agile

Nearly every CIO or VP of R&D is struggling to improve their time to market while increase the number of features delivered within stagnant or shrinking budgets. Two objectives of software development teams will address this need are to improve predictability and optimize productivity By combining views of predictability and productivity of the development activity, the team and its stakeholders can quickly and easily tell if the development is on track, if predictability is improving, and if team members are self-aware enough to improve their overall output.

I missed one presentation in my last post. At Oredev, I had an opportunity to speak with the PMI Sweden folks (at least, the southern Sweden folks). I talked about Agile Program Management, and discussed my current thinking about agile program management.

Lisa Crispin writes that you need to understand the purpose of a user story or feature. Start with the "why." You can worry later about the "how." The customers get to decide on the business value to be delivered. They generally aren't qualified to dictate the technical implementation of that functionality. It's up to the technical team to decide the best way to deliver the desired feature through the software.

Kirk Knoernschild discusses the subtle though significant ways that continuous integration can be leveraged—from helping to align IT with the business to enforcing architectural constraints—and shows that this fundamental aspect of agility is the defining and necessary element of a truly agile development experience.