The Latest
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Agile Code for Agile Teams[magazine] What makes a team agile? Is it in the way it plans projects or how it engineers its products? In this article, Steve Berczuk explains how agile code and technical practices can help a team stay agile across the product lifecycle. |
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We're Not "Special"[article] Often, when I comment on someone's blog post or respond to a tweet with a story about how my team succeeded with some practice, someone replies, "Yeah, but your team is special." I interpret this as meaning, "You're a presenter and book author. You must be an expert, so of course your team can do anything." This frustrates the heck out of me. |
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Book Review: Kanban: Successful Evolutionary Change for Your Technology Business[article] I've worked with Scrum for a while, having gotten my CSM certification in 2005, and I've spent time both before and after that trying to learn what I could about Scrum, agile, and Lean, both in the context of software and out side of it. After absorbing bits of information on Kanban informally, I decided that to was time to read a book on it. I read David Anderson's book Kanban: Successful Evolutionary Change for Your Technology Business |
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Management Myth #2: Only ‘The Expert’ Can Perform This Work[article] How many times have you seen this in your projects: You need something specific done such as a new database, or a specific user interface designed, or you need a release engineer, or a user interface designer, or a part of the system tested and the normal person who does that work is not available? What happens on your project? Does it wait until The Expert is available? |
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We Are Not Alone[article] Do you know colleagues who box themselves into the corner regularly? Getting lost is not the problem; coping with having gotten lost is the problem. Markus Gärtner explains how to notice that you are stuck, how to ask for help, and who you should be asking. |
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Integrating Games to Change Behaviors, Part 2[article] Training people and introducing new ideas requires more than just clear, factual explanations or theorems. Brian Bozzuto explores how games, simulations, and other exercises play an instrumental role in helping people be comfortable enough with new ideas that they choose to put them into practice. |
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The Half-Life Of Trust[magazine] There is definite asymmetry between building trust and destroying trust. While building trust can be complex and time-consuming, destroying trust can be done in one simple instant. |
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Move Your Career Forward[magazine] Often we spend too much time analyzing or agonizing about where to go in our careers and too little time moving forward. This article provides a few practical tips to break out of career analysis paralysis and start taking the steps that will build forward momentum behind your career. |
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Who Is Agile? {Book Review][article] Yves Hanoulle has edited a book, called Who Is Agile? I love this book because of all the back-stories, the pictures, and the links. And, oh my goodness, the links. |
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How Producing Code Is Like Producing Music (and a Message for the Agile Evangelists): An Interview with David Hussman[interview] David Hussman is an agile coach and owner of Dev Jam. In this interview, David discusses the similarities between producing music and producing code, the Frank Zappa of the software world, and why he wants agile evangelists to “shut up and play your guitar.” |
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Integrating Games to Change Behaviors, Part 1[article] Training people and introducing new ideas requires more than just clear, factual explanations or theorems. Brian Bozzuto explores how games, simulations, and other exercises play an instrumental role in helping people be comfortable enough with new ideas that they choose to put them into practice. |
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A Sticky Situation: Low-Tech Test Tools to the Rescue[magazine] The testing craft is sometimes fascinated with high-tech, expensive tools that are intended to help managers keep up to date on what's going on. Yet, sometimes heavyweight tools aren't necessary. Michael Bolton describes how Paul Holland, a senior test manager, uses a decidedly low-tech approach to track and illustrate the testing story. |
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Creative Agility[magazine] Many new products being developed require the contribution of artists and other such "creatives," but artists often view the creative process as an organic thing that cannot be analyzed, dissected, or reduced to a set of defined practices without killing it. This article explores barriers such as these to the introduction of agile methods and how these barriers can be overcome. |
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Is Test Automation a “Project”?[article] Test automation can turn into a real pain in the neck if a designated team is in charge of it or if the automators work on it as a separate project. In this article, Lisa Crispin seconds Bob Jones’s recent call for whole-team test automation and elaborates on the dangers of relegating test automation to an isolated project rather than integrating it into the overall software development process. |
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Agile Lifecycles for Geographically Distributed Teams: A Case Study[article] In this case study of a distributed agile team, the developers were in Cambridge, MA, the product owners were in San Francisco, the testers were in Bangalore, and the project manager was always flying somewhere, because the project manager was shared among several projects. The developers knew about timeboxed iterations, so they used timeboxes. Senior management had made the decision to fire all the local testers and buy cheaper tester time over the developers’ objections and move the testing to Bangalore. |