at the Agile 2011 conference in Salt Lake City, both focusing on moving organisations to "21st Century Management" and showing how Agile principles support and enable this change. He maintains that management is in need of an overhaul and that the takeup of Agile approaches helps organisations to make these changes, but Agile alone is not enough.
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Agile 2011 In Summary
A brief summary and overview of the Agile 2011 conference held in Salt Lake City from 8-12 August. This article lists the key facts about the conference and identifies some of the highlights for this reporter. Future articles will expand on the content of a number of the talks.
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Top Agile Books 2011
For second year in a row Jurgen Appelo came up with his list of top 100 Agile books. The list is based on average ratings and number of ratings done on Amazon.com and GoodReads.com The scoring also considers the year of publication.
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Open Office Layout is Bad for Brain !
Open office layout is usually considered the default layout for Agile teams. Cubicle farms are boring and a thing of the past. Open office is known to improve communication, collaboration and build stronger teams. Is it all as good as it sounds?
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How Rigid is Scrum?
Scrum is seen as an adaptive and flexible software development methodology which aims to improve the development process. Over the years, there have been many success stories which have been attributed to Scrum. However, some teams continue to smell a good amount of inflexibility and rigidity. Is it Scrum at fault or is it a flawed adoption process?
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Adopting Agile in an Environment of Fear
Agile adoption and transformation is sometimes effective, and sometimes not. Is there a common thread to the failures? Does fear have anything to do with it? And what can we expect if we start an agile adoption initiative in an environment that is full of fear?
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Systemic Constellations at Agile Coach Camp Montreal
Todd Charron is reporting about the Agile Coach Camp Canada 2011, in Montreal, Quebec where Michael Spayd demonstrated a powerful coaching technique called Systemic Constellations. Systemic Constellations comes from family systems therapy and was developed by Bert Hellinger.
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Happiness and Self Organizing Teams
Does happiness affect our results - both positive and negative - with self organizing teams? Mark Levison shares research in psychology that shows that choice and control are interchangeable: "if people lack power, they clamor for choice, and if they have an abundance of choice they don’t strive as much for power." Does this explain successes and pains of self organization?
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Commercial Interests Censoring Failures
Philippe Kruchten described the Agile movement as "The agile movement is in some ways a bit like a teenager: very self-conscious, checking constantly its appearance in a mirror, accepting few criticisms..." and shared a list of twenty elephants in the room - uncomfortable issues that are ignored on purpose. The first of these unmentionables is that commercial interests are censoring failures.
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Learning from History - or not
Consultant and author Gerald M. Weinberg has been in the computer industry for over 50 years; he raises concerns about the seemingly inevitable hype cycle associated with new techniques and how the industry so seldom seems to learn from previous cycles. In a similar vein Elisabeth Hendrickson recently blogged about the impact of "fake agile". They also provide some advice on how to improve.
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When to Cease Being an Agile Coach?
Agile coach Morgan Ahlström recently turned to the Agile Coach Support mailing list to ask how to deal with an organization that said they wanted the benefits of becoming more agile, but was behaving in ways contrary to that goal.