Articles

Why an Agile Project Manager Is Not a ScrumMaster

A reader asked why the lifecycle in Agile Lifecycles for Geographically Distributed Teams, Part 1 is not Scrum. It's not Scrum for these reasons:

2012: The Year of DevOps

Scott Ambler explains how DevOps has grown within the agile community, and why he believes it will become an IT buzzword in 2012. DevOps uses agile's community-based teamwork and offers developers and those in operations a great way to make everyone's job easier.

No Silver Bullet? A Silver Buckshot May Work

Video

It seems that someone is always promising a cure all—the proverbial "silver bullet"—for software woes. Greg's goals for this presentation are for us to understand what "better" really means, to discuss common problems and potential solutions, and to become empowered to make our personal and our group's practices better.

Environments Management—A Key Component for Release Management

The demand for software environments has increased as more organizations use agile software development practices and are required to provide a fast turnaround of deliverable IT projects. Effective environment management improves the quality, availability, and efficiency of the environments in order to meet milestones, as well as ultimately reducing both the time to market and costs.

Agile Lifecycles for Geographically Distributed Teams, Part 2

Example 2: Using a Project Manager with Kanban, Silo’d Teams

This is a product development organization with developers in Italy, testers in India, more developers in New York, product owners and project managers in California.

This organization first tried iterations, but the team could never get to done. The problem was that the stories were too large. Normally I suggest smaller iterations, but one of the developers suggested they move to kanban.

Effective Test Automation in an Agile Environment

Many of us keep asking: If the benefits of automated testing are so vast, why does test automation fail so often? Artem Nahornyy addresses this common dilemma.

From One Expert to Another: Dawn and Shannon Code

You may know the former Dawn Cannan, lover of all things testing, from her writing or her conference presentations. But, did you know that she and her husband enjoy their work so much that they legally changed their names to Dawn Test Code and Shannon Null Code? In this interview, they discuss the reasoning behind their name change and what it means to have and show enthusiasm for what is important to you.

Agile Lifecycles for Geographically Distributed Teams, Part 1

I’ve been working with geographically distributed and dispersed teams for the past couple of years. Some of them on quite large programs, some of them reasonably small. What they all have in common is that they all want to transition to agile.

Most of them start this way: someone takes a Scrum class, gets all excited. This is good. Then reality hits. Scrum is meant for collocated geographically cross-functional teams. Uh oh.

Whole-team Test Automation: Making the Move

Having someone on your test team with automation knowledge can be helpful. However, spreading that knowledge across the team can improve the individual testers, the project, and the test team as a whole. In this article, Bob Jones explains why his team first tried whole-team test automation and offers some tips for implementing it on your team.

Software Engineering or Software Craftsmanship: Do We Care?

Much like a tenet of agile software development is that "planning is more important than the plan," there are some questions about software development that are useful to explore, even if you can't suggest a good answer. One of these these is whether what we, as software developers do, is (or can be) engineering. Or should we call what we do software craftsmanship?