Archive of Process Improvement Articles

Johanna Rothman recently wrote an article with a poignant introduction: “A project team focuses on an interim milestone, works like the devil to meet that milestone. They meet the milestone, look up, and realize they’re not at the end of the project–they still have to finish the darn thing. They’re living the Crossing the Desert syndrome.” Fixing it isn’t enough - how do we prevent it from happening?

Rishikesh Tembe shared twenty rules for software product delivery last month. His rules are from the perspective of a former software developer. Some we like. Some, not so much.

“I believe the hard part of building software to be the specification, design, and testing of this conceptual construct,[...] If this is true, building software will always be hard. There is inherently no silver bullet.” - Frederick P. Brooks, Jr. 1987

Enough of the debates about requirements and what we call them. Why don’t we just hire great developers and empower them to work directly with the customers?

Burndown is a technique used in Scrum projects for tracking the progress within or across sprints. It is an exciting way to track how a team is progressing against a deadline - and we can apply it to any form of project-status. In this article, we will apply it to documenting business processes.
Thanks [...]

James Kovacs shares a great insight on software testing and the software testing process. His epiphany about test driven development makes it obvious to all of us why this technique is so powerful.

Agile processes stress communication and colocation. Splitting a team into on and offshore resources inhibits the first and prevents the second. Teams struggle to resolve this apparent conflict of interest. Applying best practices (for any team) to address these challenges makes it possible. Martin Fowler provides us with great guidance based on years of experience with his company.

Another challenge to a premise of agile comes in a well assembled argument from Tony at Seilevel, in his article, Agile…again.

Incremental delivery planning is not an oxymoron.  You just plan the soon-to-happen tasks in detail, and keep the distant tasks more vague.  Does this make sense?
Rolling-Wave Planning
Johanna Rothman has posted an article that provides a good introduction to rolling-wave planning.  She explains that she manages incremental projects with biweekly deliveries, and manages the project schedule [...]

The IIBA (International Institute of Business Analysis) has just released version 1.6 of A Guide to the Business Analysis Body of Knowledge, or the BA BOK. This new release adds over 100 pages of content and is the first “essentially complete” version.