InfoQ Homepage Value & Metrics Content on InfoQ
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InfoQ Interview: Ron Jeffries on Running, Tested Features
At Agile2006, Ron Jeffries told InfoQ that tracking "Running Tested Features" is the essential element of Agility, from which all other practices and activities necessarily follow. Ron who took to the whiteboard to explain how RTF benefits customers, by helping helps teams deliver consistently and reliably.
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How Closely Should We Measure Productivity?
A goal of agile methodologies is to improve the productivity of software developers. Unfortunately, productivity can be difficult to measure. In a recent blog posting, Lidor Wyssocky argues against focusing too closely on quantifiable metrics, encouraging us instead to look at "soft evidence" for productivity gains.
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Danube Releases ScrumWorks v1.8
ScrumWorks, the free Agile project tracking software from Danube Technologies, this week announced the release of version 1.8, which adds a Product Import feature to bring existing projects into the tool, a number of customer-requested changes and significant performance enhancements.
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Presentation: Agile Project Management Planning and Budgetting
What happens to planning when teams "self organize"? Agile methods are empirical: plan it, do it, evaluate, plan again. David Hussman reviews practices for planning a project, release, iteration.
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Is Project Status Relative?
Scott Ambler introduces a term for a familiar project phenomenon: the "green shift" that occurs when people rework status reports to make them more politically palatable to management. But can management actually handle the truth?
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Industry Survey Reveals The Bitter Truth About IT ROI
A Ziff-Davis CIO Insight survey on Business Value reveals little improvement in how, or how well, IT is measuring value, even though most firms now try to use metrics such as IRR, NPV, return on assets, or activity-based costing. There's no consensus or consistency on which measures to use, or when to use them. And half of respondents doubt that the measures are even accurate.
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The Creeping Featuritis Chart
Creeping Featuritis is an insidious sort of product rot, reducing useful software into heaps of expensive widgets and aggravating help features. Peter Abilla brings us a chart by Kathy Sierra, capturing what it looks like from the customer's point of view, and reminds us to "focus on the customer and abandon the competitor-focused strategy all-together."
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Measuring Performance in the Adaptive Enterprise
Traditional thinking has turned budgets into fixed performance contracts that force managers at all levels to commit to specified financial outcomes, despite the fact that many of the underlying variables are beyond their control. As Agility increases the futility of this exercise becomes apparent. Thought-leader Jim Highsmith proposes a helpful alternative more harmonious with Agile values.
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Jim Highsmith Proposes An Adaptive Performance Management System
Jim Highsmith, Director of Cutter Consortium's Agile Project Management Practice told the APLN Leadership Summit audience yesterday: "...to achieve truly agile, innovative organizations, a change in our approach to performance management systems is necessary... 'Conforming to plan' while delivering scant business value will seriously impede agility, whether in projects or the entire enterprise.
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Online Discussion on Scrum Requirements Basics
The ScrumDevelopment list has seen lively discussion lately on Requirements issues frequently faced by new teams: "Can the ScrumMaster be the Product Owner too?", "How do we prioritize our Product Backlog?" and "QA's role in a SCRUM process". New teams quickly discover that a poor-quality Product Backlog can frustrate and undermine a team that is otherwise raring to start delivering value.
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Statistics on Agile Practices Problematic
Keith Ray questions the value of statistics for software processes, including Agile processes.
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ESB Roundup Part Two: Use Cases
This is the second part of InfoQ's ESB series, an exploration of Enterprise Service Bus, or ESB technologies. The focus is use cases required by companies deploying this technology, such as protocol bridging, security intermediation and service virtualization. The article references analyst commentary, survey research results and comments on part one of the ESB roundup.
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ScrumWorks Release 1.7.0 adds Tagging
Danube Technologies' latest ScrumWorks release 1.7.0 includes an important feature for enterprise users who need to trace back to multiple backlogs or integrate with other project tools - tagging and filtering with user-managed "themes".
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Value-Driven Planning and Metrics
A stable Agile team can cost roughly the same each week, but value delivered changes over time. Agile planning takes into account the customer's view of value, allowing the team to deliver the most important business value right away, and allowing their customer to halt the work when cost exceeds value delivered. Why aren't all teams measuring Business Value? Dan Rawsthorne shows one way to do it.
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Health Check: Has Your Team Got Rhythm?
Agile work keeps things simple by putting in place some basic patterns. Sometimes, when problems arise within the process, complex solutions can be averted by simply re-establishing a rhythm in the cycle of releases, iterations, days, stories/features. Agile Journal, in their Metrics edition, published three articles which mention the importance of rhythm as a diagnostic.