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Use of Kanban in the Operations Team at Spotify

In this article, InfoQ spoke with Mattias Jansson, Operations Engineer at Spotify (an online music streaming service) about the adoption of Kanban by the Spotify Operations team. Jansson offered a lot of detail about the choice to adopt Kanban as well as the experiences that the Operations team at Spotify has gained while implementing a Kanban-based approach to dealing with their workload.

Michael Prokop Mattias Jansson
on Sep 14, 2010
Skills for Scrum Agile Teams

The skills required to be hyper-productive in agile projects are different from those required by a traditional one. This article identifies behavioral and technical skills required for a team to have that edge. Anyone who acquires these "delta" traits should be equipped with the right set of behavioral and technical skills, which enable them to work effectively in an agile project.

Prasad Prabhakaran
on Jul 26, 2010
The Limits of Agile

The problems faced by teams that are attempting Agile in non-traditional settings aren't that Agile principles are inapplicable, nor that the feedback cycle is doomed to failure; but rather, outside of a certain Agile sweet-spot there are additional barriers and costs to applying Agile techniques. None of these obstacles prevents Agile in itself but each increases the cost of getting to Agile.

Alan Kelly
on Jul 19, 2010
Agile Team Meets a Fixed Price Contract

Fixed price contracts are evil - this is what can often be heard from agilists. On the other hand those contracts are reality which many agile teams have to face. But what if we try to tame it instead of fighting against it? How can a company execute this kind of contract using agile practices to achieve better results with lower risk? This article will try to answer those questions.

Marcin Niebudek
on Jun 30, 2010
Multitasking Gets You There Later

It's now well understood that multi-tasking on a personal level is bad and slows down the rate at which we work. One of the key challenges of new Agile/Scrum teams is the number of projects that they have on the go. Agile teaches us that a team should work on one project at a time or it will thrash. Roger Brown shows in depth why this happens.

Roger Brown
on Jun 29, 2010
Agile Operations in the Enterprise

We've been hearing about agile operations quite a bit lately. There have been some good talks, articles and a few lively debates. It has even been called the "secret sauce for startups". What about those of us who aren't in a startup or a Web 2.0 company? Is agile operations something that can really work inside a large, established enterprise?

Michael Nygard
on May 21, 2010
SOA Strategy and Spline Tactics

In this article, Michael Poulin discusses agility-to-market changes that IT can gain using a strategy oriented onto the services. Using concepts of service-orientation as the major construct of the technical product portfolio, accompanied by a techniques he calls Spline Tactics, he examines how businesses can achieve strategic agility.

Michael Poulin
on Mar 02, 2010
Agile – A Way of Life and Pragmatic Use of Authority

Vinay Aggarwal shares many instances in life where authority is needed and lack of authority allows for extremely costly mistakes. He then explicitly suggests where authority could and should be used in Agile environments.

Vinay Aggarwal
on Feb 08, 2010
The Meme Lifecycle

Julian Everett and Chris Matts describe an IT business case as a meme - one that is competing in the complex ecosystem that constitutes a market sector and show its implications. By taking this view of a business then an organization's short and long term strategies change and we get a completely different view of how and why current development practices exist and persist.

Chris Matts Julian Everett
on Jan 22, 2010
Scrum And Strategy

If Scrum is all about short term, how then do the strategy folks work in such an ecosystem? More importantly, how does it help business leaders make and live up to important commitments? Good questions, but there aren’t easy enough answers. Doesn’t all this make strategy and Scrum look like the two poles of a magnet, or even further – the two extremes of the planet?

Mukund Srinivasan
on Dec 15, 2009
"Flirting" With Your Customers

All over the world, there are classes that teach people how to flirt. A German university even requires their IT engineers take a flirting class—not to attract a partner, but to learn how to interact more effectively in the workplace. Flirting means connecting with others, and connecting is the key to good communication. That is what the first principal of the Agile Manifesto is all about.

Jenni (Dow) Jepsen
on Nov 20, 2009
Overcoming Technical Challenges for Adopting Agile Methods in the Enterprise

This article touches upon challenges to adopting agile methods within the enterprise and provided strategies for addressing them. Set up development environments in a consistent fashion using automated scripts and checklists, facilitate automated testing and continuous integration by using standard tooling and test data transparency, and ensure a stricter criteria for the done definition.

Vijay Narayanan
on Nov 09, 2009

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