Planning
Articles
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Slim Down Your Test Plan Documentation Test plans are essential for communicating intent and requirements for testing efforts, but excessive documentation creates confusion—or just goes unread. Try the 5W2H method. The name comes from the seven questions you ask: why, what, where, when, who, how, and how much. That's all you need to provide valuable feedback and develop a sufficient plan of action. |
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Has Continuous Deployment Become a New Worst Practice? Software development has been moving toward progressively smaller and faster development cycles, and continuous integration and continuous deployment are compressing delivery times even further. But is this actually good for businesses or their users? Just because you can deploy to production quickly and frequently, should you? |
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Streamline Your Agile Requirements by Avoiding Bloated Backlogs In agile development, a bloated backlog results from teams accumulating huge lists of requirements, usually in the form of user stories. Retaining every possible story for building the product weighs down the backlog while squeezing (or obscuring) the highest-value stories. The best way to help minimize this risk is to optimize the time spent defining and refining the product priorities. |
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Build One before Building Many: Learning from Agile Feedback When you're working on a project and are presented with a big story or requirement, resist the urge to treat it as a single piece of work. One of the principles of the Agile Manifesto is to deliver working software frequently. This allows you to learn from what you built and make adjustments. See if you can break down the request and find a small piece of work within the big. |
Interviews
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The United State of Women Summit: An Interview with Tania Katan
Video
In this interview, Axosoft evangelist Tania Katan, who is also the creative instigator of the international viral campaign #itwasneveradress, reports on being invited to the White House’s United State of Women Summit. She talks about agile project management, activism, and Michelle Obama and Oprah. |
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Best Practices for Lean Documentation: An Interview with Craeg Strong
Podcast
In this interview, Craeg Strong speaks about his upcoming presentation, meeting strict documentation requirements in agile, how agile documentation differs from traditional governance, the advantages and disadvantages to taking your documentation agile, and the art of a company turnaround. |
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The Peaks and Valleys of an Agile Transition: An Interview with Neal Huffman
Video
Neal Huffman speaks about his upcoming presentation at Agile Development Conference & Better Software Conference East 2014, covers what peaks and valleys can be expected when making the agile transition, and tells you how to know when you and your company have finally become agile. |
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How Agile Helped a Business Analyst Discover Her True Value: An Interview with Diane Zajac-Woodie
Video
Diane Zajac-Woodie sat down to discuss her upcoming presentation at Agile Development and Better Software Conference West 2014, why the business analyst role doesn't get the attention it deserves, how the BA role can make a difference on agile teams, and her alter ego as the Agile Squirrel. |
Better Software Magazine Articles
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You Get What You Tolerate We’ve all worked with a talented developer who can be a frustrating challenge to manage. First-time managers may unknowingly encourage bad behavior. There are several innovative ways to resolve the situation. |
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Achieving Continuous Improvement and Innovation in Software There is tremendous pressure on software development teams to deliver software faster, better, and cheaper. Quality engineering with a focus on innovation is the answer |
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10 Things You Must Do to Become Truly Agile Agile is not a state of doing; it’s a state of being. Adopting business models on value and learning how to make teams autonomous are both necessary steps to reap the benefit of agility. |
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2017 Is a Pivotal Year for DevOps Customers expect real-time software updates. As DevOps becomes the engine for delivering business value, continuous innovation is needed. And this has to begin at the start of every project. |
Conference Presentations
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Impact Maps: Let Your Goals Drive Your Product Features
Slideshow
Wouldn’t it be great if there were a way to combine quantified business goals, direct traceability from goals to features, surfacing of value assumptions, cause-and-effect analysis, design thinking, and visual facilitation in a single approach? Mathias Eifert says there is! Impact maps... |
Mathias Eifert
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Is Your Project Doomed from the Start?
Slideshow
When we think of planning, we often think about requirements planning. We get the initial features and functions down, and then see where agile takes us. Lisa Calkins claims that less than a third of software development projects are successful. Regarding this lack of success, process... |
Lisa Calkins
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Visual Management Gone Wild
Slideshow
A visual management system is a low-tech tool with a simple mission—to visually represent the work that the team is doing. When used regularly and correctly, it can be a project acceleration tool. However, teams often go wild with visuals, decorating every inch of free wall space with... |
Nichole Vanderlaan
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Product Management: The Innovation Glue for the Lean Enterprise
Slideshow
At a time when organizations of all sizes both want and need innovation, exciting approaches including lean startup and agile development have risen to the forefront. Although there is no shortage of resources and expertise on these approaches, less guidance is available on the daunting... |
Mimi Hoang and George Schlitz
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