Planning

Articles

A Product Owner’s First Glimpse of Agile
Kent McDonald introduces us to Arthur, a middle manager and product owner in a medium-sized insurance company who has been assigned to take on an agile project. For those unfamiliar with agile, the terminology and techniques of agile approaches can seem strange and often a little silly when not accompanied with an explanation as to why those techniques exist. Kent explains the challenges product owners like Arthur face and how to make product owners understand agile better.
Take A Hike: Death March Projects And The Ice Age Wilderness Trail
Dave and his friend Bob hiked Wisconsin’s Ice Age Trail and returned home with more than just sore legs and hiking experience. Learn some of the project management tips Dave picked up while adventuring in the wilderness.
Mobile Challenges for Project Management: The Human Factors
Continuing the conversation on building software for mobile devices, we look beyond the devices to the human concerns and challenges of managing a mobile-app development team, including ergonomics, health, and scheduling.
Hoarding: How to Prioritize Features to Clean Up the Clutter
Hoarding is an incredibly common—but usually unnamed and invisible—phenomenon in corporate software development. If you’ve been doing agile for a while, you are no doubt aware of the cost of hoarding and you’ve probably removed much of it, but what happens when you aren't doing agile yet? Clarke Ching explains how to counter hoarding by prioritizing the right features.

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Better Software Magazine

Why Agile Works: Focus on the Details of Software Development
It's easy to overlook details when your focus is on the big picture. But, if you adjust your perspective, you may find new value in understanding why things work the way they do. Learn why agile works and how it can apply to both complex and simple projects.
Simplicity and Precision: Test Planning in Agile Projects
Test planning is often thought unnecessary in an agile project. However, if our mindset is on "planning" rather than "plans," we see that test-planning activities happen throughout the project, taking advantage of levels of precision, i.e., what is absolutely necessary at each level.
Don’t Bury the Survivors: The Value of Clear Communication
Whether you’re discussing software defects with your test team, analyzing requirements with your BA, or programming in your favorite new language, communication is essential. Lanette Creamer has some tips to help you communicate clearly with any audience.
The Software Development Game
Adapting your software development tools, practices, and processes can be difficult, even overwhelming. The authors have studied and applied game-like processes and behaviors to help provide structure to software development adaptation. They propose a process strategy called the software development game to help teams who are faced with change.

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Interviews

Traceability's Priceless Role in Agile: An Interview with William Gens
William Gens sits down with Noel Wurst to describe "the art and science of traceability" ahead of his STAREAST session of the same name. Learn what makes traceability meaningful and such a valuable asset to projects, no matter how bad the requirements may seem to be.
Taking a Holistic View of Collaboration: An Interview with Bob Hartman
Bob Hartman uses more than three decades of experience in software, working in nearly every position imaginable, to express the need for team members to value all coworkers equally. In this quick interview, Bob explains his "holistic" approach to accomplishing effective and enjoyable collaboration.
Effective Risk Management: An Interview with Payson Hall
We recently sat down with Payson Hall ahead of his upcoming 2012 Better Software Conference East presentation titled "Twelve Risks to Enterprise Software Projects - And What to Do about Them" in order to learn more about his experise in the field of risk management.
Agile at the Enterprise Level: An Interview with Arlen Bankston
Arlen Bankston, vice president of LitheSpeed, LLC, is a Lean Six Sigma Master Black Belt and Certified ScrumMaster Trainer. Heather Shanholtzer recently talked to Arlen about what it takes to apply agile at the enterprise level and the challenges he faces when team members aren’t collocated.

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TechWell Stories
To Estimate or Not to Estimate—That Is the Question
Removing Waste in Software Projects
Create a Vendor Contract While Keeping Agile
How Agile Teams Use DevOps for Deployment
Build a List of Things—But Don't Call It Agile

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Featured Resources

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