Month: July 2012

Stop Managing. Start Leading. Be Agile.

Managers: Want your company to be more agile? Learn to let go! Managers are trained to maintain control. Their annual reviews reinforce the need to make good decisions and stay in control. And then along comes agile software development. There’s an immediate and harsh conflict. Agile teams need to take control. They can’t be agile […]

User Stories and Security Stories Are Not the Same

The folks over at the non-profit group, Software Assurance Forum for Excellence in Code (SAFECode) have published a great document called “Practical Security Stories and Security Tasks for Agile Development Environments”. Here is the direct link to the PDF file. It’s a 34-page document that undoubtedly required a lot of work by a number of […]

Follow a Recipe to Succeed With Agile Software Development

When top consultants engage new clients, they offer ideas and suggestions to get started. A phrase that the consultants listen for from the client is something like “we tried that once before” or “we already did that”. It’s a comment that begs for probing questions. “What exactly did you try?” “What results did you observe?” […]

Fail to Fail and You’ll Fail to Improve

There are two critically important elements to agile software development that are often either overlooked or ignored. Continuous Improvement A Willingness to Fail Any team committed to being agile will seek continuous improvement through regular retrospectives. There’s always room for improvement. Who among us believes that he is the best he can be — there’s […]

Are You a Software Development Extremist?

Some of us tend toward extremism. It manifests itself in many ways in both our personal and professional lives. It could appear in the clothes we buy, the cars we drive, the way we work, or the way we look. In many situations, we’re not even aware that we’re extremists. In software development, there are […]

In Agile Software Development, Context Really Matters

Mark Mansour over at Agile Bench published a blog post titled “10 Agile Bloggers You Should Know About, But Don’t”. It’s worth reading. (Please note: In the interest of full disclosure, this BrainsLink blog appears in the post.) A phrase in Mark’s post got my thinking. There are several lists of top agile bloggers around, […]

Software Teams Have to Manage Scarcity to Be Successful

Scarcity is fact of life. There’s never enough time or money to complete a software project — and that’s only the beginning. Every project runs out of something it critically needs. Here are a few things you might not have enough of: Time Money People Computers Storage Space Network Bandwidth Software Licenses Office Space Chairs […]