Jim Miller - The Product Owner Role and Business Alignment

This short book, written by Clarke Ching, is a "biztech" parable for software developers who want to survive—and then thrive—through a credit crunch. We have republished the book in a four-part series. In part two, Bob, Bill, and Sam discover how a rocky economy can flip project costs and return on investments and how much money could be lost by canning the FBU project. Can they use these projections to save the project and their jobs?

Some organizations want to make the transition to agile, but aren't ready to trade in their old ways overnight. They'd rather spend some time getting to know agile—letting it coexist alongside already established, traditional methodologies. In this article, Michele Sliger and George Schlitz explain that such coexistence is possible, but that there is a cost of coexistence of which all organizations should be aware.

Is it just pushing up developer rates and doubling demand?

The cynic in me applauds the genius of the global developer community for inventing a way of working that requires twice the number of people to do the same amount of work – Pair Programming. Doubling demand on XP projects means more work for developers and reduces the pool available for traditional projects – rates go up and more jobs are secured. Is this the same genius as those 70’s marketing execs that added “step 3 - repeat” to double shampoo consumption and therefore sales overnight or are there genuine productivity gains to be had for consultancies and customers? I said I was being cynical, but there is some truth in this and it is a view held by some of those that pay the bills, customers.