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  • Remote Working Works

    Do you assume that remote working is a compromise? Around 5 years ago my team, and much of our software house, decided we could work as effectively from home. Many of us left London and headed to the country, replacing bars and restaurants with poultry keeping and mountain biking. Today we are closer, collaborate more, recruit better people and work more effectively than we ever did.

  • Scrum Master Allocation: The Case for a Dedicated Scrum Master

    Sharing scrum masters across teams sounds like a great way to cut costs and stretch limited budgets in agile organizations. But you might not be saving as much as you think with this approach– you could even be losing money. Discover the true impact of timesharing your agile coaches, and learn about implications for your financial bottom line that you probably have not considered.

  • Author Q&A: Portia Tung on The Dream Team Nightmare

    Portia Tung answers questions about her "build your own adventure" book - The Dream Team Nightmare. Aimed at agile coaches and teams it presents a variety of scenarios for the reader to navigate by making choices at the end of each section. Some of these choices result in success and some expose various failure modes which the reader can examine and learn from.

  • 3 years of Kanban at Sandvik IT: Sustaining Kanban in the Enterprise

    This second article in the “3 years of Kanban at Sandvik IT” series focuses on the lessons that the System Development Office learned when sustaining the Kanban method during this 4 years journey. Presented are four qualities that Sandvik IT identified as key when setting-up relevant, and long-term, kanban systems in the enterprise: Stickiness, Clarity, Curiosity and Influence.

  • Coaching the CxO

    Agile coaches are not unfamiliar in working with management roles such as project managers and team managers to facilitate changes on team level. But now they need to facilitate change on management level, which completely changes the scope of the agile coach. This article helps agile coaches to understand the context of their target audience and formulate a coaching message matching that context.

  • Kanban at Scale – A Siemens Success Story

    This article shows an internally driven and remarkably smooth Kanban implementation approach which very quickly rewarded Siemens Health Services (HS) with real and sustainable improvements in predictability, efficiency and quality. It demonstrates the benefits of “flow” and its advantages in terms of actionable metrics and forecasting capabilities based on real data captured from recent releases.

  • Interview and Book Review of The Technical and Social History of Software Engineering

    Capers Jones wrote the book The Technical and Social History of Software Engineering in which he provides an overview of the evolution of information technology and software development. InfoQ interviewed Capers about advancements and events in software engineering and the effects that they have had on our society.

  • The Kanban Survivability Agenda

    This third and last article in the series on the Kanban “nine values, three agendas” model explores the survivability agenda. The values associated with this agenda are understanding, agreement, and respect; these say much about the philosophy that underlies Kanban, the humane, start with what you do now approach to change.

  • Author Q&A – The Lean Mindset by Tom and Mary Poppendieck

    The Lean Mindset is a collection of research results and case studies from companies applying lean in product development and delivery. A lean mindset according to Mary and Tom Poppendieck is about “developing the expertise to ask the right questions, solve the right problems, and do the right thing in the situation at hand”.

  • No More Technical Debt - Invest in Quality

    Handling Technical Debt in a software system is a complex challenge. Code can always be improved – but customers only care about features. This article discusses the new metaphor “Quality Investments”. It helps to better communicate the quality of the system and guide improvements by focusing on their pay off and return of investment.

  • Solving the Gordian Knot of Chronic Overcommittment in Development Organizations

    Why do we promise more than we can deliver? Why do we say yes when we are already too busy? Chronic Overcommitment is a pervasive problem in the IT industry. In this article we take a look at the behaviors that drive over commitment and the dynamics at play in your organization the make it a difficult problem to solve. Finally, we offer some advice to those who suffer from this affliction.

  • 3 years of Kanban at Sandvik IT: The Story of an Improvement Journey

    This is the story of an enterprise-wide Kanban implementation. It explains why Sandvik IT chose the Kanban method; how it was deployed using a kick-start concept; how it was followed-up using a depth-of-kanban assessment; and the effects so far. The article includes links to concrete and step-by-step information on how to run these kick-starts and assessments

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