Articles

Releasing SMURFS Instead of MVPs, Maybe We Should Be Releasing SMURFS

The term minimum viable product, or MVP, has come to be misunderstood and misused in many organizations. It doesn’t mean you should be releasing half-baked, barely feasible software. Instead, you should be thinking of your product’s capabilities as a Specifically Marketable, Useful, Releasable Feature Set—or SMURFS!

Matthew Barcomb's picture Matthew Barcomb
Project Management Framework Common Misconceptions about Agile: Agile Is Just a Project Management Framework

When it comes to transitioning to agile, if a team only goes off what it's heard from other teams and doesn't take a class or read any books about the process, misconceptions can abound. And that leads to problems. Read on to have three common agile myths debunked and to learn why agile is a cultural change, not just a project management framework.

Johanna Rothman's picture Johanna Rothman
Agile Helped Cooperation An Experience Where Agile Approaches Helped

This article addresses a process where a team moved from a traditional waterfall model to using agile elements in order to deliver a product to a government agency. It talks about typical problems that come up in a transition to agile, complications from distributed teams, and the advantages and disadvantages of the process for government or nongovernment clients.

Yamini Munipalli's picture Yamini Munipalli
photo whiteboard showing theme we needed to finish; right side is the new theme We're Agile

I always recommend to teams newly transitioning to agile that they keep every iteration the same length. This helps them learn to manage their time, and after a few iterations they'll start to get a rhythm. Hopefully, they'll learn to work incrementally, doing testing and coding concurrently as part of one development effort, so that user stories are finished throughout the iteration, and testing isn't pushed to the last day.

Lisa Crispin's picture Lisa Crispin
A Framework for Agile

Bob Aiello discusses how CM and agile practices can go hand in hand - provided that you have a solid framework to work with. With agile's popularity seemingly always on the rise, alongside the need for CM, learn how having both benefits everyone onboard.

Bob Aiello's picture Bob Aiello
An Agile Approach to Release Management

For teams practicing Agile Software development, value working software over other artifacts, a feature from the release plan is not complete until you can demonstrate it to your customer, ideally in a shippable state. Agile teams strive to have a working system ("potentially shippable") ready at the end of each iteration. Release Management should be easy for an ideal agile team, as agile teams, in theory, are ready to release at regular intervals, and the release management aspect is the customer saying, "Ship it!."

Release Management—Making It Lean and Agile

Release management is an awesome responsibility that plays a vital role in the success of a software development project. Releasing is often considered to be an activity that happens near the end of the process—a necessary evil, perhaps, but no more.

Robert Cowham's picture Robert Cowham

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