Articles

Becoming more Agile involves significant changes in the way that we work on a day-to-day basis. One of the central reasons that many technology professionals embrace Agility is its best practices which enhance the Quality of an application effort. Agile practices cut straight to the reasons that many projects fail. Of course, many organizations have also seen that adopting Agile practices does not automatically guarantee them improved Quality either. What practices should you focus on to ensure that your development efforts benefit from Agile's wisdom in terms of improved quality and productivity?

For all you PMPs, PMOs, PMI members and PMBoK people out there ... This is it! This book is "the one" for you. Look no further than Michelle Sliger's and Stacia Broderick's The Software Project Manager's Bridge to Agility to take all the standard project management concepts and terms you've been entrenched in for the past decade or three and to explain the crux of Agility to you from within that domain. The book's title has it exactly right: It is nothing less than a "bridge to agility" for long-time project management professionals who suddenly find themselves needing to understand and manage agile projects in short-order time.

Agile development and continuous integration challenges.  To travel by air, you get to the airport, check in, with any luck get on a plane, and get to your destination. Perhaps you do not arrive precisely on time, but close enough that you make that important meeting or family event. Like jumbo jet pilots, software development teams and project managers have a lot more to worry about than the final consumers of the software or the passengers on the plane. Pilots have to go through a rigorous pre-flight check routine to ensure the plane is in top condition, the correct amount of fuel is on board, hydraulics and electrical systems are all working properly, the flight plan and latest weather is reviewed - and it's all done on the same jet that is being flown. The pilot wouldn't do their pre-flight check on their private Cessna then jump on board the corporate Gulfstream, or a Boeing 767, would they?

In 1997 Eliyahu Goldratt published a business novel titled Critical Chain in which he introduced a new way of scheduling and executing projects similar to the more familiar Critical Path method. Goldratt's version removes many of the estimating games that go on between managers and their staff. This results in projects that typically deliver in about 75 percent of the normal time. In this week's column, Clarke Ching demonstrates some of the ideas from Critical Chain and will show how to use it easily within agile projects.