Agile Teams

Photos and the summary report from the 2008 QFD Symposium are now posted. Here are the two pictures I’m in (taken by Mayumi Mazur of QFDI):

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‘Expert Panel’ composed of presenters; we took questions from the audience. I’m third from the right.

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At the start of my Getting AHEAD presentation.

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In conjunction with our colleague Elizabeth, Aldo, Qingfeng, and I have recently completed several new papers on the AHEAD method which emerged from a recent software technology evaluation project. AHEAD stands for Attribute Hierarchy-based Evaluation of Architectural Designs; the method blends the SEI’s Attribute-Driven Design (ADD) with the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) to deliver a nice balance between efficiency and accuracy (agility and discipline) in performing objective software technology evaluations. Our research results are just now ‘hitting the press’ … the first paper was well received at the QFD Symposium last week, and two others have been accepted at conferences and will be presented in March. Please check out AHEAD - we’d love to hear your comments and suggestions for improving and applying it!

This 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!

I 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?

Tonight 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.

Here’s an interesting InfoQ article on Scrum in China, for my agile-minded colleagues there

Check 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.

I’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!

Check 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’. Continue Reading »

Excellent article from Dr. Dobbs Journal (Sept. 2007) on “Scrum Meets CMMi“, about the experiences of an SCM tool development company in Spain.