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How Business Teams Can Embrace Agile Techniques As agile principles and practices receive greater organizational exposure, business teams are embracing certain aspects of agility that were traditionally reserved for technology teams. This article details the experiences of a group of people with business roles who have adopted some agile methods and how their teams have benefitted.
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Welcome to Agile: A Developer’s Experience In this article, a developer shares his personal experience with the transition from a waterfall environment to an agile one. He compares what it was like for him coding, learning, and communicating using each methodology, and he shares what it was like making the change to agile—and why he's never looking back.
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Turn Up Your Agile Noise Usually noise has a negative connotation, but in this sense, noise means something that increases the team progress (i.e., velocity) and output (i.e., quality). Chaos is the negative side of noise and decreases velocity. Teams should know the importance of agile noise and handle the chaos in a right way at the time of transformation. Let’s explore agile noise and its benefits.
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What Does It Mean to Have an Agile Mindset? There has been lots of talk about the agile mindset, but what does that mean? It does not merely encompass the skills that make a successful agile team member, but also what drives a person to want to be part of an agile team. It should include the quest to learn—even when you fail—and leveraging what you learn to continuously improve on what you do.
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Taking Vision to Reality: Using Agile to Drive Product Delivery Product development organizations that skip or rush through critical preplanning activities run the risk of failure. Organizations that use a more agile approach to product development ensure that the teams work on the right things, have the right amount of dialogue with their business partners, and produce the right amount of value to the product.
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An Innovation in Scrum Ceremonies: Peer Feedback Traditionally, the project manager or ScrumMaster is responsible for evaluating a team's performance. But peer feedback, when each member of a team picks another member, observes him or her, and then shares thoughts and suggestions about that other team member’s work, can also be very valuable to continuous improvement.
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Always Read the Label: Getting the Most from Your Tools It is possible to find a new, innovative use for a tool, but it’s much more likely that you’ll do better using the tool in the way its creators intended. And whenever you reach for a tool, check that it’s actually going to help solve the challenge you’re facing. This article explains why first and foremost, conversation is more important than a shiny new tool.
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Why Communication Is Key to the Agile Process We should all be much more active about improving our communication skills to be better at our jobs, but also (and more importantly) to make the most of the people around us. Whether you’re giving or receiving information verbally or through writing, no matter what your job is, communication is key.
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How Visualization Boards Can Benefit Your Team While many teams can use help structuring their conversations, some teams also need some way to know whether the structured conversations that have taken place have provided sufficient information. Kent McDonald explains how using visualization boards can help in these situations.
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Attacking Silos with DevOps Many professionals, while having expertise in their technical niche, are sometimes less than perfect at communicating effectively with colleagues from other departments. This can result in departments failing to work effectively together; these departments resemble silos more than a collaborative and cohesive organization. This article will help you identify and understand some of the reasons why teams operate in silos and what you can do to change that.
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