Managing Client Expectations about Agile
‘Agile’ is an incredibly powerful software development methodology, however the word ‘agile’ has become one of those IT buzzwords that people use but do not fully understand.
people
People and team member management for Agile project management and Scrum software development teams.
Forming Agile Teams Workbook
As stated in the Agile Manifesto, Agile software development is about “Individuals and interactions”. The importance of having a performing team where individuals collaborate is an essential factor for the success of software development projects. In his “Forming Agile Teams Workbook”, Jesus Mendez provides some tools that offer an alternative-proven way to add more structure, transparency and visibility to formation of Agile teams.
Scaling with an Agile Leader
Using an Agile approach for software development does not necessarily guarantee success. As Henrik Kniberg wrote at the beginning of his blog post ” Even if the entire organization is neatly organized into scrum teams, you can still end up with an unaligned mess!”. Having an Agile leader can help preventing the unaligned mess.
Organizational Debt
Technical debt is a well-known concept in Agile software development. Technical Debt is defined as the eventual consequences of poor or evolving software architecture and software development within a codebase. In this blog post, Steve Blank discusses the concept of organizational debt.
A Project Management Office (PMO) View of Agile
As Agile product and project management approaches are adopted by large organizations, they have to coexist with a typical entity of big companies: the Project Management Office (PMO). A recent report from ESI International explores how the PMO staff views the challenges of implementing Agile in their organizations.
Checking Your Scrum Team Health
The first value of the Agile Manifesto is to prefer “Individuals and interactions over processes and tools”. But how can you know if your individuals and your teams like your current Agile approach. In his article, Henrik Kniberg present a simple tool to assess the health of your Scrum teams.
Running a Distributed Feature Team
In large Agile projects where a Scrum team cannot deliver the full system, you have different options to organize your team. You can use feature teams that work on a set of user stories or component teams that work on a subsystem or component. In his blog post, Michael Valenta reports his experience as a ScrumMaster from the usage of features teams.