The Latest

We are in the business of providing our customers with products. While we may proclaim our commitment to quality, what really matters is how our users experience our products. So, how do we ensure our organization is a quality organization? Examine our values.

A ScrumMaster's accomplishments often are overshadowed by the success of his team. But like every human, these leaders have a need for esteem and self-fulfillment. Learn ways you can help to increase your ScrumMaster's job satisfaction.

Our society is founded on the importance of meetings, and it seems that the higher on the corporate ladder one climbs, the more meetings he must attend. Indeed, one of Michele Sliger's coworkers calculated that the amount of time she spends arranging meetings, getting to meetings, and in meetings equates to almost her entire workweek-thirty-six hours on average. Even though we may lose track of time in meetings, we all are painfully aware of the time we spend waiting for everyone to show up. In this column, Michele Sliger explains some of the tactics she's seen teams use to ensure that meetings start on time.

Liz Barnett writes that beyond IT, the most frequent adoption of agile processes is found in teams using Scrum for team management. Agile processes won't provide the answers to all of our challenges. But if you dig beneath the surface, you might discover some interesting ways to use these ideas to address complex problems.

The agile community needs a structured approach to help it with its agile adoption efforts. Here we present the Agile Adoption Framework, a four-stage process for adopting agile software development.

Bruce Williams talks about the RailsEdge, Rails Plugins, and UI Frameworks, as well as the tools that are available to Ruby and Rails developers and how these combined with attitude within the community may have created the sweet spot that Rails now occupies.

As a test manager, you constantly are looking at what you need in order to carry out the mission of your group. You know that you need several resources to do your job, but when you go to your manager looking for resources, her eye goes immediately to the bottom line. When it appears as if there's no way to make your boss comply with your requests, Esther Derby has a tactic that will help you make your boss see things your way.