InfoQ Homepage Agile in the Enterprise Content on InfoQ
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Presentation: Ken Schwaber on Code Quality as a Corporate Asset
Scrum co-creator Ken Schwaber spoke at Agile2006 on code quality as a corporate asset. InfoQ presents video of his talk, The Canary in the Coalmine. Schwaber discussed how a degrading core codebase paralyses a team and negates any Agility gained through process improvement. He proposed strategies for management to identify, track and stop this downward spiral.
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Easing into XP - for the Harried and Stressed
One can't always start from scratch with Agile - sometimes it's used to salvage troubled projects, but Emanuel Gaillot notes that "What's tough about XP is, the more you need it to get your project in a better shape, the harder it is to start doing it." Can a team really afford to switch in the middle of a troubled project? Gaillot recently shared his approach to gradual XP implementation.
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Dangers of Agile Adoption
Siddharta Govindaraj has been noticing what happens as Agile is adopted by more mainstream enterprises. He outlines five points that companies need to watch for when adopting agile processes - and what to do about them.
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Survey: Leaders Say Agile Has "Crossed the Chasm"
Diana Larsen leads a lot of retrospectives... So, it's not surprising that, when she asked herself "Where is Agile going now?" her response was to run a retrospective of her own. She found that leaders in our community are convinced: Agile methods have "crossed the chasm" to become a respectable alternative for managing and working in software projects. InfoQ brings you this exclusive article.
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Holacracy - The Self-Organizing Enterprise
The fit between Agile teams and traditional enterprises can be challenging. Agile may highlight or exacerbate pre-existent dysfunctions, in areas a project manager may not be well-placed to address, so those involved in Agile roll-outs are thinking about alternate ways to organize the enterprise. Holacracy, created at Ternary Software, suggests that self-organization can extend outside IT.
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Selling Your Good Ideas
In this month's edition of StickyMinds, communications consultant Naomi Karten has written a short article "Developing Sales Savvy" which may help your new ideas reach the ear of a resistant colleague. She notes that, while sometimes you just get lucky, there are other times when *how* you sell can be as critical to your success as what you sell.
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Agile, Orthodoxy and a Message From God
A long and complex thread on the ScrumDevelopment list, set off by the phrase "Agile 2.0," has been exploring the past and future of Agile methodologies (for good or ill) including so-called "next generations" approaches like AUP, MSF Agile, and AMDD. Ron Jeffries, Ken Schwaber and Scott Ambler are just a few of the serious agilists who participated in this lively conversation.
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Does Agile Dispense with Project Managers?
Agile does away with many of the tasks by which Project Managers formerly measured their own performance. The Product Owner and Dev Team take on these activities, leaving PMs confused and wondering: "Am I redundant?" Agile coach Michele Sliger offers some reassurance, mapping PMI PMBOK practice areas to new Agile practices in her whitepaper "A Project Manager's Survival Guide to Going Agile".
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InfoQ Article: Agile - The SOA Hangover Cure
Carl Ververs, an expert on SOA Integration writes about the application of "Agile" development philosophies and methodologies in order to build a sustainable and valuable SOA system.
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Digital Focus Unveils Market Survey Results at Agile2006
The survey finds Agile Software Development gaining momentum: interest in Agile methods is growing across the IT landscape with 81 percent of those surveyed either actively using Agile development within their organization or looking for opportunities to do so. Launched at the Agile 2005 Conference to assess the state of agile adoption, this year 136 execs in 128 organizations responded.
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Agile Delivery at British Telecom
Methods and Tools has a 3-part article by Ian Evans of British Telecom outlining the challenges of software development at BT and the approach they took to switch to an Agile approach. Going from a well-established waterfall-based delivery approach to Agile takes patience and time, as well as a lot of commitment. But despite the challenges, few at BT would go back to their old ways.
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Agile Fixed Price Contracting
On the high-volume ScrumDevelopment newsgroup, an interesting question has appeared, once again: "Is it possible to run SCRUM with fixed price contracts especially custom projects?". Ron Jeffries, Mike Beedle and others offer replies from experience.
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Minimalism: Creating Manuals People Can Use
Yes, documentation is not "working software". That being said, a certain amount of documentation is often necessary. But where do we start, to lighten up our documentation processes? JoAnn Hackos' workshop on July 11/12 teaches a disiplined minimalism, allowing teams to leverage structured writing, etc. to create just enough documentation - the right documentation. Almost sounds agile :-)
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Has Hell Frozen Over? An Agile Maturity Model?
Just as the traditionals have their Capability Maturity Model (CMM) do agilists need an Agile Maturity Model (AMM) which allows an organization to assess current state and build a business case for adopting Agile practices?
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AOP Used to Isolate Change on Large-scale Financial System
A large-scale J2EE-conversion project of 50+ developers at a financial services company recently had a chance to use aspect oriented programming (AOP) as a mechanism to isolate change. Vincent Frisina, revealed some of the consequences as well as some lessons learned about Agile development.