People & Teams

Articles

Agile team cooperation How Business Teams Can Embrace Agile Techniques

As agile principles and practices receive greater organizational exposure, business teams are embracing certain aspects of agility that were traditionally reserved for technology teams. This article details the experiences of a group of people with business roles who have adopted some agile methods and how their teams have benefitted.

Eric  King's picture Eric King
Fish jumping into bigger bowl Welcome to Agile: A Developer’s Experience

In this article, a developer shares his personal experience with the transition from a waterfall environment to an agile one. He compares what it was like for him coding, learning, and communicating using each methodology, and he shares what it was like making the change to agile—and why he's never looking back.

Kris Hatcher's picture Kris Hatcher
Burndown chart Help Your Team Understand Its Iteration Burndown

A good key indicator for measuring how well your agile team is performing is the burndown chart. It’s a simple concept—as time passes, the amount of work to do decreases. Of course, there will be days when progress is not as expected or tasks end up larger than originally estimated. A burndown can help your team reset and keep stakeholders in the loop.

Dave Browett's picture Dave Browett
Two birds: pair programming The Benefits of Pair Programming

This article details a team’s experience in implementing pair programming as a way to get work done as part of its agile transformation. It delves into the many positive results from the pairing experiment, as well as some of the negatives that were encountered, and weighs whether developers think pair programming is a worthwhile endeavor.

Tim Groven's picture Tim Groven
Thinking Critically about Software Development BSC West 2015 Keynote: Better Thinking for Better Software: Thinking Critically about Software Development

Software developer Laurent Bossavit delivered the second keynote presentation, about why we need to think more critically about software development. He began his presentation by saying his intention was to make you question what you know—or what you think you know.

Beth Romanik's picture Beth Romanik
Agile Mindsets How Do You Recruit Team Members with Agile Mindsets?

The traditional ways of finding employees are changing. If you want to get a role that will make you happy to contribute to the team, you need to rethink the way you apply for roles. If you are the resource manager, change how you recruit. This article focuses on the qualities you should be exemplifying or looking for if you want to form a team with an agile mindset.

Leanne Howard's picture Leanne Howard
Agile Noise Turn Up Your Agile Noise

Usually noise has a negative connotation, but in this sense, noise means something that increases the team progress (i.e., velocity) and output (i.e., quality). Chaos is the negative side of noise and decreases velocity. Teams should know the importance of agile noise and handle the chaos in a right way at the time of transformation. Let’s explore agile noise and its benefits.

Trinadh Bonam's picture Trinadh Bonam
Agile Magic Why Adopting Agile Won’t Magically Reduce Your IT Budget

Of course, all companies would like to reduce their budgets. But cutting back in the IT department can have unintended consequences. This article looks at two of the more well-adopted cost-cutting approaches, the software factory and distributed teams, and goes into how they can help and hurt your company.

Mario Lucero's picture Mario Lucero
Team Velocity Help Your Team Understand Its Velocity

Teams should be working toward a target velocity that is based on historical evidence. There may be times when this figure needs to be adjusted, but teams that understand their velocity know that it is a good indicator of what they are capable of achieving in a sustainable way, and this will increase confidence for the teams and stakeholders.

Dave Browett's picture Dave Browett
Agile Mindset What Does It Mean to Have an Agile Mindset?

There has been lots of talk about the agile mindset, but what does that mean? It does not merely encompass the skills that make a successful agile team member, but also what drives a person to want to be part of an agile team. It should include the quest to learn—even when you fail—and leveraging what you learn to continuously improve on what you do.

Leanne Howard's picture Leanne Howard

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