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Culture & Methods

Reawakening Agile with OKRs?

Corporate agile often represents an improvement over what went before but falls short on delivering the high performance management wants and quality engineering environment developers dream of. The backlog becomes tyranny. Could OKRs - objectives and key results - reawaken the radical side of agile? Or do OKRs represent a return to command and control?

Allan Kelly
on Jun 10, 2021
Culture & Methods

Q&A on the Book EDGE: Value-Driven Digital Transformation

In the book EDGE: Value-driven Digital Transformation, the authors explain why and how every business today needs to become a digital business with technology at the core. They explain six principles and a variety of practices that organisations can apply to survive and thrive on the creative edge where value is generated.

Shane Hastie Jim Highsmith Linda Luu David Robinson
on Jan 02, 2020
Culture & Methods

On Uncertainty, Prediction, and Planning

This article describes the software industry’s dismal history with predictions and planning in the face of uncertainty. It details some of the reasons why we fail to learn from our repeated mistakes. It suggests alternative approaches that are based on learning and include the strategy of hypothesis testing (Hypothesis-Driven Development) for deciding which features to deliver.

J Meadows
on Nov 29, 2019 1
Culture & Methods

Agile and Late! End-to-End Delivery Metrics to Improve Your Predictability

Agile teams may need to deliver milestones expected at a certain time, so will need to forecast or risk being accused of being “Agile and late”. There are metrics that relate to the “Logical Six” potential sources of delay which are key to improve forecasting accuracy. The metrics can used to create a Root Cause RAG Progress Report – to share a more accurate forecast and clear mitigations.

Charlie Ponsonby
on Nov 01, 2019 1
Culture & Methods

Author Q&A on the Book Software Estimation Without Guessing

George Dinwiddie has written a book titled Software Estimation without Guessing: Effective Planning in an Imperfect World. The book discusses different approaches to estimation for software products, the ways they can go wrong and be misused, and when to use them

Shane Hastie George Dinwiddie
on Oct 09, 2019
Culture & Methods

The Importance of Metrics to Agile Teams

This article outlines the importance of and proposes meaningful Agile metrics for teams seeking to raise overall performance and whose members seek to continuously self-improve. It emphasizes that team members should democratically agree and manage these metrics. It also advises what to look for in tools that track performance against agreed metrics over time.

Will Lytle Charlie Ponsonby
on Jun 22, 2019
Culture & Methods

Agile in the Context of a Holistic Approach

In this article Jon Kern, co-author of the Agile Manifesto, describes a set of critical practices that serve to build up a holistic view of the project, from which all else proceeds. Fail to do a good job at taking the systems view, and your project will likely not go as well as it could. It might even fail.

Jon Kern
on Oct 01, 2018
Culture & Methods

Measuring Tech Performance: You’re Probably Doing It Wrong

We try our best to measure our performance, and along the way identify just the right OKRs and KPIs and ABCs. There’s no One True Metric That Matters, but there are some useful guidelines and some all-too-commonly made mistakes. Use measures that focus on outcomes, not output, and measures that optimize for global or team outcomes, not local or individual outcomes.

Dr Nicole Forsgren PhD
on Jul 22, 2018
Culture & Methods

Why Software Estimation Is More Important Now Than Ever

In a world trending away from traditional waterfall and toward agile development methodologies, it would be understandable to assume that there is no longer a need for software project estimation. However, that assumption would be wrong - estimation is still a very valuable practice, even in organizations that are dependent upon agile development methodologies.

Larry Putnam Jr
on Mar 08, 2018 9
Culture & Methods

Actionable Analytics for Lean Project Management

Measuring the right KPIs of your workflow is the key for implementing successful Lean project management. Applying these actionable analytics is going to help you track your team's progress towards reaching process perfection, allow you to project future performance and help you spot potential problems in an early stage.

Alexander Novkov
on Jun 03, 2017
Culture & Methods

Monte Carlo Planning Improves Decision Making

De la Maza helped a startup IPO by applying Monte Carlo to a planning problem. Learn how Monte Carlo planning provides a rigorous, quantitative account of what the future may bring. It has advantages over standard average case approaches and you can start with a simple Excel spreadsheet.

Michael de la Maza
on Mar 15, 2017
Culture & Methods

Size Estimation Approaches for Use with Agile Methods

Reifer’s software sizing survey identifies five commonly used methods for sizing agile projects along with their strengths and weaknesses. Size is used as the basis for measurement and estimation. Stories/story points is the most popular, while function points are used at the project level. Sizing by analogy, proxies, Halstead vocabulary and hybrids are used by others as the situation warrants.

Donald Reifer
on Feb 06, 2017 3