Software is everywhere today, and countless software products and projects die a slow death without ever making any impact. Today’s planning and roadmap techniques expect the world to stand still while we deliver, and set products and projects up for failure from the very start. Even when they have good strategic plans, many organizations fail to communicate them and align everyone involved in delivery.
One of the technical practices of Agile software development is to support cross-functional teams where members perform multiple activities like requirements, coding and testing. In their book “Being Agile”, Leslie Ekas and Scott Will discusses the difficulties of creating a whole team.
The product owner is one of the three roles of the Scrum framework for Agile project management. The product owner is responsible for defining and prioritizing the backlog and to convey the product vision to the Scrum team. Some people have compared this role to the traditional product manager position, but the context is different.In her blog post, Ellen Gottesdiener shares nine things that every product manager should know about being an Agile product owner.
Adopting new software development approaches like Agile and Scrum is always a challenge. There is a natural tendency for part of an organization to resist changing and some prejudices exist against Agile, mainly due to a lack of knowledge. This article discusses these misconceptions and provides some tips on how to overcome these prejudices to get Agile adoption on track in your organization.
Improvement is one of the core principle of the Agile Manifesto that states “At regular intervals, the team reflects on how to become more effective, then tunes and adjusts its behavior accordingly”. Retrospectives are a powerful technique to achieve this goal in Scrum and in this blog post, Jonathan Berger proposes seven practices to facilitate retrospectives.
As Scrum is the most popular framework adopted by organizations adopting an Agile approach for project management, many companies are trying to find financial facts that justify its adoption. This article discusses the topic of evaluating the return on investment (ROI) of using Scrum and Agile project management approaches. It suggests some hints about mistakes to avoid and on how to get meaningful results from this activity.
If you asked software developers about Agile, there are chances that a majority will discuss it with words like “Scrum”, “sprints” or “retrospectives”. However Agile is not just a collection of techniques and practices, but it is more a state of mind or a culture. This is the topic of this book written by Pollyanna Pixton, Paul Gibson and Niel Nickolaisen.
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