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  • Why Agile Methods Work

    There is great economic value in looking at software processes from an execution perspective to examine their strengths and weaknesses. Keeping this perspective in mind keeps us at a safe distance from abusing buzzwords like Agile methods without really understanding the underlying principles that make them work.

  • Visualizing the Big Picture of your Agile Project

    Agile is all about the whole team experience. We plan together, code together, test together, and retrospect together so that everyone in the team is all on the same page. However, once your project grows bigger, teams start to get lost in pile of user stories and it gets harder for everyone to see that same big picture. This article discusses various ideas to visualize this big picture.

  • Interview and Book Review: Essential Scrum

    Essential Scrum by Kenny Rubin is a book about getting more out of Scrum. It’s an introduction to Scrum and its values, principles and practices, and a source of inspiration on how to apply it.

  • Metrics-Driven Development

    In this article the author shares his thoughts and experience gathered while working together with DEV teams, trying to make sense of metrics. He introduces the practice of Metrics-Driven-Development: using metrics to drive the entire application development.

  • Book Review: The Scrum Field Guide

    Mitch Lacey has written the book The Scrum Field Guide: Practical Advice for Your First Year in which he presents advice on how to implement many of the Scrum and XP practices. Shane Hastie from InfoQ reviewed the book and asked the author some questions about the approach. The publishers have made a sample chapter available for InfoQ readers.

  • The Prioritization Divide: With Numbers or Without?

    While there are many methods that use stories as a means for prioritizing development, there's a basic divide that asks whether it should be done with numbers or without. There are arguments on both sides, but instead of examining these, people tend to fall into one side naturally. Once there, they can become quickly entrenched in the belief that the other camp is foolishly mistaken.

  • An Alternative to Agile Coaching

    Phil Abernathy asserts that the role of the Agile Coach may be due to sunset - he proposes an alternate based on his vision of an Agile Practitioner Manager embedded within an agile team. The Agile Practitioner Manager will have "skin in the game" being responsible not just for helping the team with their process but also being accountable for the deliver of customer value through the product.

  • A Step by Step Guide to Lean ALM

    Last time we looked at Lean ALM from a high level perspective. This article Dave West builds on that by discussing how one can gradually introduce Lean ALM to established teams.

  • Agile Performance Reviews

    Why go an entire year before receiving feedback? Nothing else in the Agile world waits a year, why would feedback? Struggling to make feedback objective? Perhaps objectivity is the wrong goal perhaps reviews should be subjective. Ryan Hagan offers his approach to doing performance reviews with an Agile Team.

  • Now is the Time for Lean ALM

    In this article we examine why organizations need to transition to Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) and what we can learn from Lean thinking in transforming ALM from an inflexible, expensive, dogmatic approach to one more able to reduce waste and deliver measurable value.

  • Agile in the Defense Industry

    The Defense Industry is often viewed as a very “non-Agile” culture. Teams, organized along strict hierarchical boundaries, seldom collaborate freely and are forced to communicate through the handoff of contract-specified artifacts. In this article, Jeff Plummer shares his experience with successfully applying Agile principles and practices to his team working in the Defense Industry.

  • How To Not Destroy your Agile Team with Metrics

    The agile community needs to change how it measures success. The ways that we gather metrics and the information we seek out of those metrics is actually getting in the way of what’s most important, making working software. Forcing individual metrics sometimes discourages team collaboration by focusing too intently on others. This can skew the thing we’re measuring, thus defeating the purpose.

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