Transition

Articles

Speedometer 8 Keys to Transforming into a High-Performance Agile Team

Following an agile process alone will not guarantee your teams will be high performers. Teams undergo various challenges while transforming into a highly productive team. This article looks at the areas where teams generally struggle in adopting agile principles and the typical root causes for those struggles, as well as eight behaviors that can help drive teams toward greater success.

Uday Varma's picture Uday Varma
Hands put in the center of the group For Agile to Succeed, Put People First

There’s a lot of buzz in the agile world today about becoming more technical, automating everything, and learning the next miracle tool. While it’s important to establish a process, and tools can help with many steps of the software development lifecycle, the human contribution to project delivery is still the most important. Here are some qualities agile teams should encourage.

Leanne Howard's picture Leanne Howard
Evaluation with "Excellent" checked Are You Agile? An Assessment Can Tell You

Plenty of companies want to be agile and go through the motions but are not really agile. An agile assessment allows you to evaluate how teams or even organizations are doing in their agile journey. But like any useful tool, there is no shortage of assessment options available. Here are the acceptance criteria to look for and a framework for using an agile assessment.

Joel Bancroft-Connors's picture Joel Bancroft-Connors
Continuous improvement How Businesses Stay Agile: The Art of Being Retrospective

The greatest use for agile in business is in changing how you tackle problems and projects. Rather than defining the whole project and setting a “way forward,” an agile approach takes things much more iteratively. That means meeting as a team on a frequent and regular basis to share problems and successes, then making improvements as needed—being retrospective.

Ivan Seselj's picture Ivan Seselj
Man surrounded by sticky notes Streamline Your Agile Requirements by Avoiding Bloated Backlogs

In agile development, a bloated backlog results from teams accumulating huge lists of requirements, usually in the form of user stories. Retaining every possible story for building the product weighs down the backlog while squeezing (or obscuring) the highest-value stories. The best way to help minimize this risk is to optimize the time spent defining and refining the product priorities.

Michelina DiNunno's picture Michelina DiNunno
Leader on a team 7 Lessons Agile Can Teach Us about Leadership

The Agile Manifesto contains values to guide teams toward developing better software. But its directives are also about leadership—influencing culture and creating an organization where people can collaborate to meet the needs of their customers. Here are seven lessons the Agile Manifesto can teach us about leadership.

Ryan Ripley's picture Ryan Ripley
Woman designing software architecture An Agile Approach to Software Architecture

For an organization transitioning to agile development, creating software architecture isn’t incompatible with your new processes. Consider the principles in the Agile Manifesto, involve team members who will be using the architecture in its development, and reflect and adapt often, and you will end up with an architecture that meets the needs of your team and your enterprise.

Gene Gotimer's picture Gene Gotimer
Transparency The Transparency Experiment: Improving Accuracy and Predictability in Scrum

Using the iterative and incremental agile development framework Scrum should help manage product development, but some teams still have difficulty delivering features in a predictable manner. This organization decided to address the mismatch between what was being committed and what was accomplished by doing an experiment in work transparency.

Metrics 4 Balanced Metrics for Tracking Agile Teams

Whatever your feelings on metrics, organizations will expect them for your team. You don't want to measure only one aspect to the detriment of other information, but you also don't want to measure too many things and scatter your team's focus. Here are four metrics that balance each other out and help gauge an agile team's productivity, work quality, predictability, and health.

Joel Bancroft-Connors's picture Joel Bancroft-Connors
Back to basics Back to Basics: Use the Heart of Agile to Frame Your Agile Adoption

Somewhere along the way, agile implementations have gotten overblown and unwieldy. Managers and leaders look at all the models and frameworks and think agile adoption is too confusing or not worth the effort. To communicate what agile truly means, we have to simplify the message by getting to the heart of agile: collaborate, deliver, reflect, and improve.

Phil Gadzinski's picture Phil Gadzinski

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