Are You Ready for Go-Live? 8 Essential Questions As real and daunting as scheduling pressures can be, they have to be balanced with the consequences of a potentially disastrous premature go-live. Don’t let all the reasons a system simply "must" be implemented by a target date overwhelm compelling evidence that it is not ready. Consider these eight questions honestly first. |
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The Benefits of Pair Programming This article details a team’s experience in implementing pair programming as a way to get work done as part of its agile transformation. It delves into the many positive results from the pairing experiment, as well as some of the negatives that were encountered, and weighs whether developers think pair programming is a worthwhile endeavor. |
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ADC West 2015 Keynote: Lean UX: Turn User Experience Design Inside Out When developing products, features, and enhancements, you have to have your customers’ best interests at heart. “We’re not just creating software,” speaker Jeff Patton said. “We’re changing the world.” You need to better understand the people you’re building things for, and the only way to do that is to spend more time with them. |
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BSC West 2015 Keynote: Better Thinking for Better Software: Thinking Critically about Software Development Software developer Laurent Bossavit delivered the second keynote presentation, about why we need to think more critically about software development. He began his presentation by saying his intention was to make you question what you know—or what you think you know. |
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Using the Definition of Done to Promote Continuous Improvement The definition of done is much more than just a checklist for completeness—it can be a mechanism for determining where your product increment can be more complete by the end of your sprint. By using a discussion board with quadrants where you can sort sprint items, you can challenge yourself to see whether a task could be moved earlier in the lifecycle. |
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How Do You Recruit Team Members with Agile Mindsets? The traditional ways of finding employees are changing. If you want to get a role that will make you happy to contribute to the team, you need to rethink the way you apply for roles. If you are the resource manager, change how you recruit. This article focuses on the qualities you should be exemplifying or looking for if you want to form a team with an agile mindset. |
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User Story Points versus Man-Hours: Estimating Effort Better Effort estimation is a major challenge for all the stakeholders of a project. Most people generally underestimate situations that may block progress and consider only the best-case scenario for a project. Your choice of estimation method may not be helping, though. Which would be better for your team: estimating by man-hours or by user story points? |
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Turn Up Your Agile Noise Usually noise has a negative connotation, but in this sense, noise means something that increases the team progress (i.e., velocity) and output (i.e., quality). Chaos is the negative side of noise and decreases velocity. Teams should know the importance of agile noise and handle the chaos in a right way at the time of transformation. Let’s explore agile noise and its benefits. |
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Why Adopting Agile Won’t Magically Reduce Your IT Budget Of course, all companies would like to reduce their budgets. But cutting back in the IT department can have unintended consequences. This article looks at two of the more well-adopted cost-cutting approaches, the software factory and distributed teams, and goes into how they can help and hurt your company. |
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Make Your Retrospectives Engaging Again After performing so many meetings at the ends of your sprints, agile retrospectives can become monotonous and boring—and that’s when they become ineffective. This article looks at the reasons this happens and provides some ideas for making those retrospective meetings more lively and effective—and therefore more useful. |
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