 Agile Journal Articles
The Agile Journal publishes original content, articles and regular columns
from industry thought leaders, analysts and software providers on a
wide variety of topics related to agile development best practices and business adoption of agile ideas. Below you will find links directly to our columns
and articles or you may use the search box to scan for a particular
topic or writer.
Subscribe to the Agile Journal RSS Feed
|
|
Articles
|
Today's Agile teams contend
with challenges that few development visionaries could have imagined when the
foundations for Agile were first put in place.
In this article, we will examine Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) that
Agile teams can use to achieve transparency into key development processes, and
fulfill the customer requirements of our maturing world.
Tags:
Click to add your tags...,
|
|
Articles
|
 We all know the payoffs that can result from employing the Agile
methodology and employing it well: from highly effective self-managed teams, increased
flexibility and realtime change management ... to tight quality control and
heightened collaboration.
But what happens when you are already doing Agile in-house and
then want or need to expand your Agile development circle to include an outsourcing
partner that is 5,000 miles away?
Tags:
Click to add your tags...,
|
|
Articles
|
 You have an approved project that is about to begin - the
project team is in place, the product owner has been identified - the
stakeholders are eagerly waiting to see results of this agile approach that
they have all heard good things about ...
Here's your dilemma ... the stakeholders are expecting to see
tangible progress at the end of the first iteration in two or three weeks -
having been through presentations of Agile processes. But you know that it's
really not feasible to deliver anything remotely useful in that short a period.
Agile processes warrant early delivery of business value, stressing on working
code. Release planning and iteration planning are all based around user stories
completed to the extent of being ready to deploy. But the reality is often
different.
Tags:
Click to add your tags...,
|
|
Articles
|
 Overcoming resistance to
change and addressing challenges with distributed Agile requires considerable
skills and experience. Agile development practices are incredibly popular, with
many developers, because they work well and they add value. Unfortunately, many
Agile enthusiasts are unprepared for the challenge of overcoming organizational
resistance to change - especially from senior management unwilling to sponsor a
methodology which is unfamiliar to them and does not carry the same name
recognition as other frameworks such as the CMMI. That's not to say that we
should give up and continue to write volumes of requirements "shelf-ware" that
is outdated before it is used. Every process improvement effort has its own set
of challenges and obstacles to be dealt with. Read on if you would like to
explore overcoming resistance to change - the Agile way.
Tags:
Click to add your tags...,
|
|
Articles
|
 Chapter 14: Done State
The Done State practice is a definition that a team agrees upon to
nonambiguously describe what must take place for a requirement to be
considered complete. The done state is the goal of every requirement in
an iteration. It is as close as possible to deploying software as a
team can come.
Note: This material will appear in the forthcoming book,
Agile Adoption Patterns by Amr Elssamadisy (ISBN 0321514521,
Copyright: Pearson Education). The material is being provided by Pearson
Education at this early stage to create awareness for this upcoming book
(due to publish in July 2008). It has not been fully copyedited or
proofread yet; we trust that you will judge the content on technical
merit, not on grammatical and punctuation errors that will be fixed
at a later stage.
Tags:
Click to add your tags...,
|
|
|
Featured Books
|
 A Practical Approach to Building Successful Stakeholder-based
Products, by Carl Kessler and John Sweitzer
Reviewed by Brad Appleton
Kessler
and Sweitzer's Outside-in
Software Development should resonate deeply with all those who
genuinely value the principle of customer collaboration in the Agile Manifesto,
and with anyone who has played the role of Product Manager for a software
project. This 2008 Jolt
award Finalist is not a book
about eliciting or prioritizing requirements (or "user stories") for an Agile
project. This book goes beyond mere user-stories and their ranking or velocity
to focus on uncovering the underlying needs and goals of your stakeholders and
understanding what truly adds value for the customer and the business.
Tags:
Click to add your tags...,
|
|
|
Articles
|
 At the core of all software solutions are
underlying software architectures. The
architectures reflect initial assumptions about how products fit together,
which features are of value to customers, what are the expected integration
points, with which related technologies.
As software products find acceptance among customers, and technologies
continue to evolve, the creators (vendors) of these solutions eventually find the
need to adapt underlying architectures. Agile provides a means of doing this
early in the product lifecycle and with continual review that provides the
creator with the ability to adapt quickly and effectively to changes is the
marketplace.
Tags:
Click to add your tags...,
|
|
|
Articles
|
 In this article we
describe our work with teams that were spread between the US and India, and with the unavoidable
cultural difference. We used a facilitated retrospective to discover the most
challenging issues in the process and, just as important, to build a team and
increase trust between team members. In later work with the teams, we noticed
the immediate positive impacts on the people and the process.
Tags:
Click to add your tags...,
|
|
|
Articles
|
 One of
the common misperceptions with agile software development is that agilists
don't "do architecture." This completely
ignores the 11th principle of the Agile
Manifesto which states that the best architectures evolve over
time. More importantly, when you observe
agile teams in action, you find that the majority of them do some initial
architecture modeling at the beginning of the project. But, perhaps because agilists are not
creating detailed architectural specifications as the result of a "big design
up front" (BDUF) approach, many people think that we're not doing
architecture. Nothing can be further
from the truth, and in this article I overview an agile best practice called
"architecture envisioning" which enables you to gain the value from modeling
without the cost of needless documentation.
Tags:
Click to add your tags...,
|
|
|
Articles
|
 Within
the Agile community retrospectives are widely seen as the mechanism for
promoting learning and change. But many
teams fail to hold retrospectives, or fail to act on the findings, thus they
fail to learn and improve. If we are
going to fix this we need to change our approach to retrospectives, and find
new ways to learn and create change.
Tags:
Click to add your tags...,
|
|
|
<< Start < Prev 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 Next > End >>
|
| Results 1 - 10 of 215 |
Articles 
