Keep Both Oars in the Water - Tips for Modeling Requirements If you hear that someone doesn't have "both oars in the water," you know he's out of control, he doesn't "get it," or he's going in circles. Why? To move forward in a rowboat, you need both oars in the water to steer and to gain speed. In this week's column, Mary Gorman explains how this concept applies to modeling requirements. |
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Integrating Agile Practices With a Global Delivery Model Agile development is getting increased attention from IT professionals all over the world. Agile practices help to overcome many of the challenges in traditional approaches with its emphasis on lightweight processes, flexibility to deal with changing business priorities, short delivery cycles, higher team collaboration, and a host of other benefits. Agile offers a fresh approach to businesses seeking greater agility in their software projects. |
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Infrastructure Refactoring Early implementations of Agile focused on brand new or newer product-lines. More recently, Agile is gaining acceptance in the legacy product space where the project teams are moving away from their company's traditional (aka, waterfall) methodology and moving toward an Agile approach. In these cases, the project team that begins to use Agile methods are typically inheriting an existing infrastructure that was constructed for a phased (aka, waterfall) approach. |
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Iterations Iteration is at the heart of agile development practices. In an agile project you do something, measure your progress, and then use the feedback from the measurement to figure out what to do next. This cycle allows you to follow the Agile Manifesto value Responding to change over following a plan by providing for points in time where you can measure your progress at the project level. Whether your approach to agile is project-focused like Scrum or development-focused, like extreme programming, iteration is what drives an agile project. |
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Social Network Analysis within Agile Teams It is possible to apply techniques borrowed from social network analysis) to software development teams. Once revealed, social networks can be actively or passively stimulated for the benefit of team formation and cohesion. Agile principles incorporate social network stimulation on an almost subliminal level; this is one of the reasons why agile principles work. |
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Silver Bullets, Theory, and Agility Software isn't hard, thinking is hard! "The essence of a software entity is a construct of interlocking concepts ... I believe the hard part of building software to be the specification, design, and testing of this conceptual construct ..." Frederick P. Brooks Jr. Brooks suggests that the creation of a conceptual construct is the "irreducible essence" of software. Four properties contribute to the difficulty of creating such a construct: complexity, conformity, changeability, and invisibility. |
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Writing Shippable Code (Part Two) The first part of this article introduced the concept that developing a complex software system was like going on a journey. I contrasted how we plan our journeys through the use of route planning systems against that of an agile journey which is more like using a GPS in our car. I also introduced the idea that we only know when we have reached our journeys end (being completely done) when we have demonstrated that we have fully satisfied the expectations of the customer, our criteria for a successful outcome and that we can use this thinking throughout our project so that each iteration delivers software which can achieve a successful customer outcome. |
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Transitioning to Agile in the Middle of a Project Every team transitions to agile in different ways, and this column is one of those stories. But what makes this one different is that the main character, a project manager, is transitioning her team to agile in the middle of a project. From this story, Johanna Rothman details a potential survival guide for any project manager and team embarking on the same journey. |
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Seven Agile Coach Failure Modes Agile Coaches have a big job. "Support the team but not too much and not too little." "Be available but don't be overbearing." "Offer ideas but don't get too involved." "Coach, don't manage." All this advice can be confusing, even contradictory. No wonder Agile Coaches fall into less-than-desirable behaviors as they try out new things to help teams. The problem is that these behaviors can subtly undermine a team's ability to organize, improve and, eventually, reach high-performance. That's why they are called failure modes. |
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The New Challenge in Agile Adoption The good news is: Agile is going mainstream; it is not some fad nor is it just for unwashed coders. Managers get it. The not so good news is: this means the approach to introducing Agile needs to change. Agile Software Development started at the code face. Kent Beck's original Extreme Programming had little - if anything - to say about the wider organization and the role of management. Developers could - and did - just adopt practices like test driven development and stand-up meetings. |
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