InfoQ Homepage Delivering Value Content on InfoQ
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Achieving Agility Needed for Business Survival
An increasing number of organizations are embracing Agile development as a survival tactic in these turbulent economic times. This in turn has lead to a number of pundits examining what attitudes and attributes their teams need to be successful. Business agility is important, but how is this agility achieved?
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Being A Better Product Owner
Anyone who has spent any time on an effectively executed agile project can attest to the fact that the Product Owner's (or, in XP, the "Customer's") collaboration with the development team plays a key role in the success of a team. Peter Stevens offers a bit of advice to help people in these roles do this well.
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Presentation: Principles and Practices of Lean-Agile Software Development
In this presentation held during Agile 2008, Alan Shalloway, CEO and founder of Net Objectives, presents the Lean software development principles and practices and how they can benefit to Agile practitioners.
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Iterating To Acquire Knowledge, Not Just 'Business Value'
At first glance, most agile methodologies define simply that stories be developed in order by business value. In many cases though, it is prudent to blend increasing business value with deliberate steps in "knowledge acquisition". Alistair Cockburn describes how to do this blending effectively, and how to leverage it to deliver the right feature set at the right time.
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The Power of Done
Scott Schimanski recently added his voice to those talking about the power of a clear definition of "done." Scott points out there is both business and personal value in a well-defined meaning of "done". The business can count on shipping features that are done, without making any additional investment, while individuals really seem to enjoy the sense of accomplishment that comes with "done."
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Presentation: Prioritizing Your Product Backlog
Choosing the right features can make the difference between the success and failure of a software product. Mike Cohn presented 'Prioritizing your Project Backlog' at Agile 2008 on how a project backlog should be organized and prioritized and non-financial techniques for prioritization such as kano analysis, theme screening/scoring, relative weighting and analytic hierarchy process.
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Presentation: Future Directions for Agile
In this presentation filmed during Agile 2008, David Anderson talks about the history of Agile, the current status of it and his vision for the future. The role of Agile does not stand in just having a practice, but in finding ways to implement the principles contained by the Agile Manifesto.
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InfoQ Book Review: Agile Adoption Patterns
Ryan Cooper picked up Agile Adoption Patterns: A Roadmap to Organizational Success by InfoQ's own Amr Elssamadisy and gives this book a positive: This book belongs on the bookshelf on anyone who is interested in helping a traditional software organization make an effective transition to a more agile way of working.
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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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Agile Practices with the Highest Return on Investment
Return on Investment is a critical factor for decision making pertaining to following a particular software development practice. The post summarizes the ROI benefits of Agile and the inexpensive practices which lead to highest return on investment.
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Could the Solution to IT's Problems be less IT-Business Alignment?
The never ending debate about the role, the relevance or the organization of IT has added yet another frustration moment. Susan Cram, an industry expert, shared the 8 things -she thinks- we hate about IT. In her analysis, she points out a surprising remedy: avoiding the IT alignment trap.
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Should your architecture focus on SOA or BPM?
While SOA was the big name in the buzzword tag cloud, BPM is quickly getting bigger and bigger. As organizations are becoming more aware of the need to tame their processes in order to get the benefits of IT investments, BPM is gaining importance and mindshare inside and outside of IT. Is one more important for your architecture?
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Impediments To Your Value-Stream
Scrum defines an impediment as "anything keeping the team from being more productive" and clearly stresses that teams establish means to remove them as continuously as possible. Joe Little proposes an impediment's scope may be better established as being anything keeping the organization from delivering value.
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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.