InfoQ Homepage Continuous Improvement Content on InfoQ
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Moving Beyond Scrum
Many teams new to Agile start with Scrum. Scrum provides clear guidance, rules, and practices to help teams adopt an Agile mindset. It also surfaces a lot of problems in organizations, which is part of what makes it so difficult for many companies to do successfully. For those that have been doing Scrum for a while, the question becomes, what now? Is this all there is?.
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VS2012: Improvements for ALM and Web Developers
Microsoft has made a "huge bet on HTML5 and JavaScript", and stressed the importance of application lifecycle maintenance. InfoQ takes a look at how VS2012 brings new features to the table in its support for these areas.
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Individual Yield
Tony Wong, a project management blackbelt, enumerates some practical points on individual procutivity. This article wonders how well these apply to software development and contrasts his list with that of other lists.
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Amplifying Your Effectiveness (AYE) Conference 2011
The Amplifying Your Effectiveness (or AYE) Conference took place this year in Cary, North Carolina...
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Is Velocity Killing Agile?
Velocity, the measure of work completed by the team divided by the time taken to complete it, is increasingly being used to manage the productivity of a team and as a comparison between teams. Jim Highsmith, Mark Levison, and Scott Ambler discuss the misuse of velocity as a productivity measure.
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What Agile Architecture and Hurricanes have in Common
In a recent presentation at SATURN 2011 Eric Richardson has drawn some analogies between architects in an agile environment and hurricane meteorologists. For example, both produce various forecasts respectively documents, use many kinds of data sources as inputs, and employ different techniques to acquire data. The question arises is: what can architects learn from meteorologists?
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Feedback, Non-Feedback and Uncalled Feedback
The importance of feedback in Agile development is paramount. Feedback is built into every aspect of the methodology ranging from unit tests, continuous integration, daily standup, retrospectives to end of sprint demos. In-spite of all this, are there still some feedback loops which remain incomplete?
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The Importance of Agile Feedback Loops
Several members of the Agile community emphasize the importance of feedback loops in the effectiveness of Agile development processes.
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Agile/Scrum Retrospectives–Tips and Tricks
Retrospectives and feedback loops are at the heart of any successful Agile/Scrum implementation. They’re the tool we use to help teams improve. Yet in two day introduction to Agile classes they often get glossed over. Lacking time trainers (including this one) often race through the topic outlining only one simple type of retrospectives.
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Rules for Better Retrospectives
James Carr recently published a list of five rules to help improve the effectiveness of retrospectives. The rules are based on his experiences in hundreds of retrospectives, both successful and not.
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Opinion: Agile Success Is Not Dependent on Agile Techniques
The marvelous successes of Agile teams in the past, present, and future are fact. But so are the failures: the cases of 'fragile' adoption, 'we suck less' adoption, and many other cases where Agile teams fail to produce great software and/or fail to effect the organization as a whole. Is this something that can be addressed and 'fixed' or is Agile development only useful for a some teams?
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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.
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Improving Distributed Retrospectives
Many consider the retrospective to be an agile team’s most powerful tool for continuous improvement. The retrospective captures learning and insights while experiences are fresh, and the lessons are immediately applied to the teams on-going work. A discussion on the Retrospectives Yahoo Group examined how to adapt a retrospective to work across multiple sites, with a distributed team.
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Key Elements of a Successful Agile Retrospective: Preparation and Participation
Agile retrospective helps the team examine what went well during the past sprint and identify the areas of improvement for the future sprints. However, sometimes the exercise of conducting a retrospective ends up as a futile effort due to lack of preparation. Moreover, key members of the team end up either not attending or not participating in the meeting.
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Partition Your Backlog for Maximum Mileage
Backlogs have been under constant criticism for quite some time now. Mary Poppendieck suggested that the product backlog should be eliminated if it is not satisfying the desired purpose. Serge Beaumont suggested an interesting way of partitioning the backlog such that it maps to a flow and makes the backlog worthy for existence.