Agile Zone | Software Methodologies for Development Managers

Peter Schuh07/16/10
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0 replies

Your Waterfall Project Is Not My IKEA Kitchen

A few years back, when my wife and I still had enough free time to do our home remodeling ourselves, we gutted our kitchen and rebuilt it with free-standing kitchen cabinets from IKEA. (For what it’s worth, IKEA kitchen cabinets are surprisingly...

Michael Sahota07/15/10
1861 views
1 replies

Serious Problems? Use A3 Technique to Nail ‘em!

This post shows the A3 technique and how it is an effective management tool. The contents of this post are my summary of THE BOOK on this subject: Managing to Learn: Using the A3 Management Process to solve problems, gain agreement, mentor and lead – by...

Eric Hagan07/15/10
2769 views
0 replies

Video: Keys to Successful Agile Adoption

Developers can benefit from agile if they are looking for more project visibility, better quality standards, or faster time-to-market. Agile also helps teams...

Matt Stine07/15/10
2099 views
0 replies

Interview: Alan Shalloway on Lean Agile Software Development, Part Two

Today I'm privileged to share with you the remainder of an interview that I conducted with Alan Shalloway (you can read part one here). I first encountered Alan while searching for podcasts on agility. I luckily stumbled upon "Lean Agile Straight...

Mike Cohn07/14/10
2784 views
1 replies

What Does It Mean to Be Agile?

Laurie Williams, a professor at North Carolina State University, recently conducted a survey to find out which principles and practices are used by agile teams. If you read my monthly newsletter, you probably saw the announcement asking for people to...

Mitch Pronschinske07/13/10
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Mingle Meets JIRA and Mercurial

A boatload of extensions have docked at Mingle's port. Today, ThoughtWorks Studio's agile project management platform is getting an integration overhaul that will help synchronize data within distributed teams and add more tools into the Mingle environment...

Jurgen Appelo07/13/10
2741 views
1 replies

Cross-Functional Teams Don't Come Free

How should people be grouped together? Basically there are two main options to choose from: group people by similar function or by similar business. Grouping people by similar function means that you put developers with developers, testers with testers, and...

Giorgio Sironi07/13/10
5252 views
1 replies

Web applications as enterprise software

Usually I have no shame in using PHP for everything I do as a freelancer, because it's the language I and the people I work with know best. PHP however is a web scripting language, thus it implies that you are developing web applications with it.In our work,...

Matt Stine07/13/10
3686 views
0 replies

Interview: Alan Shalloway on Lean Agile Software Development, Part One

Today I'm privileged to share with you the first portion of an interview that I conducted with Alan Shalloway (part two will run on Thursday). I first encountered Alan while searching for podcasts on agility. I luckily stumbled upon "Lean Agile Straight...

Robert Diana07/12/10
2562 views
1 replies

How To Succeed With Scrum When Your Company Is Anti-Agile

This post is inspired by a question on LinkedIn but I felt required a full blog post to really explain the answer.

Artur Karazniewicz07/12/10
4526 views
4 replies

Patterns Antipattern

In late nineties I started my career in software development. This was roughly few days since I started my second gig. In a Bank. After initial hoopla I finally tackled my new SUN Ultra 5 pizza boxed workstation, CDE and all that bleeding edge stuff...

Roman Pichler07/12/10
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Prioritizing the Product Backlog

Editor's Note: The following article, excerpted from Roman Pichler's book, "Agile Product Management with Scrum: Creating Products that Customers Love" ((Addison-Wesley Signature Series (Cohn)), explores some important factors that should be...

Mitch Pronschinske07/11/10
10382 views
0 replies

A Kanban Board That Actually Reflects Your Workflow

Many Agilists and Kanbanites know the basic setup for a workflow board, but the real challenge is taking that board and making it reflect your development team's unique workflow. Some workflows are harder to represent than others. Sometimes it's ok to...

Mike Cohn07/09/10
2901 views
1 replies

It's Effort, Not Complexity

A client asked me last week “When will my team be done with this project?” This is probably the bazillionth time I’ve been asked that question in one way or another. I have never once been asked, “How hard will my team have to think to develop this...

Mike Cottmeyer07/09/10
730 views
0 replies

Okay... Just What are we Transforming?

I'm constantly reminded that context is king... that words have meaning... and that the meaning of our words is almost entirely dependent on our context.Last night I had coffee with an agile coach here in the Atlanta area. We got to talking about the idea...