project & team management

Articles

Five Ways to Build the Right Thing

Just because an organization has the ability to deliver fast doesn't mean the final product will be valuable, useful, or needed. Todd Olsen explains five tips to help increase your chances of delivering the right product.

Testing Tradeoffs and Project Risk: A Case Study

Between extreme opinions of what is testing “overkill” and what is “essential,” there sometimes exists a reasonable middle path. In this field report, Payson identifies an example of risk mitigation and the evolution of the analysis that brought him there.

A for Agile, A for Aristotle
Badri Srinivasan explains the link between Aristotle and agile software development methodologies and how agile allows for a higher probability of successful customer delivery.
Leading Your Team Through Difficult Times

When a project isn't going well, it's important to stay on track and keep the current and future project tasks in perspective. How do you keep your team focused on the project at hand and your client confident and calm?

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Better Software Magazine

The Half-Life Of Trust

There is definite asymmetry between building trust and destroying trust. While building trust can be complex and time-consuming, destroying trust can be done in one simple instant.

Once Upon A Retrospective

Children can teach us some extremely profound things--often when we least expect it. Jennitta Andrea shares sage advice about project retrospectives that she learned while perusing the well-known children's stories on her daughter's bookshelf. These insights will help improve the way you plan, facilitate, and participate in project retrospectives.

Software Project Managers: Know Your Business Case

Many professionals in the software industry chose to pursue software to avoid business schools and MBAs. In this article, Payson explains that some of that "Business BS" can be useful both tactically and strategically to software project managers.

10 Thoughts On Technical Debt

Many people realize that the technical debt spiral is a perverse incentive—it ends up rewarding behaviors we don't want and causing long-term pain. In this article, Matt Heusser moves beyond cliché to talk about how tech debt happens and what we can do about it.

Book Reviews for BAs

Get a head start on your New Year's resolution. Hone your business analysis skills or learn new ones, and make 2012 the highlight of your career.

When Software Smells Bad

Most software needs to be "maintainable" and have high "internal quality." But what does that mean in practical terms? Code smells form a vocabulary for discussing code quality and how well suited code might be to change. The smells also provide good indications as to what to refactor and how.

Designing an Agile Portfolio and Program Coordination System

Scaling Agile to the enterprise can be challenging once you start looking at the Program and Portfolio level. How do you design an effective coordination system that encourages collaboration, communication, transparency and is flexible, easy to implement and rapidly evolvable? We will explore key aspects of creating a simple but effective agile-ready coordination system for managing such initiatives, based upon the authors' observations and experiences across widely differing companies.

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Interviews

Adding Lean to Agile or Vice Versa: An Interview with Ade Shokoya

Ade Shokoya has interviewed some of the industry's leading agile experts, and we got the chance to interview Ade himself about the current relationship between agile and lean, and the challenges and rewards of being a ScrumMaster in today's software world.

The Agile and Scrum Mindsets: An Interview with Mitch Lacey

Mitch Lacey recently took the time to speak with us ahead of his 2012 Agile Development Conference session titled “Understanding Scrum: An Experiential Workshop.” Mitch shared with us how truly understanding scrum and agile allows for a smooth transition and effective results.

Creating Healthier, Stress-Free Teams: An Interview with Michael Wolf

Michael Wolf discusses with us the way to create happier, more productive teams is to liberate them, and remove the stress that's holding them back. Michael is presenting a session titled "Group Interaction Patterns: The Keys for Highly Productive Teams" at the 2012 Better Software Conference East.

Returning to Agile: An Interview with Dan North

Dan North is presenting three sessions at the upcoming 2012 Better Software Conference East, including a keynote. Titled "Embracing Uncertainty: A Leap of Faith," Dan will discuss how embracing uncertainty is one of agile's core principles and how taking risks amidst diversity can result in resounding success.

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TechWell Stories
Create a Vendor Contract While Keeping Agile
How Agile Teams Use DevOps for Deployment
Build a List of Things—But Don't Call It Agile
Can Agile and Lean Six Sigma Coexist?
Should Agile Teams Minimize Branching?

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