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Use Lean Thinking to Accelerate DevOps Performance for Agile Teams Leaders in agile organizations should consider adding lean techniques to their DevOps practices. Lean thinking can accelerate DevOps delivery by providing a set of processes and principles to help create more beneficial products, save money, boost productivity, reduce waste, and map to value.
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When Prioritizing Stories, Don’t Forget the Stakeholders Instead of choosing what to develop based solely on a cold, hard dollar amount, you might try approaching the person who originally requested a story—or who will be most affected by it—and asking, “What benefit will this bring you?” Armed with a list of stakeholders and interests, you can find out the real difference a story will make.
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Pair Writing: The Benefits of Working with a Partner For many, pair programming delivers benefits such as increased focus, improved team relationships, and better code. Tom Breur and Michael Mahlberg found that pair writing can work, too, and the advantages bear a lot of resemblance to those of pair programming—more concentration, productive feedback, and better writing.
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Book Review: The Agile Mind-Set: Making Agile Processes Work Gil Broza's book The Agile Mind-Set: Making Agile Processes Work speaks to the challenges faced by people who focus on "doing agile" rather than "being agile." Rote execution of methods can only get you so far, and Broza gives insights into how you move beyond practicing agile by habit into living it.
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What Rugby Can Teach You about Trust in Agile Teams Unconditional support, trust, respect, generosity, and courage are the behavioral values required for agile—and also for rugby. On the surface, the software development methodology and the rough team sport may seem to have little in common. But Luis Novella writes that rugby can actually teach you a lot about agile.
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Assessing the Business Value of Agile User Stories Allan Kelly says that ideally, companies should put a dollar amount on each planned business decision. But pinning down financial value can be hard, and besides, there are many other factors to consider, such as sustainability and customer service. He looks at various ways to assess the business value of user stories.
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Stop Re-estimating Your Stories for Every Iteration Many agile practitioners recommend re-estimating stories at the beginning of each iteration to increase accuracy. Adrian Wible, however, argues that re-estimating stories within an iteration planning meeting actually distorts results and decreases predictability. See if you need to rethink your planning procedures.
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Rethinking Workflow for Virtual Teams When you switch from working in an office with all your coworkers right beside you to working remotely and collaborating with people in other countries or even time zones, you have to change more about how you work than just the way you communicate. Magnus Ljadas details how his virtual team modified their tools, infrastructure, and processes.
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Realizing Value by Establishing an Agile Project Management Office Some believe that an overarching organizational and governance model to structure operations in agile environments is needed. An agile project management organization can act as an aggregator and evaluator of agile project data metrics to help leaders track performance for improved value delivery.
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Agile or Not? Asking the Right Questions Many organizations dipping their toes into agile just want to know one thing: Are we agile or not? Most agilists agree, however, that rather than a binary designation, agile is more of a continuum. It's a sliding scale that can vary across the development lifecycle. A better question is: How agile are you?
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