InfoQ Homepage Agile in the Enterprise Content on InfoQ
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Motivation 3.0: McGregor’s Theory Y Can Work
McGregor’s theory X suggests that employees are inherently lazy and will avoid work if they can and that they inherently dislike work. Thus, they need to be closely supervised. Theory Y suggests that employees may be ambitious and self-motivated and exercise self-control.Most Agile teams would like to be associated with theory Y. Mike Griffiths suggested how this might be easy to achieve.
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The Lean Software & Systems Conference 2010 Underway In Atlanta
The Lean Software & Systems Conference kicked off Wednesday in Atlanta with a great diversity of exciting activities and talks by Don Reinertsen, Alan Chedalawada, Alan Shalloway, Mary Poppendieck, Joshua Kerievsky, the duo of James Shore and Arlo Belsheee, and many more
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SEMAT - Software Engineering Method and Theory
SEMAT was founded in November 2009 with the bold claim that the software industry has too many fads and immature practices. The signatories promised to refound software engineering and bring it into the modern age.
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Visual Risk Management
Irrespective of the size of the project, stakeholders feel confident when they can a keep track of the risks and their mitigation strategies. Agile heavily promotes the use of information radiators. Keeping in line with the philosophy of radiators, Agilists suggested different ways of depicting risks visually for easy tracking and mitigation.
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Making Change Stick
Making cultural change in an organisation is hard, and fraught with risk. Adopting Agile principles is a major cultural shift for many organisations. Management consultant and author Steve Denning has been researching what makes change stick, and provides some concrete advice for change agents.
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Agile in the Mainstream
Mainstream Agile is an idea whose time appears to have arrived. Larger consulting services firms are now touting "agility", with firms like IBM Global Business Services and Cap Gemini pitching Agile-related service offerings. Given this kind of sudden mainstream popularity, what does it mean for Agile in general? What does "mainstream" Agile look like? What's in mainstream Agile?
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Is the Agile Community Being Unreasonable?
A recent thread on the pmi-agile Yahoo! group discusses some frustrations of the Agile recommendations that seem on the verge of naivete.
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The Open UP Debate
Following on from the discussion of the various flavours of Unified Process, there is some debate about the OpenUP process framework - is it Agile, or a reactionary result of the move to lighter processes?
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Experiment Driven Development - The Post-Agile Way
TDD and BDD are now widely-used software development techniques. However, solely following TDD & BDD may still lead to missed business opportunities, or worse, a negative impact to the business. Two questions which TDD & BDD are unable to answer are: How do you measure the usage of your application? How do you get feedback from your customers? Is Experiment-Driven Development (EDD) the answer?
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The Various Flavors of Unified Process
The Rational Unified Process(RUP) was developed through the 1990's as a framework for software engineering best practices. Features such as iterations, simplicity, focus on value and regular feedback were identified as being important for Asuccessful software engineering. A number of authors have built methodologies that adapt UP to different project domains. This article examines some of them.
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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.