agile

Many of us have horrible experiences with distributed teams where we can find no possibility of collaboration, but it doesn’t have to be that way. Even if a team is distributed, those team members need collaborative opportunities and space. What’s important is the team’s time for collaboration, not time zones. Here are some ways you can visualize when your team works and create more quality collaboration time.

With traditional software development methods, you are betting that end-of-lifecycle testing will let your team correct all risks, but experience has taught us that this seldom happens. With agile, you are incrementally reducing risk with every iteration and release you do, mitigating risks as you go. This article examines each of the value statements from the Agile Manifesto to illustrate how agile ultimately helps us reduce product risk.

One of the huge benefits of agile is improved or increased quality. However, many newly agile teams report their product quality decreasing at the rate at which delivery is increasing. Leanne Howard has some solutions for these teams, including making quality everyone's responsibility and embracing a shift-left mentality. To get accelerated quality in your agile initiatives, you have to truly be agile.

In an agile world, team members are empowered to make important decisions within the context of the behavioral architecture, without having to ask permission from supervisors or managers. But these supervisors and managers are coming from a lifetime of learning how to succeed in a hierarchical world, so they will need to leave behind those ingrained lessons. In order for agile to be successful at scale, leaders will need to change.