InfoQ Homepage Adopting Agile Content on InfoQ
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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.
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Agile Adoption: Projects Should Dive-In, Organizations Should Toe-Dip
Hearty debate abounds about whether agile adoption is better done in a gradual "toe-dipping" manner or with an all-or-nothing "head-first dive" approach. Johanna Rothman says do both: projects should dive all-in, while organizations should take it gradually.
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Opinion: Agile Coaches Frequently a Source of Adoption Problems
Increasingly there are reports of initial success followed by failures with Agile adoption. Sometimes these problems are inadvertently caused by Agile coaches.
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Ensuring Success for Self Organizing Teams
Self organization is defined as a phenomenon in which the internal organization of the system increases in complexity without being guided or managed by an outside source. However, successful self organization needs the right level of support from not only the team members but also the management and the organizational environment.
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No Easy Road to Agile Cultural Change
A number of commentators have written about the challenges involved in migrating an organisation to an Agile culture. Ken Schwaber has estimated that 75% of Scrum implementations will fail to deliver the anticipated benefits. This article looks at some of the reasons why and what can be done to improve success rates.
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Agile In a Flash
Many people playfully credit the 3x5 index card as the "agilist's badge". In many ways though this is not an inaccurate or inappropriate; going through a stack of index cards is a often real hallmark of many agile activities. But what about using index cards to learn and remember agile? With their 'Agile In a Flash' project, Tim Ottinger and Jeff Langr want to help people do just that.
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An Evolutionary Perspective of Software Development
Memes, originally coined by Richard Dawkins in "The Selfish Gene" are cultural genes; ideas that propagate among people and affect the way we think and act. Julian Everett has suggested that we can look at software development practices, ideas, and culture as a collection of memes. By doing so, our understanding of what works and why can be turned on its head.
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Resource Management in Agile Projects
Agile projects are known to address the problems of rapid change. These may be changes in market forces, system requirements or implementation technology. One of the change, that does not gel well with Agile projects, is the frequent change of people working on the project. The idea is not to disturb the high performing teams so that they can continue to deliver high velocity.
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Agile Project Sponsorship – A Light Hand for Effective Results
Organisations embracing Agile methods need to reassess their approach to project governance and sponsorship. Project decisions need to be made rapidly, responding to changes in the organisational ecosystem while keeping a clear eye on the project’s and organisation’s goals. Advice from commentators on project sponsorship and important metrics to keep projects on track.