InfoQ Homepage Continuous Improvement Content on InfoQ
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How Agile Benefits the Individual
A recent discussion on the ScrumDevelopment list shed light on the ways in which agile development practices directly benefit the individuals involved. The consensus was that an environment ideal for individual growth can be created by the implementation of agile practices such as inspect-and-adapt, pair programming, test driven development, and constant collaboration and communication.
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Making Retrospective Changes Stick
Agile teams may find it easy to talk about change during their retrospectives, but not so easy to make that change actually happen. Esther Derby, well-known thought-leader on the human aspects of software development, recounts an experience from her personal improvement efforts to illustrate this and offer a few suggestions on how to succeed with making change actually happen.
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Renowned Orchestra Embraces Scrum-like Practices
A Scrum team has no designated leader; the team is expected to self-organize. Similarly, one of the world's most renowned orchestras has dispensed entirely with the role of conductor in favor of a process where leadership is shared and decisions are made by the team. Along the way, they have learned lessons and ways of working together that any Scrum team can benefit from.
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An Introduction to Lean Thinking
Lean software development, which we hear a lot about these days, may be still a bit of a mystery for people who come to Agile via Scrum or XP. Earlier this year, at an Open Party was sponsored by InfoQ China, Ning Lu of ThoughtWorks China offered an introduction to Lean thinking, and said the biggest obstacle to Lean thinking can be the manufacturing mindset.
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Rewards to Improve Team Habits?
Sometimes teams have trouble starting new habits: writing unit tests, fix compiler warnings, not breaking the build. How do we help the team change these habits? Clint Shank designed a game to help people transition.
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Should you really learn another language?
Blogger Gustavo Duarte cursed in church when he said that learning new programming languages is often a waste of time. He said that "In reality learning a new language is a gritty business in which most of the effort is spent on low-value tasks with poor return on time invested.". But not everyone agreed.
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Well Formed Teams: Helping Teams Thrive, not just Survive
What does it take to create a high-performing team? According to Doug Shimp and Samall Hazziez, a "Well Formed Team" exhibits the following characteristics: follow Agile and Lean principles, use an adaptive system with a feedback loop, are focused on the business vision, are passionate and hyper-productive.
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Improving Productivity without Formal Metrics
Ron Jeffries has started writing a series of fictional stories based on his observation of real teams. The first story (Kate Oneal: Productivity) focuses on the character Kate O'Neal (CTO) and one of her teams "Rimshot". In this episode Ron explores achieving and measuring Productivity improvements without formal metrics.
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Understanding Business Value
Aside from "Agile" itself, "Business Value" may be one of the most widely used buzzwords around the floors of any fresh agile project. But, how many of these projects actually have a good understanding of what they really mean when they're saying it? Joe Little presents his thoughts on this very question.
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Overburdened Teams are Less Likely to Root Out Waste
Sometimes, management encourages adoption of Agile but fails to help remove the overburden that cripples teams and keeps them in non-productive patterns. In his article, Roman Pichler looks at the "3 M's" of Lean, and how the concept of removing "muri" (overburden) provides help for Agile adoptions, by encouraging teams to give up wishful thinking and commit to their actual capacity.
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Questioning the Retrospective Prime Directive
The 'Retrospective Prime Directive' is commonly used in retrospectives to encourage deep learning without recriminations. But what do you do when you *can't* agree that you "understand and truly believe" that everyone did their best? In this InfoQ article, a group of senior practitioners discusses the benefits and difficulties of using this practice.
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Does "Done" Mean "Shippable"?
There has been a lot of discussion on various agile forums and blogs about the difference between 'Done' and 'Shippable'. It might sound like both mean the same, however discussions on the lists and various blogs suggest that these are still widely misunderstood, mis-used terms. Here's a roundup of recommendations about how to handle "Done."
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Is Velocity Really the Golden Measurement?
What value do teams get from measuring velocity, beyond the ability to reasonably estimate commitments for the short-term future? J.B. Rainsberger proposes that teams spend less energy scrutinizing velocity and more energy thoughtfully identifying and eliminating areas of waste in their projects.
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Agile Kanban: Visual Tracking Beyond the Team Room
In the beginning Agile was largely a developer-driven initiative, sometimes improving development processes only to find the real bottlenecks lay outside developer control. In his latest InfoQ article, Kenji Hiranabe analyses Lean manufacturing's "Kanban" visual tracking tool, how it differs from the Agile taskboard, and how it helps identify more far-reaching improvements.
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Surprising criticism from parting Microsoft development lead
Jay Bazuzi, once Development Lead for the C# Editor, is leaving Microsoft, and he wrote some surprisingly harsh parting words for his friends before he left; things like “OO isn’t a fad” and that “It’s OK to use someone else’s code”.