Interviews

Finding Microefficiencies in Agile Practices: An Interview with Melissa Tondi

Melissa Tondi discusses retuning your standard agile practices to better engage the project team, enabling them to write code that will pass testing and free testers to assume the role of user advocate.

Jennifer Bonine's picture Jennifer Bonine
Using Agile and DevOps to Achieve Quality by Design Using Agile and DevOps to Achieve Quality by Design

When software nears completion, it is the wrong time to focus on quality. Product delivery improves if you invest in a plan, validate in small increments, and focus on continuous testing.

Michael Sowers's picture Michael Sowers
A coach training a baseball player What Kind of Agile Coach Should I Hire?

Having your organization make the mental shift necessary to adopt agile is the first important step in an agile transformation. But once you decide you want to change, now what? Should you attempt your agile adoption yourselves or hire an expert? Joel Bancroft-Connors details the benefits and downsides of going it alone and of using contract, consultant, and full-time agile coaches so you can decide what's best for you.

Joel Bancroft-Connors's picture Joel Bancroft-Connors
Agile DevOps East You Can't Improve What You Can't See
Slideshow

From value stream mapping to burndown charts, making things visible is a core component of the continuous improvement process. But even with all this visibility, much of the data surrounding how your teams work is either not captured or not understandable. This data represents a great opportunity for insights and improvement. Think about it: Your management team tells you that your velocity is too low. What do you do? First, you need more information. What does “too low” mean? Why was the velocity low? Did the team deliver value? Brandon Carlson will share one team’s surprising insights when they analyzed previously invisible data. He'll also tell you how to discover what the highest risk areas of the system are for enabling the most cost-effective regression test strategy. It's all there, only tucked away where no one can see.

Brandon Carlson
Four people on a crew team rowing together Rowing in the Same Direction: Use Value Streams to Align Work

Ambiguity abounds about value streams, so it’s good to clarify what they are, why they matter, and how to exploit them. It's important to help employees understand the organization's definition of value, to provide visibility on how business value is created, and to focus on the fast flow of value through the value streams. If everyone understands which direction to row the boat, they can steer toward it together.

Dominica DeGrandis's picture Dominica DeGrandis
Agile Dev West 2018, Better Software West 2018, DevOps West 2018 Unlocking Retrospectives
Slideshow

Retrospectives empower teams to learn and improve. But many teams fail to reach their true learning potential. Ryan was part of a team that held retrospectives for a year and a half to fix one line of code. Through the story of this team, he will show you how they turned their retrospectives from a meeting with meaningless action items to one that accomplished a meaningful improvement. Ryan will explore the resistance that was met and how it was overcome. He will show how to shift to a hypothesis-driven retrospective that to guides specific improvements and learning goals. His team made significant changes to their retrospectives and were rewarded with a radical improvement. Breaking through their retrospective impediments and finally embracing a learning mindset empower Ryan's team to fix the legacy line of code that had held the team back for over year.

Ryan Latta
Icon showing an automated system Why You Need to Be Doing Continuous Integration

It’s usually easy and inexpensive to set up a continuous integration environment for either an agile or a waterfall project. Perhaps the most obvious benefit of CI is the elimination of the integration phase that existed in traditional waterfall projects, where we typically slip the worst on deadlines. But there are many other benefits to continuous integration that you may not have considered.

David Bernstein's picture David Bernstein
Signs saying "Continue doing," "Start doing," and "Stop doing" 5 Tips for Getting Retrospectives Done Right

Unfortunately, many retrospectives are not productive. It may be that the discussions are unfocused, not enough data was gathered to be helpful for analysis, or the team concentrates too much on issues they can’t control. Retrospectives should be a key part of an agile process for helping the team improve. Here are five tips that will help you have more valuable retrospectives.

Marco Corona's picture Marco Corona
Three people To Kick-Start Your Agile Project, Begin with a Minimum Viable Team

You've heard of a minimum viable product, which has only enough features to create a working model and provide feedback for further development. If you want to get started on a new project quickly, Allan Kelly suggests assembling a minimum viable team—only a few people, with only the necessary skills. They begin work right away, with a small budget and tight feedback loops, driving down risk.

Allan Kelly's picture Allan Kelly
Building Autonomous DevOps Capability in Delivery Teams

After setting up a DevOps team and adopting continuous delivery practices, product releases may not be as smooth as they could be. The missing ingredient requires empowerment and autonomy.

Miiro Juuso's picture Miiro Juuso

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