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Archive for the ‘agile’ Category
agile tweets
Sunday, February 22nd, 2009measurement and agility
Friday, January 30th, 2009I learned this week, thanks to a LinkedIn notification about a colleague’s change of position, that Rally Development recently acquired 6th Sense Analytics. I’m excited about the potential synergies that may come from this merger of agile and as-light-as-possible measurement, and plan to follow them closely via the Rally agile blog.
agile management tools
Tuesday, January 20th, 2009Even the most agile project likely uses some kind of tools – index cards, whiteboards, etc. I recently checked out a few agile project management tools to help me with a small, but globally distributed, project. (Without continuously-on high-powered video support across the oceans, whiteboards and index cards are just too hard for everyone on the team to see 😉) After a quick check of ThoughtWorks’ Mingle, Rally Development’s VersionOne, TargetProcess, and Pivotal Labs’ Tracker, I decided to try out Tracker for my team. My main reasons:
- it’s free for our team size (under 5 people),
- it’s hosted (zero installation effort, and provides easy access from anywhere for globally distributed teammates),
- it’s reputed to be fairly simple and straightforward to use.
Although I’m all in favor of applying appropriate rigor (e.g. using a method like AHEAD) to software technology evaluations for which the business consequences warrant it, in this case, ‘doing the simplest thing that could possibly work’ didn’t appear to require anything sophisticated. I’ll post later on how well it works for us. I’d love to hear from anyone who has used them, or other tools, for similar geographically-distributed team situations.
growth
Thursday, October 30th, 2008This blog has been quiet for a while, partly due to a shift in employer focus away from coaching agile, TSP, and CMMI, and towards research in requirements engineering, technology evaluation, and software architecture. I’m delighted to be reviving this blog now with the addition of new topics (including QFD, ADD, AHP, PrIME) and an outstanding new collaborator, Dr. Qingfeng He! It also seems likely that agile coaching activities will resume in the near future, based upon grass-roots demand for Scrum, which we’re excited about. Look for more new posts and publications here in the near future!
visualizing agile projects
Friday, May 16th, 2008I found this article today via the crystalclear list I follow: http://www.infoq.com/articles/agile-kanban-boards
Several of the described information radiators will already be familiar if you’ve been following agile. The most novel – one I have no choice but to love – is the “Smiley Calendar” 😉 Seriously, getting feedback on team morale this way seems like a great idea; it gives team members who don’t like to complain a way to quietly raise a flag when morale starts to suffer. Have any of you used one?
refactoring your wetware
Tuesday, May 6th, 2008Tonight I attended an excellent ARTp (Agile RTP) session featuring Andy Hunt of Pragmatic Programmers, on “refactoring your wetware” (improving your brain; topic of his upcoming book which is ‘in beta’). Well attended, and very enjoyable.
Scrum in China
Tuesday, May 6th, 2008Here’s an interesting InfoQ article on Scrum in China, for my agile-minded colleagues there 🙂
SPIN anywhere
Wednesday, April 2nd, 2008Check out the new SEI-approved Virtual SPIN. There isn’t an agile CMMI group (yet), but I do see some agile-related discussions there already. I’ve joined.
congratulations, Aldo!
Sunday, March 23rd, 2008I’m so pleased to be able to announce that Aldo Dagnino has been selected as the 2008 winner of the SEI Outstanding Contributor Award, which was presented to him at SEPG 2008 in Tampa, Florida last week. Aldo has consistently published and presented on business-driven process improvement and blending the CMMI with agile methods. Most recently, a paper on which he was the lead author comparing Scrum and the project management process areas of CMMI won ‘Best Paper’ in its track (for Lean, Six Sigma, and Agile) at the CMMI Users Group Conference in November 2007. Kudos to Aldo on this well-deserved recognition!
self-organization
Tuesday, March 18th, 2008Check out Don Highsmith’s Cutter article on self-organizing, suggesting that the term has lost its value to the agile community, and Tobias Mayer’s response. I lean towards believing the phrase still carries useful meaning which is significantly different from ‘anarchy’. (more…)
