Many companies operate with each department acting as a silo. Agile techniques rely upon cross-functional contributions. When there are barriers (“not my jobâ€, “not your jobâ€) within an organization, they have to be addressed before agile will work.
Agile
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Going Agile, 10 Mistakes: Go Fast To Go Fast
In this mistake, Levent warns us that “just doing it†without training and explaining won’t work. Everyone needs to understand exactly what agile is and what it isn’t.
Agile
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Going Agile, 10 Mistakes: Go All In
Levent points out that the biggest mistake is to not do a pilot project, but rather to convert a large and risky project – or even worse, all projects. He points out that it is a mistake because you won’t have time to learn from mistakes.
Administrivia
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Holiday Semi-Vacation
I’m taking a vacation thru the end of the year. Hooray! We’ve already written a series of short articles about migrating a development team to an agile process. Those articles will appear over the next several days – we hope you enjoy them. When I can get online, I will […]
Flashback
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Flashback: A Year Ago This Week on Tyner Blain [2005-12-10]
A look back at the best from a year ago.
Process Improvement / Requirements / Software development
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Skip The Requirements, Empower The Developers
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?
Agile / Process Improvement / Software development
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Making Agile Offshore Teams Work
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.
Agile / Process Improvement / Requirements gathering / Software development
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Agile Argument
Another challenge to a premise of agile comes in a well assembled argument from Tony at Seilevel, in his article, Agile…again.
Agile / Product Management / Requirements / Requirements gathering / Software development
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The Agile Dragon
When Alan Cooper and Kent Beck debated the benefits of eXtreme Programming versus Interaction Design, they disagreed on a lot of things. One thing they agreed on is that Agile processes are designed to minimize the impact of changing requirements. Cooper believes that it makes more sense to minimize future change by understanding the requirements better up front. Beck believes that the requirements can not be understood by the team until something is delivered. Beck’s point is that the customer doesn’t understand the requirements until he has something in his hands. We’ve shown how this is both a strength and a weakness for Agile in the real world. In The Hobbit, the dragon Smaug was missing a scale on his belly, that made him vulnerable. Agile processes have a similar weak spot.