InfoQ Homepage Adopting Agile Content on InfoQ
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Teaching Games - Fun or Serious Business?
Michael McCullough and Don McGreal, creators of the Tasty Cupcakes teaching games website, have published an article on "Fun Driven Development." The economic downturn hasn't squeezed these games out of our training programs - in fact, they've become a staple where Agilists gather to exchange ideas. Here's a little history and some starting points for using games with your teams.
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When Agile Success is Eventually a Failure
It is often assumed that once the pilot Agile teams are successful, the process of Agile adoption is on the right track. Dave Nicolette shares very intriguing insights into situations where the adoption failed even after very successful pilot implementations.
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Looking Inward To Stop An Agile "Decline And Fall"
Discussions about agile's "decline and fall" have been a somewhat recurring theme here on the AgileQ, and in the community in general, centering around sentiments that people aren't adopting agile effectively, that they're doing it wrong and screwing it up. Kevin Schlabach poses the idea that the agile community itself, by not growing new leaders, has a hand in causing this.
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Tips to Select a Pilot Project for Agile Adoption
One of the most important factors which influences the success of Agile adoption is the set of learnings derived by applying Agile to a pilot project. These learnings significantly influence the organization to go ahead with Agile or fall back to their usual process. A wrong type of pilot could end up aborting, which would be a poor advertisement for the new process.
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Jean Tabaka at Agile Australia 2009
Jean Tabaka spoke at the Agile Australia 2009 conference in Sydney on 15+16 October. Her keynote talk titled "12 Agile Adoption Failure Modes", in which she identified a dozen common roadblocks that can prevent effective transformation to Agile techniques in organizations.
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XP or Scrum, Either, Both, or Neither?
Which is better? Scrum or XP? Is there one that is more applicable than the other or is there another alternative?
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Where has the innovation gone?
Some commentators are questioning the level of innovation happening in the Agile space. Does iterative and incremental development lead us away from innovation towards reusing old solutions, building on what we already know rather than creating truly "out of the box" solutions. Adding an R&D stream is suggested as a way to bring innovation into Agile projects.
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Agile Testing Requires Cross-Functional Teams and More
The first things many think about when considering Agile Testing are tools, automation, when and how to test, and the role of testers on a team. These are all very worthy topics. But which of these things are needed for success and which are nice-to-have?
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The 'Agile Developer Skills Workshop' Is Underway
Having a means to fairly and reliable assess the skills of agile developers has been a hot topic for quite some time. The 'Agile Developer Skills Workshop', led by Ron Jeffries and Chet Hendrickson, is now entering its 2nd day of trying to produce a real solution to the problem.
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When to Extend an Iteration/Sprint
The sprint is about to finish and you discover that you can't deliver an important story. What do you do? Extend the sprint? Put the story back in the backlog? The team consistently overestimates how much work they can get done in a sprint? What to do?
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Wrong and Right Reasons to Apply Kanban
Kanban's aim is to minimize WIP (Work-In-Process), or inventory, between processes by making sure that the upstream process produces parts only if its downstream process needs it. Of late, Lean and Kanban are growing in popularity. More and more companies are setting up Kanban Boards, limiting WIP and eliminating Muda. Michael Dubakov investigated the wrong and right reasons for applying Kanban.
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Agile 2009 Conference Retrospective
A month has passed since Agile 2009 and there is now a good variety of feedback on the conference, the sessions and what participants found most valuable.
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Leading Lean & Agile – it’s all about people
Mary and Tom Poppendieck have published a new book titled "Leading Lean Software Development: Results Are Not the Point" in which they examine the importance of leadership in Lean/Agile transformations and provide guidance for organisations making the transformation.
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Opinion: Racism in the Agile Community Hinders Learning
Earlier this month we published "The Role of Project Managers in Agile" by Vinay Aggarwal which contained some non-mainstream ideas concerning self-organizing teams. Unfortunately there were racist remarks left by readers. These remarks were removed and the offenders were banned. But this brings up another question, that of, "how does racism affect or ability to write and deliver software?"
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The Minimum Viable Product - a tool for exposing value
In a recent interview on Venture Hacks (Advice for Entrepreneurs) commentator Eric Ries discussed the concept of the Minimum Viable Product (MVP) – doing “just enough” to meet customer needs in order to get a product THAT PEOPLE WILL PAY FOR to market as soon as possible.