The Agile Alliance announced its full conference program for Agile2012. The finalized schedule is available for review at http://agile2012.agilealliance.org/program/schedule/. Agile2012, the world’s largest conference for Agile teams, developers, managers and executives, will take place Aug. 13-17 in Grapevine (Dallas area), Texas.

Scrum focuses on maximizing Return on Investment (ROI), but it does not define how to manage and track costs to evaluate actual ROI against the vision. A cost measurement that integrates with Scrum would be an additional feedback tool. This article presents the adaptation of the Earned Value Management (EVM) approach to the Scrum framework. The result is called AgileEVM (Agile Earned Value Management) and is a simplified set of earned value calculations. From the values in Scrum, a release date estimate is derived using mean velocity. Using this equation, …

This is an on-going series of blog posts that want to answer the classical question: How is software testing done during Scrum sprints? In the first installments, Clemens Reijnen discusses the importance of having testing knowledge in the team and implementing a collaborative culture. He then presents regression testing, test automation, end-to-end testing, avoiding overlapping tests, product backlog item implementation sequence, risk and business driven tests, writing acceptance tests. Microsoft Visual Studio is used as an example of tools supporting software testing practices in Scrum sprints.

Martin von Weissenberg explains in his blog post that focus and rapid feedback not only improve software development projects but shorten them dramatically as well. He use an experimental setting to compute the ROI for four different approaches: traditional plan-driven project delivering near the end, an unfocused project with continuous delivery, a focused project with an 80/20 Pareto distribution of value and a focused project with an 80/50 Pareto distribution of value. The results prove that focus and rapid feedback in the form of continuous delivery are game-changer.

What should be the lenght of a Scrum sprint? There is no unique answer to this question. In this blog post, Mitch Lacey provides some key factor to consider when you try to choose the right sprint length for your Scrum project. These should be considered looking at the expected duration of the project, the customers/stakeholders and the Scrum team. His conclusion is that the right sprint length balances a craving for customer feedback and input with the team ability to deliver and the customer’s ability to respond.

One of the first steps in an Agile adoption is the formation and organization of agile teams. Leadership often struggles to figure out how many people should be on each team, what skill sets should included, and whether the team should be focused on solution components, feature delivery, or a mix.

How do you manage activities that don’t seem directly related to features in your Scrum sprints? This blog post discusses why it is a problem when Scrum teams start to wonder about having time to manage infrastructure, technical debt or test framework. For Johanna Rothman this is the sign that the culture is not Agile enough and that the product owner doesn’t want to take iteration time to schedule anything other than features in an iteration. She offers seven hints on how to improve this situation, saying that product owners …

What do you do when models collide? Every team has their own mental model of how things are supposed to work. We often call these “processes” or “methodologies”, but they are really just a shared understanding of how things get done by a team. Sometimes, however, problems can’t be tackled by just one team because of size, company structure, diversity of required skill sets, or any number of other reasons.