Agile Zone | Software Methodologies for Development Managers

Steve Rogalsky04/23/13
1778 views
0 replies

Facilitating a retrospective with 50 people in an hour

We had just under an hour to eat lunch and complete the retrospective. Second, there are about 50 volunteers - allowing everyone to have a voice in such a short time frame would be a challenge.

Ian Mitchell04/22/13
1877 views
0 replies

An Agile Health Check: The Daily Stand-Up in Practice

The rules of a stand-up are simple. Every day the team should assemble for a maximum of 15 minutes so that they can assess progress towards the Sprint Goal, and self-organize in order to overcome any impediments. In this article we look at how to use the daily stand-up as a "health check" for gauging an agile team's well-being.

Giorgio Sironi04/22/13
2216 views
0 replies

The difficult relationship between developers and business

In the worst places where you want to work, business people such as internal software customers or sales people are an adversary to the development team. In the spirit of customer collaboration, most Agile teams do better and try to remove the negotiations...

Krishna Kumar04/22/13
7050 views
1 replies

The Work From Home Question

Everyone is talking about the Yahoo! memo ending work from home for employees. I am reminded of an article on Rands in Repose about telecommuting.

David Pollak04/22/13
4895 views
0 replies

Code of Conduct for Communities

I think that codes of conduct should be positive definitions of expected behavior rather than a series of prohibitions. Here's the code of conduct I'll use for my next conference.

Mitch Pronschinske04/21/13
924 views
0 replies

What About The Budget In Agile Software Development?

Finishing a project on time and under budget is the whole point of Agile, but the budget can put some tricky constraints on the process.

Mitch Pronschinske04/21/13
1486 views
0 replies

Agile Architecture & Design

In this presentation from JAXConf 2012, ThoughtWorks software architect Neal Ford investigates agile architecture and design, specifically addressing how big up-front architecture and design fail because of the unknown unknowns of a project.

Esther Derby 04/20/13
3658 views
0 replies

How Much Self-management Is Right for a Team?

There are lots of teams in small companies and start-ups who are self-managing and self-directing. They manage themselves, they set product direction, and set company priorities. When I visit big, established companies, there’s almost always an assumption that teams need close supervision.

Jurgen Appelo04/20/13
1971 views
0 replies

Coalition or Council: Which One Are You?

coalition: A temporary alliance of distinct parties, persons, or states for joint action. council: A group elected or appointed as an advisory or legislative body.

Jurgen Appelo04/20/13
1638 views
0 replies

A Task Board That Really Sucks

A typical problem in Agile organizations is that most Scrum and Kanban boards look messy. And office management doesn’t like a messy office. Office managers like their offices neat and tidy, hip and trendy. They particularly don’t like tons of sticky notes whirling through the corridors.

Esther Derby 04/19/13
1824 views
1 replies

Building Trust, One Iteration at a Time

A while back I talked to a CEO of a contract development shop. He wondered how Agile could help him with fixed price, fixed scope contracts to deliver software.

Johanna Rothman04/19/13
1291 views
0 replies

Management Myth 16: “I Know How Long the Work Should Take”

Long ago, when I was a young developer at an anonymous company, one of my managers was disappointed with my progress. “I know how long the work should take. If I was doing the work, it would be done by now,” he huffed at me. There is nothing more insulting to a programmer.

Matthias Marschall04/19/13
8028 views
0 replies

3 Reasons To Avoid Overloading Your Teams

Let’s discuss three negative outcomes of overloading your pipeline: You lose focus by increased task switching, Managing the waiting queue costs a lot of time, and Big releases create big headaches.

Olga Kouzina04/18/13
1242 views
0 replies

The Paradigm of Project Management Tools

While there’s been some talk and research about project management paradigms e.g. waterfall, Project Management 2.0, ALM, with the paradigm of agile prevailing at the moment, it looks like no one has spoken about the paradigm of project management tools.

Ian Mitchell04/18/13
1363 views
0 replies

Why Stretched Teams do Scrumban

A few years ago Corey Ladas wrote an article about an Agile approach he called “Scrumban”. As the name suggests, this is a variant of Scrum with certain Lean-Kanban characteristics. What he proposed was a graduation of Scrum teams to leaner and more pull-based ways of working than Scrum itself allows.