agile
Articles
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Agile Strategies for Geographically Distributed Quality Management Geographically Distributed Development (GDD) is a common strategy in the software world today. Organizations are gaining experience in developing software globally and are discovering that the competitive demand for best-in-class, high quality applications requires greater agility in quality management. Unfortunately, IT budgets are not keeping up with the staff required for quality management and the response is to accelerate quality management by leveraging global teams. This article compares and contrasts agile GDD testing strategies for affecting quality management. |
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Why Agile Development Teams Need Business Analysts Unfortunately for the business analyst (BA), much of the literature regarding agile development focuses on the perspective of the developer, largely ignoring the role of the business analyst. BAs play a key role capturing requirements on large, software-intensive projects. Teams are co-located where programmers and their "customers" interact directly as a means of eliciting requirements. Organizations that are moving toward agile development may wonder if a has a role in agile software development. The answer, as addressed by this paper, is a resounding "Yes." |
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Balancing Skills For Agile Team Success Often, our agile teams are made up of junior and senior people. Some of these people tend to be more domain focused, such as understanding financial services, while others are more engineering focused, with expertise in software architecture and programming languages. While this mix is generally beneficial from a synergistic point of view, it can also create friction during development - friction that requires active management attention and a proactive balancing of the relative quot;skills scales.quot; |
John Puopolo
September 12, 2007 |
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Challenging Why (Not If) Scrum Works Agile works. Early adopters, working largely by instinct, have seen good success. To go to the next level, instinct alone is not enough. As we face more complex and uncertain environments, as we face the need to scale to the enterprise, we need to apply intelligence and knowledge, guided by experience. Knowledge about why Scrum works. |
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Lean Anti-Patterns and What to Do About Them When attempting to adopt best practices we often can't see the forest for the trees. We can see what we are doing wrong, but how will that help us to see what to do right? In this article, we will discuss a few common Lean Anti-Patterns. Anti-Patterns are commonly recurring practices that are counter productive. We call them "Anti-Patterns" because these anti-patterns result from violating Lean principles. Lean principles form the basis for Scrum practices. Looking at how Lean Anti-Patterns violate lean principles gives us insight into how we need to modify our practices to be more effective. |
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Aligning Agile Efforts with Business Goals A phrase heard often in agile development practices discussions is "let the product lead." Applied correctly, these four words powerfully focus an agile team's energy directly on work that provides the highest business value. Traditional engineering practices that focus on process often divert a technology team's energy away from quick delivery of business value, and toward design of infrastructure and architecture. |
Guy Beaver
June 9, 2007 |
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Eye on the Prize: Best Practices for Aligning Agile Efforts with Business Goals A phrase heard often in Agile discussions is "Let the product lead." Applied correctly, these four words powerfully focus an Agile team's energy directly on work that provides the highest business value. Deep focus on technology decisions breaks the line-of-sight with business goals, creates opportunities for over-engineering, and requires complex tracing activities, which ultimately slow the process. |
Guy Beaver
June 8, 2007 |
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11 Ways Agile Adoptions Fail Usually, when Jean Tabaka lists practices, techniques, ideas, or recommendations about software development, she sticks with the number ten. It's nice and neat and has a fine history of enumeration cleanliness dating back to the Old Testament. But for agile adoption failures, Jean thinks it is time to invoke some Spinal Tap and go to eleven. Here are her top eleven signs that your agile adoption is headed down a slippery slope to failure. |
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Top-Down Agile Adoption Strategies This article covers the challenges that organizations may face and also recommends possible "top down" solutions that could help in quickly adopting agile. |
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Fast, Automatic Builds: the Agile Heartbeat I think that the person most affected by the introduction of agile or extreme programming techniques is not the software or quality assurance engineer, but the build manager. Agile techniques are a throwback to the age when developers were able to work on small projects in small teams. Each developer once again concentrates on small building blocks of code and integrates regularly with other developers to ensure that the overall software project is progressing. For developers, agile techniques are a natural fit because they reflect how developers like to work best: on small, manageable pieces of code with regular feedback. However, even though developers are working on small sections of code, their overall projects are now large and continually growing. And it's the large body of code that the build manager is expected to work with, not the manageable chunks. While daunting, this precipitous increase in builds can be managed by carefully implementing continuous integration and making fast, automatic builds the quot;heartbeatquot; of your agile development. |
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