The Latest

Unfortunately, distrust is common in the relationship between managers and employees. But it doesn’t have to be. Taking the time to keep your communication path “weed free” by finding time for one-on-one communication, being open and honest, and listening to your team members’ input will cultivate an open, honest, and trusting culture within your team.

With all of the resources available these days—books, blogs, Webcasts, training,—that aid us in our design, are you one of those programmers who lacks the "olfactory gene" needed to detect refactoring odors in your code? Unit testing helps you refine your sense of smell and improve your code design.

Bring out the best in your code. Systematic code transformations are an important tool for test-driven development. Refactoring and generalization—common code transformations in TDD—improve the code while preserving its behavior and broaden the capabilities of the software. Each technique has its place, and together they help make TDD effective.

One of the testing challenges we face is how to handle the large numbers of test cases we sometimes need to create and execute. We can't test everything, but pairwise testing using orthogonal arrays or an all-pairs algorithm can help generate pair combinations that reduce the number of test cases we run while still finding a large percentage of bugs.

For some lean/agile practitioners, the idea of maintaining traceability among different development artifacts is nonsense. There are times, though, when traceability is required and other times when it's highly valuable. We need to develop a value mindset of transparency in our processes and approach so that traceability requirements can be satisfied with minimal effort.

Segundo Velasquez takes a minute to sit down with Bob Payne to discuss a variety of topics in this informative podcast. Segundo and Bob were both attending Agile 2007 when they took the time to record this great conversation.

New, in-depth research shows that people move through distinct stages or levels as they become agile leaders. At each new level, managers gain new capacities that make it more natural for them to lead in an agile manner. This article outlines three levels of leadership agility and shows how managers at each level of agility lead projects, lead teams, and engage in pivotal conversations. It ends with a few pointers about ways to assess and develop your own level of leadership agility.