InfoQ Homepage Agile in the Enterprise Content on InfoQ
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What Really Motivates Workers
In a recent Harvard Business Review article Teresa M. Amabile and Steven J Kramer challenged the commonly held mnagement belief that Recognition is the most motivating and positive factor in the workplace. Their multi-year study tracked the motivation and emotions of hundreds of knowledge workers and identified POGRESS as the single most important factor for individual motivation in the workplace
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How Does Your Agile Compare to Your Competition?
A lot of times teams and organizations would like to evaluate their way of working with their competition. They would like to focus on their areas of improvement and incorporate feedback to do better. Comparative Agility assessment is an assessment tool which suggests that the results would help guide the organization in planning the next set of their Agile initiatives.
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Agile Retroflection of the Day
Retroflection is a concept in which one substitutes self for environment, as in doing to self what one wants to do to someone else or doing for self what one wants someone else to do for self. Introspection is a form of retroflection that can be pathological or healthy. Based on a similar concept Yves Hanoulle started the Agile Retroflection of the day project.
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Reasons for Delay in an Agile Project
A delay, in general, is getting something done later than it was scheduled for thereby causing distress and inconvenience. Likewise, a delay is considered to be a waste in the Agile terminology. A delay causes discontinuity and thereby causes other wastes like relearning, task switching etc. A few Agilists discuss the common delays and ways to resolve them.
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Stabilization Sprints, A Necessary Evil or Pure Waste?
Stabilization sprints are an additional number of sprints added to the end of the normal development cycle before shipping the product. As the name suggests, they’re usually added to shake down the product one last time and drive the last of the bugs. Do they belong in Agile environment or should "Done" be enough.
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Five Benefits of Feature Teams
Mike Cohn and others present their case to why you should consider structuring your teams around software "features" rather than software "components".
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When ScrumMaster Becomes the Impediment ...
A ScrumMaster as the name suggests is the guardian of the scrum process. He is a change agent supporting his team and socializing Scrum throughout the organization. He ensures smooth functioning of the team by eradicating impediments and keeping the team shielded from distractions. However, in certain scenarios, Agile teams feel that the Scrum Master is the biggest impediment.
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Do We Need an "Agile Team Lead" Role?
Patrick Wilson-Welsh, Chris Beale, Gary Baker, John Huston, Daryl Kulak, and others are attempting to popularize the idea of a new role, the "Agile Team Lead", to supplant many of the existing leadership roles found in and around agile 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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Agile is Micromanagement
Micromanagement, often has a negative connotation associated with it. It is a management style where a manager closely observes or controls the work of his or her subordinates or employees. Usually Agile development and micromanagement may seem to be opposite ends of spectrum however, they are more related than what meets the eye.
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What is a Good Agile Metric?
What is an appropriate Agile Metric? If traditional measures like: Earned Value, Hours Worked, Lines of Code, Code Coverage for Tests are not well suited to Agile Projects, then what is? What rules can we define that will help us choose good Agile metrics?
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Who Moved Our Project Stakeholder
A project stakeholder for an Agile team is a person having a valuable stake in the success of the project and could also be potentially holding the cash strings for the project. However, sometimes it is very difficult to get time slices from the project stakeholder. In other extreme cases, the stakeholder might seem to be uninterested or completely missing in action.
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Agile's "One Essential Ingredient"
There has been plenty of debate on what skills a developer needs, or what practices an organization must adopt for agile to be successful. But while undeniably important, is this really what's at the heart of agile success? Mark Schumann suggests that agile's "one essential ingredient" is not ground-level agile technique, but rather is the agile mindset within management ranks.
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Feedback and Feedfoward: Best of Both Worlds
Feedback is a situation in which an output from an event of the past has a potential relevance in the future. Agile places a lot of importance on soliciting and providing feedback with every step in order to build a quality product. On the other hand Feedforward is, to give someone suggestions for the future and provide help in terms of future direction.
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Opinion: Pair Programming Is Not For The Masses
Pair Programming continues to be one of the most debated and controversial practices of recent years. Most proponents don't falter in their praise of the benefits, but many of even these same people will admit they struggle to get pairing really going in their shops. Why? Obie Fernandez opinions 10 reasons why this might be so.