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Although many companies may have heard that the concepts of lean production would be of use to their organization, they do not see how something that sprang from manufacturing practices could apply to software development. This article presents a different way of looking at Lean Software Development—one that is independent of Lean’s manufacturing heritage.

In October this year Codeworks DEV received the 2010 Agile Award for the “Best Use of Agile in the Public Sector”. The use of Agile Methods within large, publically accountable environments has long represented a challenge to the Agile community. Agility is more often associated with small to medium size enterprises (SME’s) in the private sector, where organisations are incentivised to keep pace with a changing business environment. Public sector companies and larger corporates, on the other hand, are renowned for their essentially prescriptive, “non-agile” attempts at long-term planning using techniques such as PRINCE2.

My team is in the middle of one of the hardest projects—we call them "themes"—we’ve ever tackled. We’re a high-functioning agile team that has helped our company grow and succeed over several years now—we “went agile” in 2003. Here’s one thing I know for sure: No matter how many problems you solve, new challenges will pop up.

Tired of guesstimating your estimation process just to create a completion date management will accept? Jonathan Kohl takes the guess work out of estimations by focusing on uncertainties. It may sound counterintuitive, but the idea is to focus on the fact that all projects face unforeseen delays. The rigorous estimation process Jonathan describes here provides your team a way that ensures enough time is scheduled for development and a date for completion management can agree upon.

Teams that work in large-scale, complex agile environments are often distributed. As a result, it is almost impossible to discuss distributed agile development without discussing the implications of working at scale. In this article, we will cover the following topics to help distributed, large-scale teams create their initial product backlog at the start of a project:

A successful Scrum implementation requires proper understanding of Scrum processes within team and within all project stakeholders. Even after proper training and certification (CSM/CSPO) it’s really tough to achieve the success as intended. There is one common and important problem which has always been overlooked: the alignment of current team with Scrum the model. Because, vanilla-Scrum only describe what the role does in the process.

There continues to be a lot of debate on whether Agile is mainstream. According to a Forrester report published in early 2010, while widespread “Agile” use of the iterative software development processes is found, " teams are not adopting scrum, extreme programming, or another specific Agile approach, but are embracing agile as an ethos or philosophy and cherry-picking the best bits from many different process models to develop a formula unique to their own situation." However, the largest category in the survey – and the one that is the most telling is that 30.6% of the respondents said they do not use a formal process methodology. Add to this my own experience implementing Agile, reading the latest Agile literature (e.g., articles, research, books, etc.), and discussing Agile (and Agile implementations) with people across numerous companies in North America, Europe, and Asia, and what this indicates to me is that: