agile transition

Every day more agile practices and styles emerge, overlap, and compete. This proliferation challenges you to choose from among XP, Scrum, lean, Kanban, or the ways of the emerging Lean Start Up crowd. Rather than stumbling down one path or another, join David Hussman as he shares tools for assessing and designing an agile process with practices that address your specific needs and constraints. David starts by teaching a simple assessment process to help you understand where you are today. Then, he offers ideas for selecting a meaningful set of practices and moves on to teach you how to create a meaningful and measurable coaching plan. David covers the selection of product planning tools, iterative delivery tools, tracking tools, and more. If you want to clear the fog about which agile practice will really help you, come for some answers. Even if you don’t yet know what questions to ask, David can help.

When you transition to agile and you have a reasonably size codebase, chances are quite good that you’ve been working on the product for a while. You certainly have legacy ways of thinking about the code and the tests. Now learn how to work yourself out of the technical debt you have accumulated.

As technology development programs represent some of the biggest line items on agency budgets, there should be little surprise that agile development, with its promise of a fast, lightweight, and iterative approach to delivery of value, has caught the attention of officials from across the government space as they seek to improve their programs’ productivity and effectiveness.

Organizational transformation is difficult work. Many agile transformation efforts begin with lofty goals only to be sabotaged by unrealistic expectations about the depth and complexity of the changes required. Often, resistance to change is ingrained in an organization’s value system and difficult to overcome. Tamara Runyon presents an overview of a new Agile Transformation Competency Framework-a strategic tool for evaluating and guiding your transformation efforts. Evaluating the organization against the dimensions of the framework-collaboration, agile engineering, product management, environment, organizational culture, and distributed teams-results in a transformation plan that avoids setting unachievable expectations. To institutionalize agile values within an organization and lay the foundation for wide-scale adoption, a company must align with these six competency areas.