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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 i mpact, 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.
The Agile Journal staff is always looking for input. In our recent poll, we asked readers about topics for which they would like to see more coverage. Almost one-third of those responding are looking for more coverage of large-scale and/or distributed Agile teams. Another 20 percent are focused on transitioning from legacy processes. Our December and January issues, respectively, will cover these topics. In addition, close to 20 percent of the respondents want to see more coverage of metrics and project success factors. We’ve dedicated several issues to these topics in the past (Jan. 2007, June 2006), and will do so again in early 2008.
In an effort to get more people involved in the Agile Journal community we plan to make a few changes. We have added a new forum application to keep the discussion going on the days when the journal does not post new articles and we will be adding a resource center with links to websites and other Agile resources.
We also want to know how you feel about RSS (really simple syndication). We'd like to be able to keep you up to date on what goes on at the site, but we don't want to fill your inbox with email. So we have to ability to enable RSS Feeds for all forum topics and for article content.
Take the latest poll at AgileJournal.com and let us know how you use RSS.
As always, we invite our readers to share their experiences with the Agile Journal community and continue to provide feedback on current and future topics. If you’d like to contribute an article on this or another upcoming topic, go to the “Letters to the Editor” in the forum at AgileJournal.com and send us your ideas.
Liz Barnett
Editor in Chief
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Collaboration Circa 2007
More than any other types of software development teams, success on Agile teams requires collaboration among a broad community. Note that there are really two essential points here: that the Agile community is diverse and that its collaboration is effective. Just as we cite the "better, faster, cheaper" mantra to drive development priorities, so have we talked for years about the benefits of collaboration. Of course, team members must work together to achieve common goals. The greater ...
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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 iss...
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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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 | 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 go...
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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,...
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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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