Videos on Scrum and Agile Project Management
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.
The nice metaphor of technical debt introduced some 18 years ago by Ward Cunningham has slowly taken roots in our collective conceptual toolbox, as a nice way to express some of the pains that software projects suffer from. Most software developers who have had some experience with significant, long-lived projects can feel it, sometimes point to it, but more than often can’t do much about it. In most cases, technical debt is seen as something very negative, burdening projects forever under increasing amount of interests. But some technical debt can be deliberate, more akin to borrowing to make an strategic investment, and this is especially the case for architectural-level debt.
Pair programming is sometimes the norm, and some developers really enjoy the collaboration, experiencing enhanced productivity. In other teams, pairing is shunned, avoided, or… faked. Angela Harms did a short survey about pairing attitudes and compared successful and unsuccessful pairing experiences.
Learn how you can improve your business analysis with Agile story mapping, a technique that maps your stories back to business value. Thus you will be able to know if they make or save the company money and you will learn the benefits of bi-directional requirements traceability .
Agile is no longer shiny and new. Many organizations claim that they’re Agile but what does that mean 10 years down the line of the Agile Manifesto? Sadly, what’s done in the name of Agile has strayed a long way from the original ideals. A bunch of simple practices that came from programmers have turned into tools for micro-management.
The problem is not fixed price contracts. The problem is fixed scope contracts. This is what Mary Poppendieck thinks of agile fixed price contracts. Instead of a scope, we need is a short list of problems to be solved, not a bad amateur design of their solutions. Agile contracts leave solution design to software engineers and control projects through the regular delivery of measurable value.
This video contains an interview about lean procrastination, which is the postponement of decisions to the latest responsible moment. Olaf Lewitz explains the idea and how it might help larger companies becoming more agile.
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