Agile

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Barriers to Scrum Adoption: Jun 27, 2011; Scrum sounds great, but it sure seems to go wrong a lot. Matt Heusser discusses obstacles and how to go over them or around them, and sometimes just blow them up.

Beyond Process and Tools: People Issues in Agile Software: Apr 14, 2011; The Agile Manifesto says that we value "individuals and interactions" over "processes and tools." Yet TDD, Scrum, Extreme Programming, jUnit, and many other elements in the "Agile" space are processes and tools! Ken Howard and Barry Rogers draw a line in the sand with their new book Individuals and Interactions: An Agile Guide; Matthew Heusser interviewed the authors to find out more.

Breaking the Project Management Triangle: Aug 20, 2009; Niel Nickolaisen explains how he abandoned the project management triangle in favor of a new version, so much more meaningful that he gave it his own name.

'But I Don't Want the Minimum!' Understanding the Concept of the Minimum Viable Product (MVP): Sep 22, 2011; Does the word 'minimum' immediately raise your hackles? Aaron Erickson, author of The Nomadic Developer, emphasizes that learning to prioritize, getting to production early, and subsequently delivering in small increments are key disciplines in the practices of Agile and continuous delivery.

Coaching Agile Teams: Expect High Performance: By Lyssa Adkins; Jun 3, 2010; Setting high performance as your baseline expectation and giving teams a way to achieve it play directly into the powerful motivators of autonomy, mastery, and purpose. Thus invigorated, everyone wins. Lyssa Adkins shows you how to create a culture of high performance in your Agile teams.

Communication: the Key to Successful Software Development: Mar 22, 2002; Everyone on the product team has to speak in compatible terminology, or nothing will get done (or done correctly, anyway). In this article from The Coad Letter, Stephen Palmer provides groundwork for good communications within and outside the team.

Continuous Integration in XP: Mar 22, 2002; Does your hard work on a development project get pitched because someone else on the project saved conflicting changes? In this article, William C. Wake describes methods XP developers use to keep their efforts from going to waste.

Conventional Software Testing on a Scrum Team: Sep 30, 2005; The Scrum methodology can pose a challenge for software testers who are used to more traditional waterfall-inspired development processes. Jonathan Kohl relates his experiences working on Scrum teams who found some clear advantages in changing their methods.

CRC Cards: An Agile Thinking Tool: Aug 25, 2009; Rebecca Wirfs-Brock shows you how to use CRC cards as an Agile thinking tool.

Creating an Agile Culture through Trust and Ownership: An Interview with Pollyanna Pixton and Niel Nickolaisen: Apr 10, 2014; Phil Windley talks to Pollyanna Pixton and Niel Nickolaisen about their book, The Agile Culture: Leading through Trust and Ownership, why command and control management doesn't work with software teams, and why really trusting your team can make all the difference in your products, your work environment, and employee quality, satisfaction, and retention.

Crystal Clear Applied: The Seven Properties of Running an Agile Project: Nov 24, 2004; This chapter describes seven properties set up by the best teams. Crystal Clear requires the first three. Better teams use the other four properties to get farther into the safety zone. All of the properties aside from osmotic communication apply to projects of all sizes.

Crystallizing the Software Development Process: A Chat with Alistair Cockburn: Aug 10, 2009; In this interview, Alistair Cockburn shares his views on missing the point of Crystal, running productive work sessions (including the one that spawned The Agile Manifesto), and whether a project can be considered Agile if it doesn’t use all the accepted methodologies.

Customer-Oriented Rapid Application Development (CoRAD): Nov 16, 2001; This article discusses a RAD methodology for developing e-commerce applications: customer-oriented RAD (CoRAD), developed by Cambridge Technology Partners.

Developing Secure Applications Through Aspect-Oriented Programming: Nov 18, 2004; This chapter provides helpful information on using aspect-oriented programming to develop security components for distributed applications. The effectiveness of AOP technology is demonstrated with two application-level security problems that illustrate the utility of this technology.

Disciplined Agile Delivery in a Nutshell: Jul 9, 2012; Scott Ambler and Mark Lines explain that mainstream agile methods—including Scrum, Extreme Programming (XP), and Agile Modeling (AM)—each provide only a part of the overall picture for IT solution delivery. Disciplined Agile Delivery (DAD) is a hybrid process framework that pulls together common practices and strategies from these methods and supplements these with others, such as Agile Data and Kanban, to address the full delivery lifecycle.

Documentation in Scrum Projects: Feb 11, 2016; Good agile teams are disciplined about their documentation but are also deliberate about how much they do and when. In this chapter from The Scrum Field Guide: Agile Advice for Your First Year and Beyond, 2nd Edition, we find a duo struggling to explain that while they won’t be fully documenting everything up front, they will actually be more fully documenting the entire project from beginning to end.

Document-Weary? Try Chief Programmer Work Folders: Mar 22, 2002; Chief programmer work folders are a simple, effective solution for document-weary development teams. In this article from The Coad Letter, Stephen Palmer explains how the work folder concept functions.

Driving Software: Mar 22, 2002; In this chapter from Planning Extreme Programming Kent Beck and Martin Fowler explain how extreme programming is like driving a car: it's not about pointing the car in one direction and holding to it; it's about making lots of little course corrections.

Duct Tape and Design: Applying Extreme Programming to System Administration: Jul 13, 2001; Just as system administration isn't all duct tape and chewing gum, extreme programming (XP) isn't just for cowboy coders, says Pat Eyler.

Essential Skills for the Agile Developer: Avoid Over- and Under-Design: Aug 29, 2011; How do you avoid over- or under-designing your code? As Ward Cunningham once said, "Take as much time as you need to make your code quality as high as it can be, but don't spend a second adding functionality that you don't need now!" This chapter covers this "mantra for development: write high-quality code, but don't write extra code.