development

Kenneth Grant explains whether or not being agile is really as cheap for an organization as its proponents claim it to be. Agile’s relentless focus on business value and just-enough work can help teams identify waste—or poor return on investment (ROI) requirements—and gives them the opportunity to change it or leave it out all together.

Did you ever wonder if a team needs some prerequisites before transitioning to agile? In this true story, John Lynch shows us the story of a team who teetered on the brink of dysfunction and then was able to create its foundation so team members could begin their agile transition.

A written user story is a very short narrative—a sentence or two—describing some small piece of functionality that has business value. User stories are intended to foster collaboration and communication, but writing these short narratives poorly can negate agile’s flexibility. Charles Suscheck and Andrew Fuqua explain some common failure patterns that will help you focus on the right role, value, and business functionality when writing stories.

Developers must have good feedback to ensure productivity. Most shops have a continuous integration (CI) build process that allows the developer to quickly know if a build failed, and some shops have an automatic deploy of the CI build to provide website feedback. Lance Lyons writes about an approach to automating the update of databases in a CI environment.