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New Book: The Human Side of Agile
Gil Broza has written a book focusing on the people factors that are needed for successful agile adoption and transformation in an organization. He offers advice targeting leaders at all levels.
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Agile and SOA, Hand in Glove?
Agile is the hand that works in the glove. SOA is the glove, the scope is enterprise wide. Most principles of SOA and Agile are not in conflict. When they are, they keep each other sane. Agile development without a clear vision of the goals and objectives of the company is futile. SOA without a clear vision how to make it real using agile development principles is a waste of time and money.
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Book Review: Agile Adoption Patterns, A Roadmap to Organizational Success
Ryan Cooper reviewed Amr Elssamadisy's new book and found it a useful framework for designing customized adoption strategies. Rather than a single recipe of Agile practices for everyone, the reader is offered patterns and tools to help determine which practices will most effectively help them reach their own organization's specific goals.
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Choose Feature Teams over Component Teams for Agility
Feature teams, common enough in small groups, are all too rare in large product development - but they can be a key to scaling with agility. This article analyses how feature teams resolve weaknesses of component teams, and points out key issues to address when transitioning. It is an excerpt from "Scaling Lean and Agile Development," by Craig Larman and Bas Vodde, to be published later this year.
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Improvement, Success and Failure: Scrum Adoption in China
This recent inquiry, by InfoQ China editor Jacky Li, picked 5 very different cases of Scrum adoption in China, which got different results, and asked: Why did you use Scrum? How did you adopt it? What problems did you encounter, and why did it succeed or fail? Despite the small sample size, it's an interesting comparison, pointing out that improvement doesn't ensure success.
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Book Excerpt: Scaling Software Agility
"But does Agile scale?" Emerging stories and case studies indicate that it certainly does. InfoQ brings you two excerpts from Dean Leffingwell's book "Scaling Software Agility: Best Practices for Large Enterprises". Chapter 1 presents how Agile methods respond to the need for competitive advantage, and Chapter 2 revisits "Why the Waterfall Model Doesn’t Work".
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Case Study: Targeted Practice Adoption using Patterns
It's easy to forget what originally motivated us, once we're implementing Agile. Teams spin, trying to figure out which practices to start with, unsure which will have the biggest impact, or how they fit together. Amr Elssamadisy and John Mufarrige propose a customized adoption approach to help teams decide where to focus first - an alternative to adoption of pre-packaged methodologies.
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Cultivating Agile Attitudes
In this article, Dafydd Rees reminds us that there are no simple steps that guarantee a smooth transition to agile: true success with agile methodologies requires a true change in behavior and outlook. This article offers advice on "Growing Agile Developers," "Creating Agile Coaches," and "Weeding out Hidden Problems."
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Adopting Agile Development Practices: Using Patterns to Share our Experiences
Agile adoption often proves challenging. Participants at a recent OpenSpace event focused on the dynamics of adoption rather than the structure that results from adoption. The resulting patterns are part of an effort to compile Agile adoption patterns answering: "What specific practices should I adopt?", "How can I adopt incrementally?" and "Where can I expect pitfalls?"
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Book Excerpt: Implementing Lean Software Development: From Concept to Cash
In 2003 Mary and Tom Poppendieck adapted the revolutionary principles of Lean manufacturing for software development. Their new book offers a blend of history, theory, and practice, drawing on their experience optimizing the software "value stream". They present the right questions to ask, the key issues to focus on, and techniques proven to work for those implementing a lean software process.
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What is Agility, and Why Should You Care?
Coach Mishkin Berteig introduces the benefits of Agility with two stories of highly responsive teams, and outlines some further reading. Agile helps people work more effectively by empowering teams, amplifying learning and eliminating waste. Agility teaches the team to modify its own working process over time, always with a view to providing more value to the enterprise while reducing waste.
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Being Agile Without Going Overboard
Agile Software Development is gaining popularity. But, what does it mean to be agile? Is it using unit testing, continuous integration, following XP, Scrum? In this article Venkat Subramaniam discusses how to incrementally introduce agility into a project which is in trouble and not currently agile.