As I prepared to discuss Agile with a client recently, I found that I was missing an important element of the definition in my last post. Here is what we settled on: Agile is: A project management process that encourages frequent inspection and adaptation A leadership philosophy that encourages team work, self-organization and accountability A …
Defining Agile Development (part 2)
In my first post, I expressed my disappointment with the Agile software development definition on Wikipedia. In this post, I'll try to work to a concise working definition of Agile. UPDATE: Also see my refinement to this Agile Development definition. In my quest for a brief definition of Agile software development, I've tried to a …
Defining ‘Agile Software Development’ on Wikipedia
I started another post and got stuck on this Wikipedia definition. The great insight normally found on Wikipedia, in this case, has left me disappointed: Agile Software Development: refers to a group of software development methodologies that promote development iterations, open collaboration, and adaptability throughout the life-cycle of the project. Are these the three bullet …
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Becoming Agile Without Help?
I was recently asked how successful can organizations be in transitioning to agile on their own. My immediate response was to evoke the response from a team of panelist. When asked what is the most important thing they did to be successful in their transition, four panelists from across industries and organizational sizes all said essentially, …
Fail Early, Learn Often
While moderating a panel discussion recently, one of the first questions after the introductions was asking to explain what was meant by allowing a team to fail. The important understanding that I think was misunderstood is that failure is not meant to allow releases or products to fail, but to generate learning opportunities to ensure …
Measuring Outputs Expanded
I talked at a high level in my Measure Outputs post about the types of measures that are useful. That post stated broadly that input measures do little to help improve, control or predict performance. In this post, I will expand on that concept to cover in more depth what types of measures focus on …
Why Sign on the Dotted Line
Consulting organizations often require signoff on deliverables to ensure that the client acknowledges that contractual obligations are met. Across organizational lines, these signatures, serve mostly a legal purpose. I often wondered about the use of signoff on deliverables inside of an organization where there is no external relationship. I've seen some development shops average as …
Cataloging Scrum Problems to Avoid
At the risk of becoming overly link heavy in recent posts, I want to highlight two sources for trouble-shooting scrum implementations. The first is from Mike Griffiths' Introducing Agile methods to Organizations: Mistakes to Avoid” (part 1, part 2, part 3). These meaty articles share plenty of wisdom. The second is from the ScrumAlliance. They …
Cycle Time as a Primary Measure
Mishkin Berteig has a great post up at his blog titled Measuring Process Improvements - Cycle Time. In it, he eloquently details why development teams should care about and manage cycle time. It complements nicely my First Law of Development and I encourage giving it a deep read.
Tips for Distributed Teams
Megan Sumrell has 10 nice tips up on working with remote teams. I like that these tips include a softer side to the remote challenge. To them, I add a few fundamentals: Keep an open IM channel. One to one is great, but a team chat room is even better. Create a room that the …
Horizon Line Group 