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Group Coherence for Project Teams – Group Creativity

Creative achievement is typically associated with individual effort. Think of Newton, Edison, or Leonardo Da Vinci. Until not very long ago, creativity and design were the focus of a few, while the work of the masses was broken down into repeatable steps. Creativity was perceived to undermine the result of mass-production. Today, the work depends on the design and creative skills of the knowledge workers that perform it

TechWell Contributor's picture TechWell Contributor
Enterprise Agile: Yes, Your Whole Company Can Adopt Agile

About 12 months ago, our company started an initiative to adopt agile practices across our entire organization—not only our software development organization, but our business organization. For years we had experienced outstanding results by utilizing Scrum for our clients' application development projects. Team productivity improved, executive visibility strengthened, and overall quality increased. Our goal was to capture similar results for our business. Find out how we're doing!

Melissa Meeker
The Future of Agile

Software development is currently being "driven". This article finds existing X-Driven Development approaches wanting because they focus on too narrow an aspect of development and, primarily, because they are grounded in the wrong philosophy of what exactly software development "is". An alternative—theorY Driven-Development - YDD—addressing the "essential difficulty" of development is proposed. How YDD represents an evolutionary step for Agile is argued.

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The Three Pillars of Executive Support for Agile Adoption

As an executive sponsoring the adoption of agile methods, you've already spent dollars for training and coaching. You've talked to the management team and the rest of the organization about the need and rationale for using agile development methods.

But your job isn't over.

Communication and budgetary support are necessary, but not sufficient for your organization to realize the benefits of agile methods.

If you want the transition to succeed you must provide on-going support. The good news is, that doesn't mean you must keep handing over money. The bad news is that what's required of you is much harder than writing a check.

TechWell Contributor's picture TechWell Contributor
Adopting Agile: Hidden Benefits

When XDx's Software Group adopted an agile approach to application development, we achieved the fastest development time on any software project in the company's history. While we expected to shorten development time and reduce costs, we discovered that agile provides several hidden benefits. Beyond its value as a software development methodology, our agile platform is a tool that enables and improves communication with our users which has been a key success factor, because user groups have a hard time thinking in the software development terms imposed by the traditional waterfall method of upfront specification. This improved communication has helped everyone to let go of complete up-front specifications and trust the agile process.

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APLN Washington DC - Scott Ambler - New Survey Information - What We Really Do.
Podcast

Bob interviews Scott Ambler about new survey information from APLN.

Bob Payne's picture Bob Payne
Six Ways to Build Trust and Three Ways to Break It

Esther Derby has been thinking about trust in the workplace a lot lately, and the absence of trust, too. When she asks people what it's like to work in a group where people trust their managers, they tell her information flows freely, conflict is productive, and that they can tell their managers what they think without fear of retribution. On the other hand, when trust is absent, people hide information, look out for themselves, don't bring up new ideas, and withhold effort.

Esther Derby's picture Esther Derby
What's Going Right Around Here?

Instead of focusing on the problems, focus on what works. That is the simple premise of "appreciative inquiry." In this week's column, Ellen Gottesdiener explains how to help your team focus on the processes that work by outlining what should be included in your appreciative inquiries, in order to make more positive organizational changes.

Ellen Gottesdiener's picture Ellen Gottesdiener
Not Wanted on the Voyage

Back in the day of cross-Atlantic boat travel, luggage that wasn't needed during the long journey was labeled "Not Wanted on the Voyage" and stowed away below decks. In this column, Fiona Charles suggests that testers can also be viewed as heavy baggage and not exactly welcome by some parties during the journey of software development. To understand why others might think this way, Fiona takes a good, hard look at what testers do that could possibly make them undesirable team mates.

Fiona Charles's picture Fiona Charles
Agile Product Managers and Product Owners: A Scalable, Nuanced Approach

In the first article of this three-part series, Dean Leffingwell describes a nuanced approach to the role of the agile Product Owner in the enterprise setting, concluding that the enterprise is likely to need both agile Product Owners and agile Product Managers to achieve success.

TechWell Contributor's picture TechWell Contributor

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