Reducing the time to create usable software with short Scrum sprints is a nice thing, but then how do you deliver it to the users? How can Agile developers who embrace changes work with system people who like stability? To answers these questions, Scrum.org and the DevOps Institute have produced a white paper titled “The Convergence of Scrum and DevOps”.
Socrates Canaries is the Spanish stage of the International Software Craftsmanship Gathering, a series of events for open-minded software developers who want to improve their craft and the software industry as a whole. The local Software Craftsmanship community in the Canary Islands organizes it.
Organizations invest in agile processes, tools, training, and coaching, but how much are they getting back? Has product delivery improved? How much happier are users and the business customers? Are employees empowered and enabled? Traditional metrics might give you insight into improvements of operational efficiency, but the real conversation is about the value created for your organization by the improved processes. Without measuring value, the success of any agile initiative is based on nothing more than intuition and assumption.
It all starts with doing the right thing. Agile has not changed the old computer wisdom of “garbage in, garbage out”. This is why Allan Kelly last book is dedicated to the art of Agile product ownership. As he wrote: “If a Scrum Master performs badly, the team simply fails to perform well. If the Product Owner performs badly, the whole product is in jeopardy”.
Agile development starts with small Scrum teams tackling small problems. After some initial successes the organization gets more ambitious, and tries to get more teams tackling bigger problems. At some point these endeavors run headlong into organizational finance and governance structures from a different era, designed with huge projects in mind, and it usually doesn’t end well.
The 1st Conference is an event aimed at people starting out with Agile and Scrum run by practitioners of the Agile Melbourne community. The format of the 1st Conference is a one day of presentation and one day of workshops presented by Australian and overseas Agile experts.
Marc Andreessen famously said “software is eating the world”. Yet most of our software development project teams and organizations simply are not set up for us to take part in this revolution. Why? Our organizational surroundings are directly responsible for inefficient design and delivery – locally-optimized silos, opaque and ossified power structures, multi-layered middle management, command-and-control executives – the failings are well known.
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