People & Teams
Articles
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The Modern Role of the Agile Business Analyst The business analyst (BA) has played a key role in software development. But within a modern agile context, the role of the BA is less clear, and there is some confusion as to whether the product owner role subsumes that of the traditional BA. Let’s look at the roles the BA can play with agile teams and how to fully leverage their expertise to supplement or augment that of the product owner. |
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Rowing in the Same Direction: Use Value Streams to Align Work Ambiguity abounds about value streams, so it’s good to clarify what they are, why they matter, and how to exploit them. It's important to help employees understand the organization's definition of value, to provide visibility on how business value is created, and to focus on the fast flow of value through the value streams. If everyone understands which direction to row the boat, they can steer toward it together. |
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5 Tips for Getting Retrospectives Done Right Unfortunately, many retrospectives are not productive. It may be that the discussions are unfocused, not enough data was gathered to be helpful for analysis, or the team concentrates too much on issues they can’t control. Retrospectives should be a key part of an agile process for helping the team improve. Here are five tips that will help you have more valuable retrospectives. |
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To Kick-Start Your Agile Project, Begin with a Minimum Viable Team You've heard of a minimum viable product, which has only enough features to create a working model and provide feedback for further development. If you want to get started on a new project quickly, Allan Kelly suggests assembling a minimum viable team—only a few people, with only the necessary skills. They begin work right away, with a small budget and tight feedback loops, driving down risk. |
Interviews
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Discovering the Soul of Agile: An Interview with Selena Delesie
Podcast
In this interview, Selena Delesie, an international leadership and transformation coach and trainer, explains how your team can find the soul of agile, why some agile teams lack creativity, and who on your team should become a leader. |
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Getting People to Embrace the Change Required for Agile: An Interview with Bob Galen
Video
In this interview, Bob Galen, an agile methodologist, practitioner, and coach, explains why in order to become agile, people need to overcome their resistance to change. Bob details why agile works, how people's jobs will be safe, and why "change from the bottom up" can only get you so far. |
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How to Implement Agile Transformations at Large Companies: An Interview with Adam Auerbach
Video
In this interview, Adam Auerbach, the vice president of quality and DevOps engineering at Lincoln Financial Group, explains how major corporations can learn to take advantage of agile and quickly adjust to the speed it demands, as well as the methods he uses to implement enterprise agile. |
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The Value of Attending TechWell Conferences: An Interview with Mike Sowers
Video
In this interview, Mike Sowers, CIO and president of SQE Training at TechWell, explains what goes on at TechWell's different software testing conferences like STARCANADA. He details the different topics you’ll learn about, the speakers, and the types of presentations you can expect. |
Better Software Magazine Articles
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Scrum: Back to Basics So you think you know Scrum? Using the whimsical notion of farm animals and light-hearted visuals, take a refreshing review of the entire Scrum lifecycle as an intuitive set of roles, responsibilities, and handoffs. Particular attention is placed on what the ScrumMaster and product owner are expected to do at each handoff. |
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5 Ways to Pair Developers with Testers Some agile practices stress the importance of pairing team members together to achieve better team performance. Try these five suggestions for pairing key resources. |
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Building Autonomous DevOps Capability in Delivery Teams After setting up a DevOps team and adopting continuous delivery practices, product releases may not be as smooth as they could be. The missing ingredient requires empowerment and autonomy. |
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Scaling Agile Thinking through Empowered Teams Just because a software team adopts agility doesn’t mean they’ll see results. Being flexible has its benefits, but ensuring that the team is given total responsibility to make decisions may be more important. |
Conference Presentations
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You Might Be an Agile Leader If...
Slideshow
In case you haven’t heard, the leadership landscape has been changing—and continues to change—to keep up with the accelerating pace of business. And agile development has been an incubator of new leadership approaches. It has introduced or fostered many innovative concepts... |
Bob Galen
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Keep Engagement High in Difficult Projects
Slideshow
Aggressive timelines, scope creep, changing requirements, development delays, and the imperative to finish on the imposed timeline … how can you keep your team motivated and engaged when everything seems to go wrong? Larissa Rosochansky describes the major factors of team... |
Larissa Rosochansky
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Individuals, Interactions, and Improvisation
Slideshow
As agile practitioners, we constantly strive to better ourselves, our team, and our delivery. A great way to achieve this is simply being open to learning new ideas from other disciplines—including improvisation. Jessie Shternshus shares her story of realizing the uncanny similarities... |
Jessie Shternshus
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The Fourth Constraint in Project Delivery—Leadership
Slideshow
All too often, the triple constraints—time, cost, and quality—are bandied about as if they are the be-all, end-all. While they are important, leadership—the fourth and larger underpinning constraint—influences the first three. Statistics on project success and failure abound, and these... |
Rob Burkett
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