InfoQ Homepage Planning Content on InfoQ
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Interview: Johanna Rothman on Schedule Games and other Organizational Dysfunctions
Johanna Rothman is an organizational consultant, coach and co-creator of the AYE conference (Accelerate Your Effectiveness). Deborah Hartmann interviewed her at Agile2007 about her third management book - and discovered that there are names for some of the the scheduling games that cause us to spin our wheels, including: Bring Me A Rock, Queen of Denial and Pants on Fire!
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InfoQ Presentation: Selecting the Right Methodology and Steering it to Success
It's easy to agree with "anything more than 'barely sufficient' in is waste," but it's more complicated when we actually need to customize a process for a particular project. At Agile2006 Todd Little shared a model to help leaders choose the right flavour of Agile based on project and team attributes, and he emphasised the need to actively steer projects as development progresses.
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Discussion: Measuring Success of an Agile Project from the Customer’s Perspective
A recent discussion on the Scrum Development list looked at: “How does a customer measure the success of an Agile project?” Emphasis on: “measure”. The discussion seemed to agree that clients do need a way to track success in their terms, and various metrics were suggested, though it was agreed: it depends on the situation and the customer.
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VersionOne Announces New UI and Embedded Forecasting in Release 8
VersionOne recently announced Release 8 of their agile project management and team organization tool suite. This new release features an all-new user interface, introduction of a release forecasting toolset, and additional plug-n-play integrations for some popular open source tools.
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Measure Teams, Not Individuals
Michael Dubakov recently expressed warning against the measurement of individual velocity and individual estimate accuracy. His view: measurement of these metrics not only provides no more useful information than is already available with their team-level equivalents, but may also have a tendency to encourage teams into behaviors that reduce effectiveness.
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Are Iterations/Sprints Waste or Value to Agile Teams?
Although many people consider iteration to be a key characteristic of agile software development, some question whether or not they're important, and add value to an agile method, or if they're superfluous, or even wasteful. InfoQ has assembled a roundup of arguments on the subject, to help agile teams decide if iterations are important for them.
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Is Velocity Really the Golden Measurement?
What value do teams get from measuring velocity, beyond the ability to reasonably estimate commitments for the short-term future? J.B. Rainsberger proposes that teams spend less energy scrutinizing velocity and more energy thoughtfully identifying and eliminating areas of waste in their projects.
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Target Process 2.7: Agile Project Management tool for Distributed Teams
Target Process 2.7 has been released. Target Process is an Agile Process Management tool that automates many of the tasks associated with an agile project. Notable features in recent iterations include visual iteration planning, program level release planning, individual velocity reports, and more.
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Multiple Projects, One Agile Team
It's not uncommon for an organization to have one group of developers who need to complete multiple projects. In those situations, how should the group be structured, and how should their work be planned and allocated?
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What Makes a Tool Agile?
Individuals and interactions over processes and tools is the very first of the values of the Agile Manifesto. Tools, however, seem to be a big part of development on most Agile teams. When does a tool help and when does it hinder (Agile) software development?
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InfoQ Article: Lean Kanban Boards for Agile Tracking
"Big Visible Charts" aren't unique to Agile - Lean manufacturing also has its Kanban Boards. "Kanban" roughly means "card or sign," and each Kanban card is "pulled" onto the board only when the work represented by an "in progress" card is retired. In this InfoQ article, Kenji Hiranabe proposes using Kanban Boards to track Agile project status (Time, Task, and Team) to enhance collaboration.
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VersionOne release Agile Enterprise 7.2
Version One recently announced their new release of V1: Agile Enterprise, InfoQ provide an overview of the new functionality in the latest release of one of the more prominent pieces of Agile project management software.
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InfoQ Interview: Experiences with Planning Poker
In this fourteen-minute interview, Nils Haugen described "Planning Poker," a simple mechanism for arriving at estimates collaboratively, which has additional team building benefits and improves team estimates over time. Haugen shared his views on why this technique is an important tool for Agile teams in this InfoQ interview.
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Working with Mingle
InfoQ had some time with Mingle project engineer Jay Wallace, to use ThoughtWorks' much anticipated Mingle software and demonstrate to us how it differentiates itself from other products by being a truly agile project management tool.
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Incremental Software Development without Iterations
David Anderson described how his team is using a kanban system for their sustaining engineering (maintenance and bug fixing) activities. Iterations have been dropped although software is still released every two weeks. Work is scheduled, monitored, and run via a "kanban board" and daily stand-up meetings.