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  • Interview and Book Review Change Artistry

    The book change artistry is a collection of essays from Esther Derby, Don Gray, Johanna Rothman and Gerald M. Weinberg. The essays cover a variety of topics to support professionals in developing their organizational change skills.

  • The Sustainability Agenda in Kanban

    This first article in the series on the Kanban “nine values, three agendas” model, explores the sustainability agenda: a common approach to Kanban adoption at the level of individuals and teams, often motivated by the need for relief from unsustainable practices and workloads. This sustainability agenda draws on the Kanban values transparency, balance, and collaboration.

  • Pragmatic Techniques for Maintaining a Legacy Application

    Maintaining a legacy application can make you feel like mice in a maze. In this article Ping Chen shares her experiences on how to pragmatically maintain a large legacy application. "Pragmatic” is the operative word; since a legacy application can have lots of technical debt, one has to be strategic in choosing the right battles.

  • Tracking Schedule Progress in Agile

    The challenge of knowing whether we are on track to deliver haunts projectmanagers and developmentmanagers at various levels as their organizations take on agile approaches to product and project development. Driving towards smaller work items and lower work in process brings the benefits of both better project risk management as well as more effective agile execution and learning.

  • I’d Rather Be Coding – Writing Things Down

    For lots of reasons, most developers hate writing down anything that isn’t code. The Agile Manifesto deemphasizes documentation, but there are times on a project when a little documentation can go a long way. In this article, we will explore why collaboration over comprehensive documentation shouldn’t mean “NO” documentation – and when you should stop coding and start writing things down.

  • Retrospectives Applied as “PROspectives"

    We can view situations in our work as opportunities from which to learn how to better handle similar situations in future, by looking back and asking “How will I deal with future situations like this to improve my results?” PROspectives help us to reflect more often, independently of acute, unexpected problems and without time pressure, to uncover ideas for future improvements.

  • Book Review and Author Q&A - Explore It! by Elisabeth Hendrickson

    Elisabeth Hendrickson has released a book on the practices, techniques and mindset of exploratory testing. Sharon Robson reviewed the book and raised some questions with the author.

  • Architecture and Agility: Married, Divorced, or Just Good Friends?

    This article describes the relationship between architecture and process of software development and how architecture can responds to a set of needs, such as functional requirements, operational characteristics, and developer habitability. It also talks about the role of pragmatic architects when working with developers and stakeholders.

  • The Gentle Art of Running a Lean Startup

    Yiannis relates the practices and approach of running a Lean Startup organisation with the skills and disciplines needed in the martial arts through his practice of Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu. He shows how the underlying practices of both are very similar and how understanding the martial arts approach can assist in conserving energy and maximising outcomes in a lean startup organisation.

  • Spreading CMMI Practices among Agile Teams in Big Organizations

    Agile methodologies have become mainstream because they provide a better fit to the modern, changing software world. CMMI is a cross-organizational approach which has proven successful in terms of quality assurance and cost when executed properly. Big organizations with self-organized agile teams can achieve technical maturity levels, by using a common metalanguage and a good-practices catalog.

  • Agile Walls

    BVCs, TOWs and POWs are very important tools in the agile world but what exactly are they? BVCs are Big Visible Charts, TOWs are Things on Walls and POWs are Plain Old Whiteboards – information radiators all. Using the right wallware and the information they provide can make or break an agile team.

  • The Perfect Dev/Test Lab: 10 Principles that make it Possible

    Software that drives the business typically takes inordinate amounts of time to develop and test. Now with new technologies able to normalize the private and public clouds the ultimate software development lab is not only feasible but cost-effective as well. To achieve hyper-agile software development, here are key principles for building the next-gen dev/test lab of enterprise DevOps’ dreams.

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