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Barriers in front of a road It's Not Just Culture: When Teams Impede Agile Adoption

Cultural norms can hamper successful agile transformation. Many of these habits and customs are started and perpetuated by senior leadership, but that’s not always the only source of resistance. Often, ingrained behaviors and thinking can occur within the team, including business partners, that also can hinder agility. Five of these barriers are explored here, as well as mindset antidotes to help get the team on the road to agile success.

Joe Schofield's picture Joe Schofield
DevOps team bumping fists 7 Ways to Change the Culture for DevOps Success

The hard part of successful DevOps isn’t implementing the technology; it's ensuring you have the right culture in your organization. You need to break down silos and align competing priorities and individual incentives to gain real benefits from DevOps. Move beyond thinking about technology alone and look at the people side of the equation. Here are seven ways to create a successful team that delivers the benefits of DevOps.

Steve Jones's picture Steve Jones
Cars speeding down a highway Accelerated Quality Using Agile

One of the huge benefits of agile is improved or increased quality. However, many newly agile teams report their product quality decreasing at the rate at which delivery is increasing. Leanne Howard has some solutions for these teams, including making quality everyone's responsibility and embracing a shift-left mentality. To get accelerated quality in your agile initiatives, you have to truly be agile.

Leanne Howard's picture Leanne Howard
Horse leaping over a barricade Countering 5 Barriers to Enterprise Organizational Agility

Many now recognize that organizational agility is critical to business success, but historical patterns of resistance still abound. Before you can change work processes, you should first tackle the traditional mindsets that can pose challenges to the transformation. Here are five traditional behaviors that impede agility, as well as some actions you can take to counter them by changing the corporate mindset.

Joe Schofield's picture Joe Schofield
Team of cyclists Successful Agile Requires a New Kind of Leadership

In an agile world, team members are empowered to make important decisions within the context of the behavioral architecture, without having to ask permission from supervisors or managers. But these supervisors and managers are coming from a lifetime of learning how to succeed in a hierarchical world, so they will need to leave behind those ingrained lessons. In order for agile to be successful at scale, leaders will need to change.

Jeff Dalton's picture Jeff Dalton
Two agile team members standing beside a large globe Distributed Agile Approaches Optimize for the Team over Individuals

Consider how your team currently organizes: for resource efficiency, optimizing for the individual; or for flow efficiency, optimizing for the team? Successful agile teams—distributed or not—should collaborate to optimize the flow of work through the team. This approach lets you understand your capacity, learn together, and deliver more effectively.

String lights shining on a story book Business Storytelling in an Agile Context

Storytelling in business is about sharing the context—explaining different aspects of the same information through different perspectives, such as the customer’s wishes or various internal department needs. The more each person shares their point of view, the more the knowledge deepens, which provides a solid story in a business context. Here's how storytelling can help your agile team.

Karen N. Johnson's picture Karen N. Johnson
Person using a screen reader Fitting Accessibility Testing into Agile Development

The concept of accessibility has been around for more than twenty years, yet it’s only recently that more companies have started including it in their development efforts. Developers and testers are recognizing the advantages of incorporating accessibility techniques into their processes. Here are some of these methods specific to agile software development, including a handy checklist.

Albert Gareev's picture Albert Gareev
Playing cards Virtual Agile Games to Strengthen Distributed Teams

While many games and related materials have been created for collocated team-building activities, there is a need for more of these artifacts in virtual form to support distributed teams. These three authors developed a set of virtual agile games that can be downloaded and played remotely, for team-building with newly created teams or as a fun activity with established teams.

Metal gears 6 Steps for Succeeding with Test Automation in Agile

Lots of test automation efforts in agile software development fail, or at least do not maximize their potential. This article looks at two main reasons test automation may not live up to the expectations that testers and other stakeholders in the agile development process have, then outlines six steps to avoid falling into these traps. Here's how to succeed with test automation in an agile environment.

Bas Dijkstra's picture Bas Dijkstra

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