The Latest

Designing an Agile Portfolio and Program Coordination System[magazine]

Scaling Agile to the enterprise can be challenging once you start looking at the Program and Portfolio level. How do you design an effective coordination system that encourages collaboration, communication, transparency and is flexible, easy to implement and rapidly evolvable? We will explore key aspects of creating a simple but effective agile-ready coordination system for managing such initiatives, based upon the authors' observations and experiences across widely differing companies.

Arlen Bankston's picture Arlen Bankston Bob Payne
Imaginary Friends: Creating Software with Personas[magazine]

We all want to satisfy our users, but tailoring software to customers is easier said than done. Personas—a method to synthesize your primary users into abstract entities—facilitates understanding of goals and experiences.

Shmuel Gershon
What Does "Being Done" Really Mean in Software Development?[article]

Agile New England (which used to be called the New England Agile Bazaar, and which was started by Ken Schwaber) , has this wonderful activity before the main event each month: they host Agile 101 sessions, where people who know something about agile lead a short (30 minutes) small (about 10 people) class on agile basics for those who want to learn more about some aspect of agile. 

Steve Berczuk's picture Steve Berczuk
The Agile Success Factor: Continuous Integration[article]

Kirk Knoernschild discusses the subtle though significant ways that continuous integration can be leveraged—from helping to align IT with the business to enforcing architectural constraints—and shows that this fundamental aspect of agility is the defining and necessary element of a truly agile development experience.

Kirk Knoernschild
One-Minute Management and Project Teams[article]

Managing expectations and providing useful feedback are incredibly important skills for managers, whether you’re dealing with one employee or many. In this article, Laura Brandenburg takes a closer look at how some of the principles from the book The One Minute Manager apply to project teams.

Laura Brandenburg's picture Laura Brandenburg
Innovate Successfully by Creating a Lean, Minimal Product[article]

Investing in a new product always involves risk. We may have targeted the wrong market segment, envisioned the wrong product or the wrong features, or the market may have changed by the time the product is launched.

Roman Pichler
Assessing a Selected Agile Method Assessing an Organization’s Capability to Effectively Implement Its Selected Agile Method[article]

Shvetha Soundararajan and Dr. James D. Arthur write that the agile philosophy provides an organization or a team with the flexibility to adopt a selected subset of principles and practices. However, more often than not, these customized approaches fail to reflect the agile principles associated with the practices.

TechWell Contributor's picture TechWell Contributor
A Productivity Comparison of Kanban and Scrum[article]

Charles Suscheck compares the levels of productivity of Scrum and Kanban through a hands-on experiment that he and his team personally participated in. Learn the upsides and warnings about each practice to help you decide what might work best for you and your team on your next project.

Charles Suscheck's picture Charles Suscheck
How to Manage the Hurly-Burly Hubbub of Change[article]

Giving yourself, and your team, the necessary time to adapt to and move on from change is the healthiest way to make sure that everyone is back on the same page in a timely manner. Learn how to avoid prolonging the necessary time to "heal" by minimizing turbulence.

Naomi Karten's picture Naomi Karten
Speaking 101[presentation]
Video

Are you a new Better Software speaker or aspiring to be one in the future? Join us at this workshop on making effective conference presentations.

Lee Copeland, Software Quality Engineering
Load Test Your Website Before Your Customers Do [article]

When you release a website or web application, it’s going to face a lot of very public load testing. If it performs poorly, there’s a good chance that you’re going to lose a lot of customers. Colin Mason offers some tips for load testing in order to ensure a better customer experience.

Colin  Mason's picture Colin Mason
Testing Under Pressure[magazine]

A cast-in-concrete delivery date looms on your project’s horizon. You have precious little time remaining, and the development team keeps delivering incomplete builds of unstable code. Is this a "death march" project, or can the testing team actually do something useful, or perhaps even save the day?

Robert Sabourin's picture Robert Sabourin
Managing in Fluid Environments[magazine]

Most management and change management methodologies assume a traditional environment—one in which the time between changes is much greater than the time required to adapt to each change. In fluid environments, the next change event happens before we can finish adapting to the last one, and sometimes even the one before that.

Rick Brenner's picture Rick Brenner
Five Steps to Creating Effective Agile Contracts[article]

While using an agile approach for projects that involve outside parties can be complex, especially during an audit; living documents and early involvement by all parties involved will help ensure a worry-free process. Learn how expert planning allows for the right path to emerge on its own.

TechWell Contributor's picture TechWell Contributor
Orders of Magnitude in Test Automation Orders of Magnitude in Test Automation[article]

Mike Kelly explains the following heuristic approach to help ensure your testing is roughly inline based on orders of magnitude across the various types of automation. It’s not a method for measuring effectiveness. Instead it’s simply a “smell” to tell you when you might need to take a little extra time to make sure you’re focusing your automated testing efforts at the right level.

Mike Kelly's picture Mike Kelly

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