Articles

cross out waste Use Lean Thinking to Accelerate DevOps Performance for Agile Teams

Leaders in agile organizations should consider adding lean techniques to their DevOps practices. Lean thinking can accelerate DevOps delivery by providing a set of processes and principles to help create more beneficial products, save money, boost productivity, reduce waste, and map to value.

Gail Ferreira's picture Gail Ferreira
Book cover The Agile Mind Set Book Review: The Agile Mind-Set: Making Agile Processes Work

Gil Broza's book The Agile Mind-Set: Making Agile Processes Work speaks to the challenges faced by people who focus on "doing agile" rather than "being agile." Rote execution of methods can only get you so far, and Broza gives insights into how you move beyond practicing agile by habit into living it.

Steve Berczuk's picture Steve Berczuk
Fish jumping into bigger bowl 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.

Kris Hatcher's picture Kris Hatcher
Don't Shoot Agile in the Foot How to Plan and Execute Programs without Shooting Agile in the Foot

Program planners in IT organizations have a dilemma: On one hand, their agile teams tell them that if requirements are defined up front, agile teams cannot operate; but on the other hand, the program’s budget and scope need to be defined so that resources can be allocated and contracts can be written for the work. How does one reconcile these conflicting demands?

Clifford Berg's picture Clifford Berg
Making Agile Leaner Making the Agile Extra Lean by Adopting New Practices

Prakash Pujar writes about his team's experience adopting some of the best agile practices to make their process extra lean and increase efficiency by increasing throughput—all without any change to the agile framework his team was following before and after. Here, he talks about some of the lean practices that worked for them.

Prakash Pujar's picture Prakash Pujar
Implement Agile A Case Study in Implementing Agile

This case study serves as an example of how adopting agile can be extremely beneficial to an organization, as long as situational factors are considered. Adopting a new development method is a strategic, long-term investment rather than a quick fix. As this article shows, making deliberate, fully formed decisions will ultimately lead to better outcomes.

Taylor Putnam's picture Taylor Putnam
Growth of Agile How Agile Is Growing as It Goes into Its Teenage Years

Agile is growing up and is now officially a teenager. It has moved from being a somewhat rumbustious child with some overzealous followers and a skeptical management crowd to something that is generally accepted by the mainstream IT community and particular management. Has the agile community lost something? Are the founding members and early practitioners evolving the practice? Is this good? Well, the answers are yes, yes, and maybe.

Jon Hagar's picture Jon Hagar
Estimate Your Work Need to Learn More about the Work You’re Doing? Spike It!

How do you estimate work you've never done before? One proven method is to spike it: Timebox a little work, do some research—just enough to know how long it will take to finish the rest of the work—and then you can estimate the rest of the work. You don’t waste time, you can explore different avenues of how best to complete the task, and your team learns together.

Johanna Rothman's picture Johanna Rothman
Implementing Agile in Fortune 1000 Companies Implementing Agile in Fortune 1000 Companies

David Thach and Rick Rene share what they have learned are the most effective and readily adoptable agile processes, as well as a few techniques to integrate hybrid waterfall approaches. Companies adopt an agile software development framework to become more effective and more efficient, not to become a model of purist agile utopia—which, if attempted, ironically can be immensely costly and detrimental to progress, if not disastrous.

David Thach's picture David Thach Rick Rene
 Thinking Up Front about Agile Requirements An Agile Approach to Thinking Up Front about Requirements

Thinking about interacting with the customer at the start of the project? Who would argue against that? Well, it depends on what you call it. It also depends on whether you then do it without the benefit of the rest of the project team. Here, Ulrika Park helps us see what an agile approach to thinking about the requirements might look like.

Ulrika Park's picture Ulrika Park

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