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Agile Journal

Agile Journal is an online magazine and e-newsletter focused on providing readers with the need-to-know information and resources they need to develop software for an agile business. For over three years Agile Journal has delivered thought leadership and pragmatic advice from a wide range of industry experts, as well as direct feedback from hands-on developers and project managers.

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Agile Communities

Volume 2 Number 9 - October 2007

Without a community, an Agile team may be nothing more than a productive group of developers. For Agile methods to truly have iAgile Community impact, organizations must broaden their view of a traditional project team to include all of the constituents who will benefit from the initiative. This may include business users, end-user customers, marketing staff, and third-party partners in addition to the core team of developers, testers, and project managers.

In this month’s Agile Journal, we consider different dimensions of an Agile community. Diverse Agile teams must continually communicate among themselves and with other organizations. Jonathan Poole explores the relationship between IT and business staff, and how Agile approaches can help to improve their interactions. Ryan Martens demonstrates how Web 2.0 communities can enable organizations to scale their Agile initiatives. David Webb drills down into a specific role – the Product Owner – and the critical role that this member of the community plays. With a focus on the Product Owner, Brent Barton explains how the Meta-Scrum meeting can provide top to bottom transparency in an organization. Finally, Joe Krebs offers advice on better “guesstimating” as a means to roughly estimate a project and communicate to the business.

Agile Journal

Featured Articles...

Agile/Lean Product Development and Delivery – Mastering the Art of Change
The modern world of systems/software product development and delivery presupposes we work faster and better, do more with less, change continuously, and invent new ways of working. The modern formula for work appears to be: More Success + Greater Speed + Fewer Resources + Constant Uncertainty + Increased Competition + Quicker Time to Market. Mastering the ―art of agile/lean systems and software product development and delivery requires you ask yourself, ―Do I really understand both t...
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Business and IT - A Marriage Made in Heaven?
To most non-technical people, the mere mention of "IT" can be a real turn off, or result in a roll of the eyes. Although traditionally associated with geeks developing code in a back room, IT - in its very broadest sense - forms the backbone of organizations today, which begs the question: why is there still such a huge communication gap between the IT discipline and the business it powers? This article provides anecdotes and advice for businesses to help them resolve the issues between business...
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What Do Agile and Community Have in Common?
Several forces in the software industry are combining to dramatically shorten product cycle times for even the largest applications. These forces also shorten the feedback loops on an application's quality, usability, and customer relevance. As feedback loops shorten and the number of software deliveries goes up, it becomes paramount to inform and collaborate with employees, customers, and partners in a community setting.
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More articles...

The Product Owner: Choosing the Right Person for the Job
Agile teams large or small, co-located or distributed, have one very important common denominator: the absolute imperative that a strong product owner be established before any work begins. Arguably the strongest, or weakest, link in any Agile team is the product owner. At odds with this basic fact is a startling oversight of this role at the outset of many projects. Add to this a multi-site outsourced development team and it's no wonder successful enterprise Agile adoption is slow going. What m...
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Establishing and Maintaining Top to Bottom Transparency Using the Meta-Scrum
Agile processes and practices have gained enough attention that both IT businesses and product development organizations are engaging in large Agile implementations. These larger-scale products, programs, and projects are more complex, have more dependencies, and present significant challenges. According to the second annual "State of Agile Development" survey, Scrum (and Hybrid XP/Scrum) is being chosen over other Agile methods 60% of the time. For larger multi-team implementations, Scrum h...
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Better Guesstimating
When large enterprises experiment with agile process adoption, an agile project manager is often challenged by and compared to projects of existing systems. Often these are mission-critical applications, which have been patched, fixed, and improved over time, leading to a complexity and size of functionality which could be overwhelming. If you are in charge of replacing such a system using an agile approach or are in the beginning of new large enterprise-wide project, the bar could sit very high...
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FEATURED BOOK:

FEATURED BOOK: The Enterprise and Scrum by Ken Schwaber
Do we need yet another book about implementing Scrum? Actually, if the book is The Enterprise and Scrum then the answer is yes! We know that small and large teams have been successful with Scrum at the project level. But so many organizations seem to stumble when they try to scale Scrum up to the enterprise level. Why? What should they do differently? In this book, Ken Schwaber, the industry leader with by far the richest Scrum experiences, shares his insights and offers suggestions for those tr...
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