The Latest
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Advice for the New Leader[magazine] As a new manager it's easy to fall into the trap of taking on more of your team's responsibilities than you should. Learn how to guide your team to success by stepping back and letting team members solve their own problems, learn from their mistakes, and most of all do what you hired them to do. |
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The Mission Is the Message[magazine] A mission statement is supposed to guide and inspire the members of an organization as well as define the organization's purpose, the business it is in, and its responsibilities to its clients. Is your statement sending the right message? |
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Stop The Insanity! Using Root Cause Analysis to Avoid Repeating Your Mistakes[magazine] We've all heard Einstein's definition of insanity, and it definitely holds true in software development. We "are" going to make mistakes in product development, but root-cause analysis can help us understand those mistakes and be proactive in not repeating them. |
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The Myth of Risk Management[magazine] Risk management is an illusion. We must recognize that software projects are inherently risky and admit to ourselves that it's not the known problems that are going to cause our projects to fail. It's the risks that are unmentionable, uncontrollable, unquantifiable, or unknown that make projects crash and burn. |
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Agile Model-Driven Development[magazine] Despite what you might have heard, modeling is an important part of agile software development. Find out how agile model-driven development fits into the overall agile development lifecycle in a lean and streamlined manner and can improve productivity on your team. |
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A ''D'' in Programming, Part 2[magazine] In his final pitch for the D programming language, Chuck brings to "closure" (pun intended) a running example from previous Code Craft articles while exploring some powerful features of the D language. |
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Know Where Your Wheels Are[magazine] Drawing from his experiences while learning to drive, Michael applies lessons he learned from written rules, experiential learning, and the advice of mentors to teaching new testers some valuable skills. |
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An Agile Approach to Release Management[article] For teams practicing Agile Software development, value working software over other artifacts, a feature from the release plan is not complete until you can demonstrate it to your customer, ideally in a shippable state. Agile teams strive to have a working system ("potentially shippable") ready at the end of each iteration. Release Management should be easy for an ideal agile team, as agile teams, in theory, are ready to release at regular intervals, and the release management aspect is the customer saying, "Ship it!." |
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Traces of Agile in the Big Apple[article] Michele Sliger is often asked if the agile approach can be used for things other than software development. She gave the question some consideration and found the following example of a non-IT case of agility in action, which she highlights in this week's column. |
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Eight Reasons Retrospectives Fail[article] Retrospectives work for most teams, yet some teams are convinced that retrospectives will never work for them. When Esther Derby came across several of these teams for which retrospectives had failed, she questioned why and discovered eight common reasons for those failures. In this column, she details these eight reasons and offers solutions for each one. |
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Agile CMMI: KPIs for Agile Teams[article] Today's Agile teams contend with challenges that few development visionaries could have imagined when the foundations for Agile were first put in place. In this article, we will examine Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) that Agile teams can use to achieve transparency into key development processes, and fulfill the customer requirements of our maturing world. |
Roger N. Dunn
May 13, 2008 |
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Applying the Inverted Pyramid to Agile Development[article] Modern day reporters tend to write their articles using what is known as the "inverted pyramid" style. They start with the most important information in the first sentence, followed by the next most important, and so on. This format not only gives the reader the biggest bang for his buck as he reads it also gives both the reporters and their editors huge flexibility in their uncertain and fast-changing environments. Clarke Ching shows how modern software development techniques use the same idea to give customers the best bang for their buck—in equally uncertain environments. |
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Overcoming Resistance to Change with Distributed Agile[article] Overcoming resistance to change and addressing challenges with distributed Agile requires considerable skills and experience. Agile development practices are incredibly popular, with many developers, because they work well and they add value. Unfortunately, many Agile enthusiasts are unprepared for the challenge of overcoming organizational resistance to change - especially from senior management unwilling to sponsor a methodology which is unfamiliar to them and does not carry the same name recognition as other frameworks such as the CMMI. That's not to say that we should give up and continue to write volumes of requirements "shelf-ware" that is outdated before it is used. Every process improvement effort has its own set of challenges and obstacles to be dealt with. Read on if you would like to explore overcoming resistance to change - the Agile way. |
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Elastic Path uses Distributed Agile and Outsourcing to Stay on Top in Fast-Paced E-Commerce Software[article] We all know the payoffs that can result from employing the Agile methodology and employing it well: from highly effective self-managed teams, increased flexibility and realtime change management ... to tight quality control and heightened collaboration. But what happens when you are already doing Agile in-house and then want or need to expand your Agile development circle to include an outsourcing partner that is 5,000 miles away?
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Testing Lessons Learned from Extreme Programmers[presentation]
Video
One of the things testers often notice about Extreme Programming (XP) is that there is no defined role for testers on the team. Yet XP teams describe themselves as “test infected.” They practice Test-Driven Development (TDD), writing executable unit tests before writing the code... |
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