Articles

Please enter an article title, author, or keyword
Swiss army knife Want True Agility? Foster General Skills over Specialization

Many organizations enforce systems that stifle flexibility by promoting specialization. But encouraging learning new skills and expanding outside core responsibilities promotes flow over resource efficiency, helps cover gaps in time of crisis, and lets you build a team that can deliver continually at a sustainable pace. It's the age of the generalist.

Phil Gadzinski's picture Phil Gadzinski
value highlighted in dictionary Get Smart about Your Regression Tests’ Value

If you aren’t measuring the coverage your regression tests provide, you may be spending too much time for little benefit. Consider the value of your regression tests as you create and manage them. You need to be smart about the regression tests you maintain in order to gain the maximum value from the work put into creating, running, and analyzing their results.

Leanne Howard's picture Leanne Howard
hands holding soil with plant The Values Essential to a Scrum Software Development Practice

The Scrum Guide was updated recently to make values an explicit part of the framework: commitment, courage, focus, openness, and respect. When these values are embodied and lived by the team, the Scrum pillars of transparency, inspection, and adaptation come to life and build trust for everyone. Is your team practicing them?

Ryan Ripley's picture Ryan Ripley
ladder up into the clouds 4 Secrets to Successfully Scaling Agile Tech Teams

There comes a time for every successful tech team to expand. But how do you scale in an agile way without losing productivity? Here are four secrets to successfully managing this transition, from deliberately choosing an incremental growth process to hiring new team members and retaining efficient communication.

Debbie Madden's picture Debbie Madden
Failure Next Exit sign How to Guarantee Failure in Your Agile DevOps Transformation

Many organizations make the same agile and DevOps scaling mistakes year after year, then attempt to rectify them by putting together a great new strategy—only to miss the reasons causing the failure. If you want to refuse to evolve and, as a result, cause your organization’s agile and DevOps transformation efforts to deliver zero business value, be sure to follow these seven antipatterns.

Mik Kersten's picture Mik Kersten
circle of continuous arrows Learn Agile Techniques to Become a More Valuable Tester

Agile is still on the rise, with many organizations that have been successful at the team level looking to scale their adoption. Consequently, it's important for testers to have practical application of agile techniques. You should know how to create tests to optimize maximum test coverage, have interpersonal skills, and successfully build relationships within the team.

Leanne Howard's picture Leanne Howard
man bending over backwards Create an Agile DevOps Environment That Fosters Flexibility over Features

When a company makes the move from software as a service (SaaS) to an API-first platform, a change in mindset is required. The successful transitions come from those who shift from features to flexibility. Technology teams should look to remove constraints and broaden the possibilities of their platform by constantly exploring ways to make their platform as flexible as possible.

Steve Davis's picture Steve Davis
financial graph How to Train Agile Product Owners Using Financial Terms

Prioritizing stories for an upcoming sprint can lead to confusion and miscommunication between the product owner and agile teams. But putting that exercise into financial terms, such as purchase, budget, cost, and investment—a set of words that everyone understands, no matter what their area of expertise is—gets everyone thinking about value.

Kris Hatcher's picture Kris Hatcher
man speaking into megaphone Speak Up: The Key to Agile Success

You can learn all the theoretical agile principles and best practices, but you still may not be agile. To be truly agile, you must also communicate and collaborate with your team—and this means speaking up. Even if you're not a natural extrovert, there are plenty of ways you can contribute during planning, sprints, and retrospectives to make your product and process better.

Brian Everett's picture Brian Everett
start, continue, and stop doing signs When Postmortems Meet Retrospectives: Improving Your Agile Process

If you want secure, reliable systems, you need all stakeholders actively communicating. This means involving both IT operations and developers in discussions after deployments, to ascertain if anything went wrong and can be avoided, and what went well or could be refined. Integrating your postmortems and retrospectives facilitates collaboration and improves processes.

Bob Aiello's picture Bob Aiello

Pages

Upcoming Events

Apr 28
Jun 02
Sep 22
Oct 13