Transition

Articles

The Reason Scrum So Often Fails Agile Teams

The core of the Scrum framework for managing product development is the three key roles: ScrumMaster, product owner, and the development team. This triad is what makes Scrum so successful—when it works. However, it is the absence of these three roles that is the root cause of the majority of unsuccessful adoptions.

John Yorke's picture John Yorke
Agile icon 5 Ways Agile Testing Is Different from Traditional Testing

It’s the distinctions between agile and traditional software development approaches, as well as the adaptability of testers in these very different environments, that makes agile testing different from traditional testing. Agile demands more from its testers, and, in turn, it values them more, too. Let’s look at five main things that make an agile tester’s life different from that of a traditional tester.

Nishi Grover's picture Nishi Grover
Swiss army knife Want True Agility? Foster General Skills over Specialization

Many organizations enforce systems that stifle flexibility by promoting specialization. But encouraging learning new skills and expanding outside core responsibilities promotes flow over resource efficiency, helps cover gaps in time of crisis, and lets you build a team that can deliver continually at a sustainable pace. It's the age of the generalist.

Phil Gadzinski's picture Phil Gadzinski
Failure Next Exit sign How to Guarantee Failure in Your Agile DevOps Transformation

Many organizations make the same agile and DevOps scaling mistakes year after year, then attempt to rectify them by putting together a great new strategy—only to miss the reasons causing the failure. If you want to refuse to evolve and, as a result, cause your organization’s agile and DevOps transformation efforts to deliver zero business value, be sure to follow these seven antipatterns.

Mik Kersten's picture Mik Kersten
circle of continuous arrows Learn Agile Techniques to Become a More Valuable Tester

Agile is still on the rise, with many organizations that have been successful at the team level looking to scale their adoption. Consequently, it's important for testers to have practical application of agile techniques. You should know how to create tests to optimize maximum test coverage, have interpersonal skills, and successfully build relationships within the team.

Leanne Howard's picture Leanne Howard
man speaking into megaphone Speak Up: The Key to Agile Success

You can learn all the theoretical agile principles and best practices, but you still may not be agile. To be truly agile, you must also communicate and collaborate with your team—and this means speaking up. Even if you're not a natural extrovert, there are plenty of ways you can contribute during planning, sprints, and retrospectives to make your product and process better.

Brian Everett's picture Brian Everett
person taking a piece of pie Transitioning to Enterprise Agility—and Bringing Outsourced Delivery Partners Along

When companies adopt agile internally, they often forget to extend the concepts and values to their partners. You have to look at your outsourced delivery components as part of the process that needs to be included as an extended team. Collaboration, reflection, and improvement is at the heart of agile, and it should look that way from the perspective of all elements in the delivery chain.

Phil Gadzinski's picture Phil Gadzinski
organizational structure Code Factories: Making Agile Work in Large Organizational Teams

Making the transition to agile can be difficult for teams that are used to working in large groups and reporting to a single manager. Kris Hatcher suggests a new way to work: in smaller teams called code factories, which are created to stick with a specific product throughout its lifetime.

Kris Hatcher's picture Kris Hatcher
functional testing Kanban chart Kanban for Software Testing Teams

Kanban, a highly effective agile framework, is based on the philosophy that everything can be improved. And it's not just for development teams. The QA team also can use kanban to organize tasks, identify bottlenecks, and make their processes clearer and more consistent.

Sofía Palamarchuk's picture Sofía Palamarchuk
people talking The Real Key to Agile Success: Communication

Think about the common practices of an agile team: daily stand-up meetings, retrospectives after every sprint, pair programming and buddy reviews, collaborating with customers, and more face-to-face time instead of mountains of documentation. What is the agenda behind all these operations? Frequent and open communication.

Nishi Grover's picture Nishi Grover

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