Articles

How ALM Drives Business/IT Alignment, Competitive Advantage

ALM and Business Processes

Large-Scale Agile Design & Architecture: Ways of Working

During my 2011 QCon London keynote on "Scaling Lean & Agile: Large, Multisite or Offshore Delivery", I mentioned — as an aside — that, "Architecture is a bad metaphor. We don't construct our software like a building, we grow it like a garden." This prompted many a tweet, and some people were interested in clarification or elaboration.

The Art of Creating Whole Teams: how agile has changed the way we work with our customers

Angela Martin earned her PhD examining how agile methods work in practice and what is different about this way of working. She shares some of the key practices which organisations can implement to increase their likelihood of successful cultural change through creating Whole Teams - truly cross functional collaborative teams working well together to deliver products which meet customer's needs

The Top Five Challenges of Building Software Platforms in the Agile World

When scaling Agile to the enterprise new concerns arise that require revisiting the values and practices of Agile software development. One such concern relates to a common strategy to achieve reuse at the enterprise level - building software platforms. This article lists the top five challenges that an Agile organization should expect to face when deciding to adopt a software platform strategy.

The Accidental Agilist: A Personal Look Back at 10 Years of the Agile Manifesto

Johanna Rothman reflects on her journey to pragmatic agility. She discusses the way in which agile practices work together to improve project outcomes, and how this is not restricted to software development. She challenges teams to embrace the transparency that agile brings and stop talking about becoming agile and start doing it properly.

Implementation Decision Rationales – Program Comprehension in Agile

Given the fact that the bulk of a developer's work is maintaining and enhancing existing code, Fabian Kiss makes the case for a lightweight approach to documenting the rationale and decision process behind design decisions to help later developers tie the source code syntax to its meaning in the application domain. Using simple tags and clearly thought out rationale to provide just-enough value.

Reflections on the 10 Years Since the Agile Manifesto

Mike Cohn reflects on the changes in software development over the last 10 years, as agile has gone from fringe to mainstream and his hopes that we will move from seeing agile as something different or special, to being simply the way we work. In the same way that the Magna Carta influences our lives without being in the forefront of thinking so the Agile Manifesto should fade into the background

The Many Levels of Planning on an Agile Project

One of the fundamental Agile values is “we value responding to change over following a plan” which has sometimes been misintrepreted to mean we don’t need to plan on an Agile project. Nothing could be further from the truth - in reality agile organisations and projects plan at many different levels. Shane Hastie discusses the different types and approaches to planning and how the work together.

Agile 10 Years On

James Coplien looks from the hacker culture of the 1960s, through objects in the 1980s and forward to the future to put the Agile Mainfesto in context of the 20 year cycle of fashion and change. He argues against mindless adherence to a particular set of rules and tools and for carefully thought out application of good practices that support the production of good quality software products.

A Personal Reflection on Agile Ten Years On

Stephen J Mellor was one of the original signatories of the Agile Manifesto. He attended the Snowbird meeting “as a spy” with but found himself agreeing with most of what was being said and became a proponent of Agile techniques and emphasizes the value of modelling in the Agile world. We rarely see the words “agile” and “model” in the same sentence, but they are not at all in conflict.

Agile Contracts

The traditional Waterfall model fits nicely with the way companies buy things: requirements are drawn up, a supplier quotes a price, and everyone signs a legally binding agreement. Contracts written this way seldom offer the freedom to work using an Agile approach. This article examines four separate models available to suppliers and customers for establishing contracts for Agile work.