Articles

How To Choose Quality Candidates/Consultants for Your Large Company Agile Initiative

We created this set of questions to help corporate managers select Agile-experienced consultants and candidate employees for project work. Assembling a team of qualified Agile people is one thing, but the fact that some Agile practices and principles mean different things to different people makes it even harder to succeed in staffing your initiatives.

Finding the Steady State

With more and more scrum'ing and sprinting going on in agile development, let's reflect on the analogy made between Scrum and sports before we take a look at what misunderstandings it may cause within organizations transitioning to agile development practices, in particular Scrum.

It's a Tough Job... but Somebody Has to be the Product Owner

With so many corporate developers and IT teams beating a path to Scrum adoption there seems to be a lot of ScrumMaster training (both certified and otherwise) as well as coaching going on these days. Putting aside any worries about people receiving just enough training to be dangerous (e.g. 2-3 day ScrumMaster training is available from many sources) for moment, most of us think this trend towards Scrum and Agile Development is a very positive one indeed. That said, what concerns me the most is what I perceive to be an oversight of the need for product owner selection, investment and support.

Writing Shippable Code

Software systems are being delivered to our customers at an ever-increasing rate. How can we keep up with the pace whilst still maintaining the quality of our code? I will demonstrate over a series of three articles how by focusing on the customer throughout our delivery cycle we can deliver reliable working software with confidence, reduce the number of defects, reduce our delivery timescales and ultimately save money. You may think this is nothing new, and that agile development has long since answered this question. However, even in the agile world there are loopholes which allow us to bypass the customer. Leading us to deliver what we think they want, rather than what they were expecting.

Agile Using Offshore Development: The Costs and Risks

With today's economic pressures coupled with a highly competitive business environment, management is aggressively pursuing ways to increase effectiveness and efficiencies at the same time as they strive to improve customer services. For these reasons many organizations are trying to integrate offshore development into the Agile projects. Offshore development has seen tremendous growth in recent years. The efficiencies gained by combining these two methods could be significant, but there are some pot-holes on the road to success.

Agile 2008 - Johanna Rothman - Agile Portfolio Management and Agile 2008

Podcast

Bob speaks with Johanna Rothman about Agile Portfolio Management at the Agile 2008 conference.

State of the Industry

In the StickyMinds.com column, "May I Take Your Temperature?" by Linda Hayes, you were asked to rate the state of the testing industry and your current level of satisfaction as a tester. Many of you responded to Linda's survey, and the results surprised her. In this week's column, Linda shares a revision of her state of the industry, as reported by you!

Little Excuse Not to Realize Test Automation's Full Potential

Inadequate automated software testing costs businesses a
significant amount of money. In the current economic climate it is vital to realize the full potential of all investments, including test automation. With the emergence of Business Process Testing on the automation landscape, there is little excuse not to. The purpose of this first article on Business Process Testing is to raise awareness towards this cutting edge automated testing methodology.

White Paper: How Mature Is My Test Organization STD

Software testing, which was thought of as a support function until a few years ago, is now seen as a core function. Testers are seen as the last line of defense to determine the success or failure of a product in the field. CIO's looking closely at this area to assess quality and reduce costs, now look at how to accurately measure the effectiveness of process improvement initiatives.

How I Stopped Worrying and Learned to Love Prioritization

Managing an agile project based on uncensored "Very High," "High," and "Low Priority" user stories or backlog items used to induce stress on Jeff Patton. So he learned to implement a combination of prioritization techniques to get these lists--and the job--under control. In this week's column, find out how Jeff utilizes MoSCoW and business goals to make sense of prioritization.