agile

Today, many larger companies are taking notice of agile practices, starting agile transition programs, or testing the water with pilot projects. Unfortunately, the realities of inter-team dependencies, ingrained cultural issues, and human nature quickly get in the way and threaten progress. Multi-team development environments can foster excessive standardization, gaps in dependency management, and vague reporting structures. Fortunately, good agile coaching can help you avoid many of the issues and mitigate others. Through first-person stories and from eyewitness accounts of fellow agile coaches, Rob Myers shares the warning signs of these threats and provides recommendations for avoiding them. Learn to identify and engage hidden stakeholders before they become unwitting constraints or worse. Discover how to organize and empower a team of agile coaches who will breed trust during your agile roll-out.

It doesn't matter what you're producing-physical goods, software, or other products. When efficiency and workers' time utilization become more important than the value of the work product, the production system is optimized for the wrong thing. Lean thinking shifts the emphasis to creating value through the concept of "flow." The goal of flow is to eliminate delays and bottlenecks producing the product to speed up its delivery and earn value for the organization sooner. Kanban explicitly recognizes the advantages of establishing flow-an idea inherent in most agile processes. Through presentation, simulation, and discussion, Jean Tabaka and Bill Wake open your eyes to how different processes affect flow. Learn about the impact of sub-optimization and the sometimes deadly costs of delay common in many teams-even those that profess to be agile.

Have you noticed that similar stories appear over and over as you develop a system? According to Dan Rawsthorne, stories-those small chunks of work that make up your backlog and provide demonstrable value to the project-can be categorized by purpose: production, analysis, cleanup, business support, infrastructure/environment, or other. Within each of these categories are different "story-o-types"-patterns that define the commonalities among the stories themselves. Dan defines and describes some of the most common story-o-types, explains why they are useful, and demonstrates the concept with examples including "Alternate Path" and "Clean-Up Interface" for the production category, "Talk to Stakeholders" and "Exploratory Testing" for the analysis category, and others. For each story-o-type, Dan provides sample tasks and canonical "doneness" criteria that make planning and backlog grooming easier and more consistent.

Some companies take the low road to adopting agile: renaming team leads to Scrum Masters, declaring business architects to be product owners, and holding a daily meeting where everyone has to stand up. Others get excited and march bravely down the road to agile proclaiming "We're all going to be agile, all agile, all the time!" embracing both agile values and principles. If you're starting your agile journey, join Don Gray and learn how to keep your organization focused on the benefits while avoiding some bumps along the way. Don shares the transition problems he's overcome including managers taking Scrum roles, inserting agile teams in the middle of sequential software development, and many more. Explore how defining the goals of your agile transition, establishing a shared vision, understanding the plan, and giving everyone a meaningful role help people better deal with the changes they face.