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  • A Leaner Start: Reducing Team Setup Times

    How long does it take a newcomer to become an effective member of your team? Learning integral to agile methodologies, but the learning needs of the newcomer are different from established team members: in a standup meeting, "I did (unintelligible) yesterday" offers them more questions than answers. Pat Kua suggests some practices that specifically reduce the "setup time" for new team members.

  • AgileEVM: Measuring Cost Efficiency Across the Product Lifecycle

    In this InfoQ article, Tamara Suleiman explains AgileEVM, an adaptation of traditional Earned Value Management (EVM) metrics, designed to fit a Scrum project management framework. Compatible with traditional EVM metrics, it allows both Agile and traditional projects to be tracked within a single program, giving important early warnings of trends across the entire product life cycle.

  • Book Review: The Responsibility Virus Helps Fear Undermine Collaboration

    Do "empowered" organizations outperform their command-and-control competitors? Business school dean Roger Martin saw this promising approach fail too frequently. His diagnosis: he calls it the Responsibility Virus, and offers tools to help those who would treat the Virus in their own workplace. Reviewer Deborah Hartmann found this book a good explanation of why process is not enough.

  • Visualizing Agile Projects using Kanban Boards

    In the spirit of "information radiators and “big visible charts” Kenji Hiranabe proposes using Kanban Boards to organize three viewpoints (Time, Task, and Team) so the whole team understands the current status of the project and can work in an autonomous, motivated and collaborative manner.

  • Designing Collaborative Spaces for Productivity

    The typical Agile team may work in a common "teamroom", but personal space is also needed. Teams find out fast enough that some of the creature comforts left behind in their former traditional spaces were there for good reasons. This article shares the collected wisdom of dozens of teams who created their own work spaces, as collected by several experienced Agile coaches.

  • "Real Options" Underlie Agile Practices

    Whether we realise it or not, "freedom to choose" is a principle underlying many Agile practices. By avoiding early commitments, we gain flexibility in the choices we make later. In this article, Chris Matts and Olav Maassen propose that an understanding of "Real Options" allows us to develop and refine new agile practices and take agile in directions it hasn't gone before.

  • Executive summary - An Adaptive Performance Management System

    Traditional thinking has turned budgets into fixed performance contracts forcing managers at all levels to commit to specified financial outcomes, although many of the underlying variables are beyond their control. In this Cutter Executive Summary, Jim Highsmith offers an alternative for the adaptive organization: a project performance management system and a team performance management system.

  • Agile: The SOA Hangover Cure

    Author Carl Ververs who is an expert on SOA Integration and Distributed Systems writes about the application of "Agile" development philosophies that ensures that organizations can overcome architectural paralysis and get moving on those important SOA projects, while at the same time ensuring that the architecture is sufficiently flexible and adaptable for future growth.

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