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Rowing in the Same Direction: Use Value Streams to Align Work Ambiguity abounds about value streams, so it’s good to clarify what they are, why they matter, and how to exploit them. It's important to help employees understand the organization's definition of value, to provide visibility on how business value is created, and to focus on the fast flow of value through the value streams. If everyone understands which direction to row the boat, they can steer toward it together.
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Why You Need to Be Doing Continuous Integration It’s usually easy and inexpensive to set up a continuous integration environment for either an agile or a waterfall project. Perhaps the most obvious benefit of CI is the elimination of the integration phase that existed in traditional waterfall projects, where we typically slip the worst on deadlines. But there are many other benefits to continuous integration that you may not have considered.
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5 Tips for Getting Retrospectives Done Right Unfortunately, many retrospectives are not productive. It may be that the discussions are unfocused, not enough data was gathered to be helpful for analysis, or the team concentrates too much on issues they can’t control. Retrospectives should be a key part of an agile process for helping the team improve. Here are five tips that will help you have more valuable retrospectives.
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To Kick-Start Your Agile Project, Begin with a Minimum Viable Team You've heard of a minimum viable product, which has only enough features to create a working model and provide feedback for further development. If you want to get started on a new project quickly, Allan Kelly suggests assembling a minimum viable team—only a few people, with only the necessary skills. They begin work right away, with a small budget and tight feedback loops, driving down risk.
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Agile Trends to Watch in 2018 With 2018 well underway, it seems like a good time to look ahead and think about what we hope to accomplish this year. Find out which agile trends these software experts are most looking forward to in the coming months.
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Top 10 AgileConnection Articles of 2017 Agile software development is mainstream by now, but people are still finding ways to experiment with agile. Measuring agile success with metrics, the debate over whether to use estimates, and improving predictability in Scrum were all hot topics last year. The rise of DevOps has given even more material for people curious to adopt the practice, so automation and "continuous everything" were also popular subjects.
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Find Your Metaphor for Agile Software Design How you think about software design can have a big impact on how effective you are when you do it. All of us have different criteria for success, and some of them aren’t even conscious. We have to figure out what resonates for us so that we make the right choices, and we can get a clue about the right choices for us by looking at the metaphors we use when we talk about software.
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Experimenting with Daily Retrospectives Experimentation is a great way to unleash creativity, continuously improve, and see what works and what doesn't. When a team was tossing around the idea of doing daily retrospectives, agile coach Ben Kopel decided to guide them through some iterations on the process. Here, he talks about what the team did and what they gained from both the retrospectives and the quick feedback from experimenting.
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Signs Your DevOps Initiative Is Off the Rails There’s lots of confusion about what DevOps is. This has resulted in the emergence of DevOps “antipatterns”—DevOps patterns of behavior that will not result in success. There are often clear signs that what you are doing isn’t going to work. This article delves into some of them in hopes you can avoid these mistakes and successfully implement DevOps principles and practices.
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Your Strategic Planning Should Be Agile, Too What has agile taught us about trying to plan everything up front? It usually doesn’t work. So why does your company still use a yearly strategic planning approach that takes six months to develop and requires significant time and effort to pivot to new opportunities and challenges? We need to rethink strategic planning to incorporate design thinking, collaboration, and agility.
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