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Enterprise Agility vs. Lean Delivery: An Interview with Mik Kersten Mik Kersten recently sat down with us to discuss the challenges and the benefits that adopting lean's principles brings to projects of all sizes. While challenges will vary due to the size of the enterprises lean is being applied to, the goals—and hopefully the outcomes—remain the same.
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Did You Know That Your Product Portfolio Is in Trouble? Based on his own work experiences, Anupam Kundu has found some patterns (or anti-patterns) that explain why product managers and product teams have a hard time managing their portfolios.
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The Next Level of Agile: DevOps and Continuous Delivery
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Mature agile organizations are introducing continuous delivery as a crucial step to realize their goal of delivering business value rapidly. Andrew Phillips highlights implementation issues about how agile development can fit with enterprise release management policies and governance needs. Andrew outlines proven practices and selection criteria for tools to help you address these issues. Then, he presents a DevOps case study demonstrating the continuous delivery process for building, packaging, deploying, and testing a complex application. Find out about deployment support for server and resource configurations, application binaries, database upgrades and rollbacks, messaging, and enterprise service buses. With the right tools and processes you can develop an open, extensible framework that supports additional services and platforms.
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Andrew Phillips, XebiaLabs Inc.
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Agile at Scale with Scrum: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly
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Come hear the story of how a business unit at one of the world's largest networking companies transitioned to Scrum in eighteen months. The good-more than forty teams in one part of the company moved quickly and are going gangbusters. The bad-an adjacent part failed in its transition. The ugly-if you're in a large company with globally distributed teams, it's not hard to torpedo Scrum adoption. Steve Spearman and Heather Gray describe Scrum adoption challenges for a multi-million line, monolithic system developed across multiple locations worldwide. They share the techniques and tools that helped them implement Scrum in just two project cycles and the reasons part of the company failed to make the leap.
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Steven Spearman, AgileEvolution
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Scaling Agile at Dell: Real-life Problems - and Solutions
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The transition from waterfall-based software development to an agile, iterative model carries with it well-known challenges and problems-entrenched cultures, skill gaps, and organizational change management. For a large, globally distributed software development organization, an entirely different set of practical challenges comes with scaling agile practices. Last year the Dell Enterprise Solutions Group applied agile practices to more than forty projects ranging from a collocated single team project to projects that consisted of fifteen Scrum teams located across the US and India. Geoff Meyer and Brian Plunkett explain how Dell mined these real-life projects for their empirical value and adapted their agile practices into a flexible planning model that addresses the project complexities of staffing, scale, interdependency, and waterfall intersection.
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Geoffrey Meyer, Dell Inc. l Enterprise Product Group
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Disciplined Agile Delivery in IT: A Full Lifecycle Approach
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The good news: Agile methods deliver superior results compared to traditional approaches. The bad news: For IT projects, mainstream agile methods-Scrum, Extreme Programming (XP), and Agile Modeling (AM)- provide only part of the overall solution. Agile IT projects require some time and effort for upfront planning at the start and activities for sophisticated deployment scenarios at the end. Additionally, most agile projects in large IT organizations cannot escape compliance with governance standards. Mark Lines describes and explores the realities of agile development in enterprise IT environments. Discover how IBM’s freely available Disciplined Agile Delivery (DAD) process framework combines common practices and strategies from mainstream agile methods to address the full delivery lifecycle-from project initiation to solution release into production.
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Mark Lines, UPMentors
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Test Automation on Large Agile Projects: It's Not a Cakewalk Automating regression testing on large-scale agile projects with multiple independent Scrum teams is not a cake walk. Because there is no single "test team" that performs all the testing-each Scrum team develops and runs independent tests, gaps arise as different automation implementations spring up. One team adds a new function which breaks automated tests, setting back the progress of other teams. Scott Schnier reviews one organization's journey developing a "test community of practice" to coordinate test development and maintenance across Scrum teams. Scott shares the lessons they learned, particularly selecting tools compatible with other developer and tester needs. Learn how Scott extended the JUnit framework to support automated functional testing and how his teams keep the standard that a user story is not really done until all its tests are "green" in the continuous integration, regression test pipeline.
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Scott Schnier, Agilex Technologies
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Better Software Conference East 2012: Lean Development Practices for Enterprise Agile
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Enterprise agile initiatives require strategic, portfolio, product, and team perspectives at all levels. Alan Shalloway has found that lean software development principles help integrate all of these perspectives into a cohesive, actionable whole. With a combination of lean science, lean management, lean team, and lean learning methods, Alan shows how your organization can prepare for enterprise agility. Lean science focuses on the “laws” present in all software development projects. Lean management empowers executives to contribute to the context within which teams can flourish. Lean team methods are actualized in Kanban approaches. Lean learning empowers everyone in the organization to improve his skills and practices.
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Alan Shalloway, Net Objectives
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IT Governance and Compliance in an Agile World
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Establishing IT governance and compliance practices is essential for organizations that have regulatory or audit requirements. The good news is that you can be agile and still comply with Sarbanes-Oxley, CFR 21, HIPAA, and other regulatory imperatives. Done well, IT controls actually help you improve both productivity and quality. Bob Aiello describes how to implement IT controls in frameworks such as ISACA Cobit and ITIL v3 that many regulatory frameworks require-while maintaining agile practices. Bob's guidance includes specific examples of establishing IT controls: separation of duties, work-item to change-set traceability, physical and functional configuration audits, and more. Bob explains how these practices help government, defense, and corporations scale agile practices where audit and regulatory compliance is a must.
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Bob Aiello, CM Best Practices Consulting
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Massive Continuous Integration and Light-speed Iterations
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Continuous integration (CI) has become a buzzword, with most engineering organizations claiming they've adopted the practice. However, the sad truth is that unreliable tests, long feedback loops, and poor configuration management block their efforts and minimize CI's potential benefits. Jesse Dowdle shares how AtTask radically redesigned its engineering pipeline and, through massive CI scaling, drove three days of testing to just minutes. Learn the pros and cons of different CI systems and how to integrate them with the cloud. Watch a live demo of AtTask's internal test and CI systems, which they’ve designed to make "Every commit a potential release candidate"-meaning that every commit is an iteration. Arm yourself with the talking points to sell massive CI to executives.
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Jesse Dowdle, AtTask, Inc.
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