A recent Business Week article proclaimed, "There is no more Normal." With businesses in the throes of pervasive change, the traditional emphasis on "following the plan with minimal changes" must be supplanted by "adapting the plan to inevitable changes." If agile development practices are about focusing on and delivering customer value, then how can adherence to traditional scope, schedule, and cost be a good way to measure performance? It can't. Jim Highsmith explains the need to move beyond the classic Iron Triangle measures to instead focus agile software development success on value, quality, and constraints. Even today, many agile teams are asked to be flexible and adaptive and then are told to conform to planned scope, schedule, and cost goals. They are asked to adapt-inside a very small box. If we are to truly bring agile values to our organizations, then we must change our performance measures.

In these times of economic crisis, cost reduction is usually the number one motive for test process improvement. Although improvement models such as TMMi® and TPI® are very popular, they require formal assessments, process change working groups, extensive implementation programs, and new organizational structures. Instead, you can quickly implement measures that improve your testing process incrementally within your day-to-day activities. Martin Pol presents a low-budget way to select and implement a set of measures that can rapidly improve testing’s contribution to your project’s success-simple risk analysis, proactive test design, coverage targeting, and novel ways to reuse tools, environments, expertise, and existing testware. Learn how low-budget test process improvement can become a natural behavior for your testing staff.

What do testers need to do differently to be successful on an agile project? How can agile development teams employ testers’ skills and experience for maximum value to the project? Janet Gregory describes the seven key factors she has discovered for testers to succeed on agile teams. She explains the whole-team approach of agile development that enables testers to do their job more effectively. Then, Janet explores the “agile testing mindset” that contributes to a tester’s success. She describes the different kind of information that testers on an agile team need to obtain, create, and provide for the team and product owner. Learn the role that test automation plays in the fast-paced development within agile projects, including regression and acceptance tests. By adhering to core agile practices while keeping the bigger picture in mind, testers add significant value to and help ensure the success of agile projects.

PMOs usually think they are out of business when agile rolls into town. But the reality is that the PMO can play a pivotal role in successful agile adoption in large organizations. Jean Tabaka shares her knowledge about how to engage your PMO for agile adoption by using three primary Lean Principles: "Eliminate Waste," "See the Whole," and "Amplify Learning." Jean gives examples of how PMO members can act as the "systems thinkers" for their organizations, pulling successes from the engineering group and instilling them into the entire enterprise. Learn the role of the PMO within agile-how the PMO pulls standards versus pushing them; how the PMO provides product backlog prioritization guidance regarding architecture and governance; how the PMO serves its agile community by facilitating release planning across teams; and how the PMO creates and maintains product councils.