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  • To Deliver Innovation Don't FedEx It, ShipIt!

    After seven years, over 500 innovation projects and high profile endorsements from Dan Pink and other leading publications that resulted in hundreds of organisations copying the concept, Australian software company Atlassian has had to rename its famous innovation day concept.

  • Does Agile Make the PMO Obsolete?

    At the recent Agile Australia conference Agile coach Renee Troughton spoke about her experiences changing the governance model at large organizations in Australia and New Zealand. Other commentators talk about the need for "Fluid IT" and discuss governance models that radically change or remove the need for the PMO.

  • A Very Personal Look at 12 Years of Agile

    Simon Baker from Energized Work talks about past, present and future of Agile in his paper "No bull". The publication covers Baker's 12 years of experience with different teams and companies.

  • Survey Confirms Scaling Agile Across The Organisation Is Still A Challenge

    Forrester have recently released the results of their November 2011 Global Agile Software Application Development Online Survey in a report entitled "Survey Results: How Agile Is Your Organization?" It contains a number of interesting findings around how organisations that have adopted Agile are dealing with their implementation.

  • How to prioritize tasks based on their value

    Bob Marshall in his new blog post, "The Value", summarises his research on different methods of prioritisation. Together with Grant Rule he developed a new way of understanding team and company goals.

  • Agile adoption changes organizations policies and facilities

    A number of organizations have recently acknowledged the impact that adopting Agile techniques has had beyond the software development areas. This news item examines the impact on two very different organisations - SAP in the design of their new cloud computing development facility and Valve Software Corporation's employment policies.

  • The Management View of Agile - Unaware or Unwilling?

    A series of recent articles by Steve Denning on Forbes have highlighted the challenges that the Agile community faces to get acceptance by mainstream management.

  • Product Owner should deliver Enabling Specifications

    Scrum community leaders recommend Product Owners to deliver an Enabling Specification as a part of a User Story to improve the efficiency of the development team.

  • The Daily Standup/Scrum is not for the Scrum Master

    Mike Cohn recently suggested that the Daily Standup (or Scrum) is not a status meeting for the Scrum Master, but a forum where team members are synchronising their work. Techniques such as breaking eye contact are helpful for Scrum Masters to fix this anti pattern in their teams.

  • Achieving More By Doing One Thing at A Time

    A recent Harvard Business Review article highlights the importance of finishing one task at a time and hence getting more work done. Some of the core Agile practices help minimize context switching and bring a similar task focus while building software.

  • A Collection of Agile Resources by J. Sutherland, K. Schwaber, D. Star, M. Lacey, and D. J. Anderson

    Microsoft has put together a number of resources for Visual Studio developers, containing principles, practices and guidelines for Agile development. These resources are condensed articles written by influential Agile leaders -Jeff Sutherland, Ken Schwaber, David Star, Mitch Lacey, David J. Anderson - containing the essence of several Agile methodologies and being usable by any software dev team.

  • Seven Options for Handling Interruptions on Agile Teams

    Interruptions are something that every team has to deal with and, if not managed appropriately, they can potentially have a detrimental affect on their ability to deliver. In a recent post on the Agile Advice blog, Mishkin Berteig described seven options that teams could consider to deal with interruptions when using Scrum or iterative Agile approaches.

  • Experts advise growing Agile projects with feature teams

    Agile experts suggest a slow ramp up, thinking beyond Scrum of Scums, and using techniques like Feature teams, for scaling Agile projects. A feature team takes responsibility for one or two features at a time and works on them as a whole until they are done. Once the features are delivered, each team member signs up for the next feature by joining another feature team.

  • Product Backlog Ordering, Sequence for Success

    Historically, some product owners have prioritized backlogs by making pairwise comparison of projected economic return between two items in isolation. Successful Agile teams often take a holistic approach, accounting for risk, dependencies, and the complex interplay among and across backlog items.

  • The Agile Community Needs to Embrace... Agile Thought Leaders at YOW! Australia 2011

    What is the most important thing that the Agile community needs to embrace in 2012 and beyond? InfoQ had the opportunity to attend the recent YOW! Australia Software Developer Conference and took the opportunity of having such a large number of Agile speakers in one place to sit in on the sessions and ask them their thoughts on this question.

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