Posted by Geert Bossuyt at around evening time: October 16th, 2011
Market Driven Development (aka Agile Fixed Price)
I propose a paradigm shift in developing software to deliver business value.
For a team to satisfy a business need,
it is not the amount of work that defines the time needed,
it is the available time that defines the amount of work that can be done.
The deadline is part of the need, and not the result of estimation or planning techniques.
With the deadline being part of the need, the Team and the Product Owner have a shared budget ( = number of Sprints ) to realize the Vision.
Instead of using Poker to give insight in the estimated time of delivery, let’s create a Market Place where Product Owner and Team ‘negotiate’ on the complexity of each story.
Posted by Nicole Belilos in the wee hours: October 1st, 2011
Let me introduce you to Nick, Martijn and Harold. Junior developers at a large company. They were good. They were young. And they were angry.
Angry, because they felt they were being held down by the system. As junior developers they only got to do simple, boring work. They were unable to show all their knowledge, or use the cool things they had learned in college. Their salary matched the level of the work they did, and this was another big frustration.
Then one day the company decided to transfer to Agile, and the lives of Nick, Martijn and Harold changed. While in the beginning it looked like a great improvement, the young men soon got trapped…
Posted by Pieter Rijken in the early morning: September 30th, 2011
I used to be a big fan of tools. I still am…..but not as big a fan as I used to be. This changed after I realized the meaning of ‘Individuals and interactions over processes and tools’. Especially the “interactions over tools” part. This week’s blog Eat your failure cake! Learn from your mistakes. motivated me to share one of my failure cakes with you.
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Posted by erustenburg in the early morning: September 27th, 2011
Running a great session at the ALE2011 conference last week gave me a great level of energy. Facilitating a story mapping session gave me a great boost of confidence. Running a similar session in a different context with a different group toke that confidence away. By eating my failure cake I was able to celebrate my failing and opened my eye to enable me to learn from the failure.
Posted by Pieter Rijken mid-afternoon: September 23rd, 2011
In Agile methods focus on short feedback cycles and regular delivery of (business) value. Both are supported by having short lead times. Kanban is one of the tools to manage the flow of tasks and reduce lead times.
This article shows how to reduce lead times even further.
One of the mechanisms in Kanban to manage flow is to explicitly set a limit on the amount of work in progress for a process step. By modifying this to include part of the next process step, this article shows that the amount of work in progress is limited more and therefore also lead times are reduced.
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Posted by Maarten Winkels in the early morning: September 21st, 2011
Wouldn’t it be sweet if your whole life were perfect? Your wife would fulfill your every wish. Your children would be perfect examples of responsible happy people growing up. At work your colleagues are the nicest people and working with them is always fun. Your team would feel responsible for every action they (proactively) take and the software systems you produce and maintain are flawless and run like well oiled machines?…
You need to wake up! Nothing will ever be perfect and Agile knows it!
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Posted by Daniel Burm in the early morning: September 16th, 2011
Agile companies that want to create real ownership, have to say goodbye to traditional stakeholdership and embrace “joint company stakeholdership”. Remain to be an old-skool stakeholder in an agile environment and you will possibly act as a “stakekeeper” instead of a “stakesharer”, therefore withholding the company “staketakers” from focus on value and real ownership of results.
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Posted by Martien van Steenbergen mid-morning: August 29th, 2011
What electronics tools exist to electronically master the agile process like Scrum, Kanban, and others?
Since this question surfaces every now and then, answers collect here (in alphabetical order).
- Agile Bench
- Google Docs
- Microsoft » Excel
- FlowKaizen
- Atlassian » Greenhopper for JIRA
- Hansoft
- Bandit Software » LeanKit Kanban
- Pivot Labs » Pivotal Tracker
- Rally Software » Rally
- ScrumDesk
- Silver Stripe » Silver Catalyst
- smartQ
- TargetProcess
- Version One Suite
- Atlassian » Vodafone wins Ultimate Scrum Board Award
Got more?
Contributors:
- Serge Beaumont
- Erica
- Theo Gerrits
- Olav Maassen
- Pieter Rijken
- Yves Hanoulle
- Jem
Posted by Daniel Burm mid-afternoon: August 26th, 2011
Some time ago I saw an interview on a talk show that intrigued me. It kept me thinking and even to this date the topic discussed still puzzles me. In modern day organizations and markets more and more emphasis is placed on efficient behavior which should lead to better results and better ROI. Effective behavior is also sometimes mentioned, but way less often and it’s is not elaborated upon as much as efficiency. Maybe it’s because both nouns have two f’s and a lot of e’s, so people tend to forget about effectiveness?
Posted by Erwin van der Koogh late at night: August 9th, 2011
Today I was asked a really interesting question by a client: “Agile is very simple, why do you need Agile coaches?”.
That is a pretty fundamental question to ask of any Agile coach and after my initial shock we did come up with some good answers.
But the question (and the initial answers) kept nagging at me all day. And while I sat down with a glass of good whisky in the evening I got back to the question. Here is what I came up with:
- Agile is simple, not easy
- Experience bootstraps learning
- Organizational gravity