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  • Book Excerpt: Coaching Agile Teams by Lyssa Adkins

    Very little in our education or experience properly prepares a ScrumMaster or project manager for the role of agile coach. This leaves most wondering, "What is my role in a self-organized team? How do I help the team yet stay hands-off?" This chapter, excerpted from the book Coaching Agile Teams, shows you how to activate the journey toward high performance in both provocative and practical ways.

  • 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.

  • Agile Teamwork: The Leadership - Self-management Dilemma

    Self-managed teams are unstable and are successful when the ‘Leadership – Self-Management’ dilemma is understood and dealt with. Too much central control destroys agility, inhibits creativity and resists change. Too much self-management leads to chaos and anarchy and destroys a team. A successful Agile Team operates as far along self-management as it can, without tipping over into chaos.

  • Burndown Analysis for Managing Productivity & Schedules

    Managing the productivity and the schedules on a project is always a big challenge due to the complexities involved in taking the decisions fast. We attempt to use the “Burndown” information to address this issue. We show how a burndown chart comes in handy when a Project team is faced with the tough questions on the issues pertaining to Schedule, Resource Management and Productivity.

  • Virtual Panel: The evolution of bug trackers

    Bug (issue) tracking systems have become a standard tool for any organization that develops software and have evolved greatly in the last years. InfoQ has conducted a virtual panel with people from JIRA, FogBugz, Basecamp and MantisBT about this evolution and the future developments in this field.

  • Collaborative Leadership and Collaborative Management

    What is the role of a leader in today’s dynamic environments? Does traditional management provide value in a market that requires agility and adaptability? In this article, we propose a leadership and management framework that fits well with the current need for innovation and distributed decision-making.

  • Book Review: Facilitator's Guide to Participatory Decision Making

    One of the responsibilities of self-organizing teams is to take decisions that respect everyone’s opinion. This book has some great examples in coaching the team to navigate through difficult discussions so they can maintain their speed without endangering their success by suspending or ignoring critical issues.

  • Scaling Agile with C/ALM (Collaborative Application Lifecycle Management)

    IBM Rational and InfoQ published an eBook, Scaling Agile with C/ALM, "dedicated to all of the functional and dysfunctional organizations that are eager to break down the organizational and cultural silos, and become a finely tuned software delivery machine." The eBook explores the barriers to team integration and scaling and then shows, in detail, how to overcome these obstacles.

  • The Hidden Face of Agile

    There are intangibles that result from adopting Agile development techniques. The hidden side of the transformation, so to speak – the changes in perceived values of interpersonal relationships, the enhanced necessity for trust, the soon-obvious need for enhancing cross-site communication inefficiencies are examined in this article.

  • Making TDD Stick: Problems and Solutions for Adopters

    Mark Levison observed that, after solid classroom training, teams in larger companies still struggle to adopt TDD. To better understand the problem he surveyed team members. In this article he shares the problems he uncovered and his own comprehensive strategy, designed to help anyone introducing TDD into an organization.

  • Key Takeaway Points and Lessons Learned from QCon San Francisco 2008

    This article presents the main takeway points as seen by the many attendees who blogged about QCon. Comments are organized by tracks and sessions: Keynotes, Interviews, RESTFul Web Integration in Practice, Solutions Track, Performance and Scalability, Being Agile, Ruby in the Enterprise, Cloud Computing, Functional/Concurrent Programming Applied, Effective design and Clean code, and many more!

  • "Who Do You Trust?" by Linda Rising

    During Agile 2008, Dr. Linda Rising held a presentation centered on experiments conducted many years ago, presenting how deep, powerfully affecting, and difficult to avoid are human “prejudices” and “stereotypes”. This article is a summary of that presentation.

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