Scrum

I always recommend to teams newly transitioning to agile that they keep every iteration the same length. This helps them learn to manage their time, and after a few iterations they'll start to get a rhythm. Hopefully, they'll learn to work incrementally, doing testing and coding concurrently as part of one development effort, so that user stories are finished throughout the iteration, and testing isn't pushed to the last day.

Len Whitmore writes on using agile practices for the development of software. In the ten years since the Agile Manifesto, the agile development domain evolved, as evidenced by such things as the six levels of planning: strategy, release, iteration, daily, and continuous, with strategy appearing to be the least evolved of the planning levels.

The product owner role on agile projects is critical to the team and the project. The product owner's influence, performance, and behavior can set the stage for smooth sailing—or sink a project. In this article, Anupam Kundu shares two different product owner experiences to drive home the argument how their behaviors and practices can shape organizational culture—specifically for new product development and start-ups.

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.