Some companies switch from waterfall development to some form of agile development in order to reduce costs, shorten schedules, improve quality and mitigate risk. Agile can do all that, right? Sure, and I can juggle while skipping rope and walking on water! Sometimes, expectations are out of control. Let’s examine what agile techniques can and […]
Agile Projects Need Vision
Does your software project have a vision statement? It’s that document that defines a system and summarizes predicted benefits, risks, goals, scheduled milestones, stakeholders, etc. If your team doesn’t have a vision statement for the software under development, they lack a basic roadmap to guide them toward the end result. A good vision statement can […]
Sponsorship + Momentum = Agile Success
Some agile projects are doomed from the start. They simply cannot get going. The team brainstorms with the business folks, defines requirements, creates mock-ups, conducts feedback sessions — then repeats the process again and again. They have paved the road to nowhere. How does this happen? How can a team of software engineers and managers […]
Agile Stories Need Roles Not Users
I’m sure you’ve read that only drug dealers and software developers call their customers ‘users’. When it comes to agile software development, simply calling everyone who will run your software, ‘user’, is a problem. Agile software requirements are usually captured as stories following a structured format like this: “As a <user role> I want <goal/desire> […]
Agile Solutions Are About Benefits, Not Process
Agile software development and the Scrum process are based upon collaboration — creating a tight union between the technical and business teams. This appears to be a simple and obvious approach but it turns out to be one of the most difficult aspects of agile and Scrum development. Some agile/Scrum projects fail simply because the […]
Agile Development Teams Take on Debt
Technical debt is a hot topic among agilists. What is it? Does it really matter? Is it a problem? Should you be concerned about it? Let’s start with a definition of technical debt. It occurs when development teams cut corners to meet deadlines. Let’s be honest, we all take liberties to meet scheduled commitments. When […]
Apple’s App Store Is an Old Concept
Apple takes all the credit for inventing the concept of an “app store”. They even want to copyright the name. Copyright aside, Apple did not invent the concept, the open source community did — over a decade ago. Linux distributions (aka distros) use the concept of ‘packages’. A package can contain any software that runs […]
Agile Development Teams Know How to Fail
Do you want your software development team to develop better software faster? Learn to fail fast, often and cheap. Sounds silly doesn’t it? You want to succeed not fail, right? Fail often? What’s up with that? Agile development advocates take a lot of heat over our efforts to fail fast. Well, the word ‘fail’ is […]
Sprint Results Are Not Releases
In agile software development, it’s widely believed that every Scrum sprint should result in software that is ready to ship. The theory is that the team will be able to stop or suspend development at the end of any sprint and ship the software to the end users. This means that the team is always […]
Success or Failure – It’s About Expectations
How do you know if your project succeeds or fails? If you assembled your management team in a room and gave them some project statistics, would they rate the project a success or a failure? Consider this. You’ve just completed a project that was planned for six months of work by a team of five. […]
Don’t Skimp on Software QA; It’s Not Agile
There are two major schools of thought around quality assurance (QA) testing. The waterfall crowd appends QA to the development process while the agile crowd integrates QA into the process, sort of. The waterfall approach has an obvious problem. If defining and writing the code takes longer than planned (very likely) and the schedule is […]
Are you on a Team or in a Workgroup?
If you have four software developers, a Scrummaster and a product owner, do you have a team? Is that all it takes to assemble an agile team? Forming an agile team is not easy. Most often, a group of people are assembled and given a common corporate goal. They create a plan and start working […]
LibreOffice Is an Important Open-Source Project
When Oracle bought Sun Microsystems they acquired the rights to OpenOffice, an open source equivalent to Microsoft Office. Sadly, Oracle is not known for its openness or contributions to open source projects. It began to look like OpenOffice would become OracleOffice. Thankfully, some of the OpenOffice contributors decided to fork the code and create LibreOffice. […]
Enthusiasm Delivers Results (if you’re agile)
One of the big challenges on any major software project is maintaining a high level of enthusiasm. When the team and the stakeholders are enthusiastic, ideas flow and things happen. Enthusiasm creates energy. One of the reasons agile software development is successful is its ability to maintain a high level of enthusiasm within the team. […]
Super Agile Teams Need Superstars
Every team needs good people. Great teams need superstars, that is, one or more top-notch contributors. Agile teams are no different. A team composed of average contributors will produce average work. If you’re lucky and the team collaborates really well, you may get above average results — unlikely, but possible and worth striving for. A […]
Agile and Big Companies Don’t Mix
The agile approach to software development has difficulty succeeding in big companies. This seems odd and almost counter intuitive but is simple to explain. Big companies establish lots of policies and procedures. They are constantly in search of the cookie-cutter approach to solving problems and building things. Big companies are focused on performance and scalability. […]
There Must Be an Agile Way
How many times have you heard someone say, “There must be a better way.” I’ve heard it often enough but rarely does any real change follow. There is surely resistance to change but the problem runs deeper. A “better way” is too general — too ambiguous. It is not actionable. What if the statement was […]
Crisis Management Is Disruptive to Agile Teams
Crisis management is a tough job. The biggest problem isn’t solving the technical problem — given a little time, you surely can solve it. The biggest problem is disrupting priorities. It plays out like this: A crisis situation develops. Priorities change to get people focused on the crisis. Staff is moved around to get more […]
Scrum’s Popularity Has Its Price
Agile software development has massively increased in popularity over the last decade. Scrum, in particular, has attracted enormous attention. That’s the good news. The downside shows itself when teams adopt agile methods and cut corners. They skimp on training and coaching. They leave out techniques they don’t like. They add elements from waterfall that are […]
Plan Ahead and Be More Agile
Agile development teams often struggle with reaching the goal of having every sprint deliver a customer-ready build. Not every software feature fits into a short sprint. Should you abandon such a feature or revert to waterfall for implementing it? At times, unforeseen issues arise and a feature can’t be completed as planned within the sprint. […]