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The Ideal Workspace for an Agile Team If your agile team is all wearing noise-canceling headphones and stepping outside for conference calls, you have a problem. An agile workspace doesn't only mean putting everyone in the same room. The layout, configuration, and seating must be conducive to sustainable teamwork. Here are some tips about what an agile workspace is—and isn't.
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Fitting Technical Writing into Agile Development As teams strive to move to a mature agile process, technical writers must adapt as effectively as the development personnel. This new agile process demands that knowledge dealing with software or product releases is only sparingly documented up front, making the technical writer's job of gathering information much more dependent on talking with people over reading requirements.
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Using Sprints for Agile Coaching Discussing the work to be done as a group, building in short iterations, getting feedback, and looking for ways to improve are not just practices for development teams—it is an effective way to achieve any goal. Here, Ben Kopel details his experience of working with other agile coaches in a sprint to hire a new ScrumMaster.
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Using Agile to Lead Your Agile Transformation There's something ironic about starting an agile transformation by spending six months creating a detailed transformation plan. We have to move away from a prescriptive playbook and toward a more responsive transformation model. Why not use the agile transformation as your first opportunity to be agile?
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8 Keys to Transforming into a High-Performance Agile Team Following an agile process alone will not guarantee your teams will be high performers. Teams undergo various challenges while transforming into a highly productive team. This article looks at the areas where teams generally struggle in adopting agile principles and the typical root causes for those struggles, as well as eight behaviors that can help drive teams toward greater success.
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Prevent Disaster by Righting Cultural Dysfunction on Your Team The space shuttles Challenger and Columbia were two of NASA's biggest disasters. Investigations into these accidents discovered the engineering issues responsible, but management practices and cultural barriers also were found to be contributing factors. Does your organization have a healthy culture that lets you safely voice concerns? It could help you prevent tragedy.
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For Agile to Succeed, Put People First There’s a lot of buzz in the agile world today about becoming more technical, automating everything, and learning the next miracle tool. While it’s important to establish a process, and tools can help with many steps of the software development lifecycle, the human contribution to project delivery is still the most important. Here are some qualities agile teams should encourage.
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Are You Agile? An Assessment Can Tell You Plenty of companies want to be agile and go through the motions but are not really agile. An agile assessment allows you to evaluate how teams or even organizations are doing in their agile journey. But like any useful tool, there is no shortage of assessment options available. Here are the acceptance criteria to look for and a framework for using an agile assessment.
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Code Health Kaizen: Self-Organizing for Agile Improvement People at Ben Kopel's organization were interested in improving their code health. It was something the engineers had control over and leadership didn't need to be involved, so code health was a great candidate for a self-organized initiative. Ben details the meeting they held, their discussions and plans, and how an agile team empowered themselves to improve.
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7 Lessons Agile Can Teach Us about Leadership The Agile Manifesto contains values to guide teams toward developing better software. But its directives are also about leadership—influencing culture and creating an organization where people can collaborate to meet the needs of their customers. Here are seven lessons the Agile Manifesto can teach us about leadership.
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