Refactoring Large Software Systems

by Sibylle Peter, Sven Ehrke (2010-02-03)
Rating 4.0 out of 5 (1 rating) read comments

What can you do when a strategic software system written in java is unmaintanable? This article presents the precious experience harvested in a large software architecture refactoring project.

Scrum Primer

by Dan Rawsthorne and Douglas Shimp (2010-01-21)
Rating 5.0 out of 5 (1 rating) read comments

Scrum is about Teams producing Results in an agile way. Scrum Teams achieve results anyway they can by using a simple set of rules to guide effort. We will describe scrum as a simple applied model so that a central understanding of scrum can be built. Other complexities of applied scrum such as scaling, distribution, etc. will be explored elsewhere.

When Democracy Fails

by Alex Rosiu (2010-01-05)
Rating 5.0 out of 5 (1 rating) read comments

A brief article on taking the right decisions on technical matters.

Metrics and Process Improvement

by Juan Banda (2009-11-13)
Rating 5.0 out of 5 (1 rating) read comments

It’s not uncommon to hear that managers are interesting in improving productivity in their teams, metrics-wise this means that the indicators that they’re looking at, should start to show bigger and better numbers.

It’s not uncommon to hear that managers are interesting in improving productivity in their teams, metrics-wise this means that the indicators that they’re looking at, should start to show bigger and better numbers.

Metrics are commonly applied for measuring processes and they in turn reflect internal team organization policies and practices. Following this rationale, managers should start improving processes if they want to have better metrics. But what if processes are something that you can’t measure and consequently improve?

Agile Accelerators for offshore based Agile Development

by Vetrivel S (2009-11-04)
Rating (0 ratings) read comments

Agile development requires strong collaboration. If you are operating a delivery model of 90:10 (90% – offshore and 10% onsite) or similar 80:20 models, implementing the agile practices could be very challenging. To speed up the offshore agile development with a thin onsite team may require some deviation from the standard thought process.

Being Agile exercise for gaining a common team understanding and consensus

by Russell Pannone (2009-10-30)
Rating (0 ratings) read comments

Simple exercise for gaining a common understanding and consensus about what it means to you, the team and the organization to be Agile.

The Challenge

The modern world of Agile 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.

Peoples beliefs, understanding and perspectives as well as their unwillingness and ability to change makes being Agile hard.

Contributing to this challenge is a proliferation of new vocabulary, new terms, old terms having new meaning, guidance, books and articles on the subject and ones interpretation of what it means to be Agile.

Goal of the exercise

Minimize frustration and waste usually associated with gaining consensus on what it means to an individual, team and organization to “be Agile”; as they work through the forming, storming, norming and performing stages of team development.

Agile Software Development Methods: Review and Analysis

by Abrahamsson, Pekka; Salo, Outi; Ronkainen, Jussi; Warsta, Juhani (2002-09-01)
Rating 4.7 out of 5 (15 ratings) read comments

Excellent overview of all leading agile methods including Extreme Programming, Scrum, Crystal, Feature-Driven Development, Rational Unified Process, and DSDM.

The World of Agile & Lean Product Development and Delivery with SCRUM Made Easy

by Russell Pannone (2009-10-20)
Rating 5.0 out of 5 (1 rating) read comments

This presentation makes understanding Agile & Lean Product Development and Delivery with SCRUM easy.

What the PO Does During the Sprint?

by Juan Banda (2009-10-05)
Rating 5.0 out of 5 (1 rating) read comments

Somebody asked me an interesting question: what does a Product Owner do during the Sprint? But before answering this question, let’s go one step back and see what the PO does for the release backlog.

Applying Queueing Theory to Sprints

by Juan Banda (2009-09-24)
Rating 5.0 out of 5 (1 rating) read comments

I realized time ago that the Quality Engineers (QEs) in my projects were doing not much during the beginning and first half of the Sprints and this was like a recurrent pattern; they created test cases, prepared tested environments, updated existing ones, did some research, write training documents, etc. That sounds kind of ok but the problem was that by the end of the iteration they were all of a sudden overwhelmed by the amount of user stories that they had to test. Consequently, they had to work killing hours (including weekends) to get the work done.

I remembered that time ago banks had a similar problem, tellers where not doing much during most of the day, but at peak hours they can hardly breathe because they have a bunch of impatient clients formed on a lane in from of them. Banks played smart and did something to improve their service systems; they did something to evenly distribute arrivals. Queuing theory-wise, if you can’t increment servers, go in the other direction and look for an stable arrival rate.