Agile Zone | Software Methodologies for Development Managers

Johanna Rothman04/10/13
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Technical Debt: Do Managers (Unintentionally) Force Bad Code?

I still have estimation on the mind. I saw The Impact of Accidental Complexity on Estimates and I was wondering about the effect of management on bad code. Do managers sometimes force developers to write bad code by allowing technical debt?

Giorgio Sironi04/10/13
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Monitoring with DataDog

Recently I found myself sending more and more business metrics to Datadog , a Software as a Service solution that promises to collect all your data points and build business metrics, displaying them as graphs and triggering alerts whenever they get to critically low (or high) levels.

Venkatesh Kris...04/09/13
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Self Organizing Teams and New York Soda Ban

All of you have probably heard the news involving the recent ban on larger soda sizes in New York and the subsequent un-banning. Have you come across situations where project teams have resisted changes suggested by their leader? To add another twist, what if the teams were self-organizing, as in the agile world?

Tom Howlett04/09/13
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Openness

The purpose of a Silo is to protect the contents from being disturbed or damaged from external foreign bodies. Creating a Silo is reasonable if you are the farmer protecting your grain from insects but surely they are not necessary in an organisation where we should be supporting each other?

Derik Whittaker04/09/13
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Moving a TFS Git Repository to Github

We gave using the git support in TFS the old college try but the friction and issues were just too much so we decided to move our repository over to github. I am not going to go over our issues w/ TFS git here, but I am thinking of creating a separate post for it.

Justin Bozonier04/08/13
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TDD for Business Value

A New Hope Software Craftsmanship, SOLID principles, eXtreme Programming, the list of all the “best practice” guides I’ve learned over the years goes on and on. But they also need to make room for a new style of development being ushered in by the ideas expressed in The Lean Startup.

Johannes Brodwall04/08/13
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How to Start an Agile Project

How do you start an agile project and ensure room for future enhancements? How can we achieve flexibility at the beginning? This is my answer.

Jurgen Appelo04/08/13
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Empowerment, That Horrible Word

What scientists call distributed control is usually called empowerment by management consultants. However, some experts don’t like the term. The word seems to suggest that people are “disempowered” by default and need to be “empowered” by their managers.

Steve Rogalsky04/08/13
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In Pursuit of Better, Not Best

I realize that many of you already scowl when you hear anyone talk about 'best practices'. Instead of adding to that discussion, I'd like to share a short story with you about someone who influenced me to keep looking for better and to never assume that I've reached 'best.'

Giorgio Sironi04/08/13
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Diving into Behat

I had the occasion to try out and adopt Behat for a particular need in our projects at Onebip. Here is my recount of the experience from a PHPUnit contributor and invested person.

Michael Dubakov04/08/13
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Product Software Development is a Marathon

Software development demands focus. You can’t create anything significant hopping from one thing to another. That is obvious. Less obvious is that product development demands patience.

Mitch Pronschinske04/07/13
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DZone Links You Don't Want To Miss (4/8)

More about asm.js from John Resig and also some amazing benchmarks for comparing a ton of different web frameworks. Plus Rackspace is suing patent trolls and a blogger explores what is really necessary in a programming language.

Kane Mar04/07/13
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5 Big Scrum Questions – Issue 2

This is the second issue of James Brett‘s 5 Questions. From the first issue of 5 Questions ”The ideas was to ask five specific questions to members of the Scrum community and post the their replies.” In issue 2 of the five questions series we hear from one of the godfarthers of Scrum Ken Schwaber.

Johanna Rothman04/07/13
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Changing Iteration Contents Mid-Sprint

When a Product Owner wants to change the iteration contents mid-sprint, and the Product Owner realizes this is a no-no, look deeper for systemic forces at work. It won’t be an easy answer, and will likely be a combination of answers. If you are lucky, it will be a relatively easy-to-diagnose problem

Esther Derby 04/07/13
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Promoting Double Loop Learning in Retrospectives

I have no doubt that retrospectives that are too short, don’t result in action / experiment, or fail to delve beneath the surface are a waste of time. But what about earnest retrospectives that focus on an area of concern, examine data, analyze underlying issues and result in action?