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The last responsible moment is an idea that gets a great deal of play in the Agile community. One way that concept comes about is when figuring out how soon to do certain thin…
Kent McDonald
Kent J McDonald writes about and practices software product management. He has IT and product development experience in a variety of industries including financial services, health insurance, nonprofit, and automotive. Kent currently practices his craft for a variety of organizations and provides just in time resources for product owners and business analysts at KBP.media and Product Collective. When not writing or product managing, Kent is his family’s #ubersherpa, listens to jazz and podcasts (but not necessarily podcasts about jazz), and collects national parks.
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Agile software development has become fairly commonplace, some people may even say that it is now mainstream.
The success of those moves to Agile have met with varying levels…
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The general guidance in the Principals Behind the Agile Manifesto is that you want self-organizing teams consisting of motivated individuals:
“Build projects around motivated …
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When organizations adopt Agile practices, there are a few roles that often get left out of the picture because they were not explicitly noted in the framework that the organiz…
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When I’ve helped organizations adopt Agile software development, there are three groups of people who seem to get the most concerned: development managers, project managers, a…
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When the topic turns to testing and Agile software development, I usually hear variations of the following two questions:
We usually take six weeks to do systems testing af…
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This is part of a series of posts where I take a look at some commonly asked questions and provide my spin on them. The answers are all my own. So while my answers do not nec…
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I have the opportunity to talk to business analysts quite a bit, and the conversation usually turns to the topic of Agile.
More often than not, the question that comes up is …
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I recently received a question about the basic qualities Agile teams should have via the website. I replied with a Reader’s Digest version to the requester and promised a more…
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What activities do you suggest when starting a new team?
When forming a new team, you want to make sure you can get them started off on the right foot. There are several diffe…
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At Agile Alliance, we pride ourselves on the wealth of high-quality, in-depth Agile-related resources we offer you.
But we also realize that sometimes too much of a good thin…
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If you work in an IT organization that seeks to operate in an Agile fashion, you may have run across the challenge of getting your stakeholders — those people who you’re build…
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Late last year we asked our individual and corporate members for some feedback on their Agile Alliance membership.
We received a lot of great information, and also remember…
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Just about everyone who has looked into Agile software development is familiar with the Manifesto for Agile Software Development (Agile Manifesto) and the Principles behind th…
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Ron Quartel recently put relative estimation to the test and shared the results in his recent post, Putting Relative Estimation to the Test. His main finding was that absolute…
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A few days ago, I added a glossary item for epic to the Agile Glossary.
As I started writing that entry I thought crafting a definition of epic should be really straight forw…
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Last week we added the term customer development to the Agile Glossary. Customer development is a framework originally named by Steve Blank but practiced by many entrepreneurs…
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There’s a concept core to Agile Software Development not mentioned explicitly in the Agile Manifesto or the 12 Principles behind it.
Context is very important.
You could eve…
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Folks in the Agile community have long suggested that user stories are placeholders for a conversation. That pronouncement may leave you with some questions, such as who shoul…
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In my several years helping organizations adopt Agile, I’ve seen the label “Hybrid Agile” pop up frequently. It seems to be used most frequently in organizations whose IT depa…
