The Latest
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The Tester's Role on Small and Large Agile Teams: An Interview with Mary Thorn[interview] In this interview, Mary Thorn, the director of agile practices at Ipreo, explains why there shouldn’t be any real differences between large and small agile teams. She details the qualities of an interchangeable tester and breaks down manual versus automated testing. |
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You Get What You Tolerate[magazine] We’ve all worked with a talented developer who can be a frustrating challenge to manage. First-time managers may unknowingly encourage bad behavior. There are several innovative ways to resolve the situation. |
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Code Health Kaizen: Self-Organizing for Agile Improvement[article] People at Ben Kopel's organization were interested in improving their code health. It was something the engineers had control over and leadership didn't need to be involved, so code health was a great candidate for a self-organized initiative. Ben details the meeting they held, their discussions and plans, and how an agile team empowered themselves to improve. |
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Achieving Continuous Improvement and Innovation in Software[magazine] There is tremendous pressure on software development teams to deliver software faster, better, and cheaper. Quality engineering with a focus on innovation is the answer |
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How Businesses Stay Agile: The Art of Being Retrospective[article] The greatest use for agile in business is in changing how you tackle problems and projects. Rather than defining the whole project and setting a “way forward,” an agile approach takes things much more iteratively. That means meeting as a team on a frequent and regular basis to share problems and successes, then making improvements as needed—being retrospective. |
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How Technology Is Changing the Way We Learn[magazine] Modern technologies like virtual reality, cloud-based systems, and measurement of content have disrupted how we learn. Standards have evolved to improve how learning material can be published to any device. |
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Streamline Your Agile Requirements by Avoiding Bloated Backlogs[article] In agile development, a bloated backlog results from teams accumulating huge lists of requirements, usually in the form of user stories. Retaining every possible story for building the product weighs down the backlog while squeezing (or obscuring) the highest-value stories. The best way to help minimize this risk is to optimize the time spent defining and refining the product priorities. |
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10 Things You Must Do to Become Truly Agile[magazine] Agile is not a state of doing; it’s a state of being. Adopting business models on value and learning how to make teams autonomous are both necessary steps to reap the benefit of agility. |
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Build One before Building Many: Learning from Agile Feedback[article] When you're working on a project and are presented with a big story or requirement, resist the urge to treat it as a single piece of work. One of the principles of the Agile Manifesto is to deliver working software frequently. This allows you to learn from what you built and make adjustments. See if you can break down the request and find a small piece of work within the big. |
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How to Adapt to the New Age of Testing and Development: An Interview with Melissa Benua[interview]
Podcast
In this interview, Melissa Benua, a senior technical lead at mParticle and senior backend software engineer at PlayFab, explains how the speed of development and testing has changed, as well as how to adapt to the new era of software. |
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The Power of Thinking Upside Down[magazine] Software developers can become bogged down trying to keep up with agile process and procedures. Get better results by rethinking your approach to balancing focus, agility, management, and testing. |
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10 Lessons Learned in Cross-Platform Development[magazine] Building an app for a single platform is difficult, but designing, implementing, and testing an app targeting multiple operating system platforms can be next to impossible. The secret balances upfront design with customer feedback. |
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7 Lessons Agile Can Teach Us about Leadership[article] The Agile Manifesto contains values to guide teams toward developing better software. But its directives are also about leadership—influencing culture and creating an organization where people can collaborate to meet the needs of their customers. Here are seven lessons the Agile Manifesto can teach us about leadership. |
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An Agile Approach to Software Architecture[article] For an organization transitioning to agile development, creating software architecture isn’t incompatible with your new processes. Consider the principles in the Agile Manifesto, involve team members who will be using the architecture in its development, and reflect and adapt often, and you will end up with an architecture that meets the needs of your team and your enterprise. |
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A New Leader to Guide AgileConnection Forward[article] AgileConnection has a new technical editor! Jeffery Payne has years of experience in the agile community, and he's excited to take the helm. The site will still be a home for software professionals to learn and talk about the latest agile development and methodology practices, but Jeff also has plans to start covering DevOps more and to recruit new writers. |