BT

Facilitating the Spread of Knowledge and Innovation in Professional Software Development

Write for InfoQ

Topics

Choose your language

InfoQ Homepage Agile in the Enterprise Content on InfoQ

  • Software Debt Adds Up to Substantive Costs

    In a recent article entitled “Continued Delivery of High Values as Systems Age”, Chris Sterling discusses the concept of Software Debt – “Software debt accumulates when focus remains on immediate completion while neglecting changeability of the system over time.” Software Debt goes beyond technical debt an encompases a variety of aspects that impact on the ability to deliver value.

  • EU Software Libability lawsuit: half say unit testing is the answer

    52% of the .NET developers surveyed by Typemock think that unit testing can help companies avoid law suits associated with the proposed EU software liability bill. What does this say?

  • ScrumMaster Interview Tips

    The ScrumMaster or Iteration Manager is a crucial role on Agile teams, and selecting which organisation/team to work with is important – when considering taking on a new project it’s important to set the environment up for success. This article provides interviewing advice for ScrumMasters considering taking on a project or team.

  • The PMI Agile Community of Practice

    Agile and the Project Management Institute (PMI). For many years and for many people this combination of terms rings a similar connotation as "oil and water"; they don't mix. But, is this justified? Jesse Fewell, Dan Mezick, and others say no and are aiming to bring agile into the PMI with the new 'PMI Agile Community of Practice'.

  • 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.

  • IBM Rational and InfoQ eBook: Scaling Agile with C/ALM

    IBM Rational and InfoQ preent an eBook, Scaling Agile with C/ALM, "dedicated to all of the functional and dysfunctional organizations that are eager to break down the organizational and cultural silos, and become a finely tuned software delivery machine." The eBook explores the barriers to team integration and scaling and then shows, in detail, how to overcome these obstacles.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • How to Tide Over Organizational Politics?

    Politics is an integral part of all organizations.Generally, technical people have a distaste for politics because technical matters are mostly precise and can be stated in black and white where as political matters generally involve shades of gray, which are not always easy to decipher. Recently, members on the Scrum Development group discussed ways to deal with politics.

  • Atlassian Acquires GreenHopper Adding Agile PM to JIRA

    Atlassian announces acquisition of GreenHopper from Pyxis Technologies to add agile development support to JIRA. Also announced, the availability of a new Website, "agile@Atlassian," where the community can share perspectives on agile software development and where Atlassian engineers can explain their techniques and experience.

  • Interview with Bas Vodde at Agile 2008

    Bas Vodde describes strategies for large teams with legacy software to adopt Scrum successfully. Bas discusses communication problems found in most component teams and why and how teams - especially large ones - should make the change to feature teams and how that change affects organizational structure.

  • Is Measuring Hyper-Productivity a Waste of Time?

    In a presentation about Shock Therapy, Jeff Sutherland mentioned that Hyper-Productivity is at least Toyota level of performance which is four times the industry average. In a recent discussion on the Scrum Development group, members debate whether it is both fruitful and possible to accurately measure productivity across sprints.

  • James Shore With More On Keeping It (Agile) Real

    In a casual interview, InfoQ got to talk with James Shore about some of the topics he's been most vocal about lately, including his Art Of Agile book, recent waves of watered-down agile, and how Kanban might be less than the whole picture.

  • Presentation: Beyond Agile - Cultural Patterns

    Willem van den Ende and Marc Evers introduce different cultural patterns you can find in software organizations, based on Gerald M. Weinberg's work, and tell how to recognize them, what behavior to expect, and how you can handle unexpected events and change. They show how different agile processes like Scrum, XP, and Lean fit in, while explaining some common agile failure modes.

BT