agile transition

Articles

Enterprise Agile: Yes, Your Whole Company Can Adopt Agile

About 12 months ago, our company started an initiative to adopt agile practices across our entire organization—not only our software development organization, but our business organization. For years we had experienced outstanding results by utilizing Scrum for our clients' application development projects. Team productivity improved, executive visibility strengthened, and overall quality increased. Our goal was to capture similar results for our business. Find out how we're doing!

Melissa Meeker
The Four Pillars of Agile Adoption

Now that the world has heard of Agile [1], they think–incorrectly–that the pieces of Agile they like best can be cherry-picked and used in isolation. Unless it is combined with Lean Thinking, agile software development can achieve only a fraction of its potential. Agile software teams are not sustainable for very long if they are islands in a sea of waterfall projects. This artcle examines four change processes that must occur simultaneously for agile adoption to succeed.

Setting Up Global Agile Teams

There are no best practices for creating a productive, global development organization, just a few good ideas to think about and tailor around your particular objectives. Consider three universal issues every organization must grapple with to make a global agile team successful: data considerations, communications needs, and a company's agile readiness. How you handle each of these issues will vary widely, and there is no one-size-fits-all solution for every organization.

David Webb
sound byte button 11 Ways Agile Adoptions Fail

Usually, when Jean Tabaka lists practices, techniques, ideas, or recommendations about software development, she sticks with the number ten. It's nice and neat and has a fine history of enumeration cleanliness dating back to the Old Testament. But for agile adoption failures, Jean thinks it is time to invoke some Spinal Tap and go to eleven. Here are her top eleven signs that your agile adoption is headed down a slippery slope to failure.

Jean Tabaka's picture Jean Tabaka
Agile Top-Down: Striking a Balance

Agile is being evangelized in executive boardrooms and introduced top-down with increasing frequency. Considering that Agile advocates self-management by the individual and within a team, what is the role of senior leadership? My experience from this top-down perspective has given me insight into attitudes and techniques that are successful and others that fail. I assert that there is an effective and appropriate stance for senior leadership that will improve the effectiveness of an Agile transformation. Key to my list of recommendations for making Agile work is the balanced involvement of both senior-level leaders and practitioners in the planning and executing the introduction of Agile practices.

Bryan Stallings
Why You Need to Be Specific about Agile Practice Adoption

Amr Elssamadisy presents one way to share our knowledge that is more specific than full methodologies and processes, more general than war stories, and will help new agile adopters get beyond the mantra "It depends!"

Amr Elssamadisy's picture Amr Elssamadisy
How to Preview User Satisfaction before Your Release

Why wait to discover how your users will react to your system when there are ways to measure such things during development? This column describes a simple tool to develop visibility into customer satisfaction. Learn how you can begin to manage expectations so that neither you nor the customer has an unpleasant surprise on release day.

Esther Derby's picture Esther Derby

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