The Latest
What's So Special About Specialists?[article] If two projects in your organization require specific expertise that only one employee has, what do you do? Projects need to stay on track, but one person certainly can't be everywhere—or even two places—at once. In this column, Johanna Rothman shares a story of an organization stuck in the specialist mindset and offers some tips on how to escape if you're stuck there, too. |
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Do You Know Why You Are Doing That?[magazine] It's easy to get caught up in the inertia of a project and forget to ask exactly what we are developing, who our customers are, and what their goals with our software might be. Few software projects have the time and budget to figure out what their project is through trial and error. Getting clarity on project focus not only helps productivity, working to create software that people actually need increases our chances for success. |
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Tips and Advice - Beyond The Team - Sanjiv Augustine[article]
Podcast
Bob interviews Sanjiv Augustine about agile transitions. |
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Deep Agile Conference 2009 - Nancy Van Schooenderwoert, Jack Ganssle[article]
Podcast
A podcast about the Deep Agile 2009 conference. |
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Tips and Advice - Team Rooms[article]
Podcast
Many organizations know the importance of nurturing culture in order to create happy and productive teams, but how many have set aside team rooms for these groups to accomplish their builds? In this podcast, Bob Payne get the opinion of someone who agrees with this added bonus for teams. |
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Feature Injection: Part One[article] We are leaving the "last responsible moment" for a while. This month we start a discussion of Feature Injection, an analysis process based on real options and Kolb's circle of learning. The first episode ( of five ) introduces the "Information Arrival Processes. |
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Tips and Advice - Listener Email - Self Organizing Teams[article] In this podcast, Bob and George respond to a listener-submitted email by providing a better understanding of what truly makes self-organizing teams. We encourage you to listen to this informative discussion to make sure everyone is on the same page with what these teams are truly made of. |
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How Scrum Increases Productivity[article] Scrum has become the most popular exponent of agile software development frameworks. Organizations-and those developing software, in particular-are drawn to Scrum for many reasons. They include its capacity to mitigate risk, facilitate frequent communication, reduce cycle time and cost, and deliver the right products to customers. From a managerial standpoint, Scrum's most appealing attribute is its ability to boost productivity through autonomous, hyper-performing teams. |
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Agile Development Infrastructure—on Premises or in the Cloud?[article] How do companies face the challenge of setting up their infrastructure when they've just started agile development? One option is to move your infrastructure to the cloud. In this article, we help you decide what's the best fit for your team and project by addressing this issue head on. |
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The GDM-Agile Paradox: Tips to Tap into the Capabilities of Agile in the Global Delivery Model[article] Agile is a development strategy that we have worked with for a number of years now. Lately, we've been getting a lot of questions from clients along the lines of: "I've got a project, I want to globally source it, can I use Agile Development?" Well, that depends. |
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Agile in the Downturn[article] The current economic downturn is a new test for Agile, until now Agile has been promoted in a growing economy. Proponents of Agile have emphasized how it improve competitive advantage and helps a company out-compete its rivals. Now companies are concerned with simple survival. Today's managers are concerned with cutting costs, improving cashflow and managing without credit. Organizational change and process improvement are not top of the agenda. Promoting Agile in this environment is something new. |
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Seeding the Agile Product Owner in the Enterprise[article] In this final installment of a three-part series on product owners in the agile enterprise, Dean Leffingwell provides several case study "vignettes", which illustrate how specific agile enterprises found the right people necessary to fill this role, along with some of the unique challenges they faced and the solutions they applied. |
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Ending Right[article] Jeff Patton has been building software using the agile approach for a while now. His observations of how others are implementing agile development fall short of complete, but he has noticed is that the adoption breaks down during the evaluation phase. In this column, Jeff goes through the agile development process and offers guidance on the correct way of conducting an agile evaluation during this phase in the software development lifecycle. |
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The Trouble with Derivation[magazine] This article discusses the dark underbelly of derivation: the fragile base class. It's possible to modify a base class in such a way that, even though you've improved its implementation and all your tests work just fine, you've nonetheless damaged the derived classes, perhaps fatally. |
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Three Pounds of Manure in a Two-Pound Sack[magazine] Multitasking is not a magical cure for getting too much work done by too few resources. Listen in as Payson Hall eavesdrops on a coaching session between two managers about how to assign and prioritize work. |