Tag: agile software development

Management Books

• Out of the Crisis: by W. Edwards Deming
  A classic but not an easy book to read. Packed with good ideas that still have great merit. New paperback printing (2000).

• Implementing Lean Software Development: From Concept to Cash by Mary Poppendieck, Tom Poppendieck
  

• Kanban: Successful Evolutionary Change for Your Technology Business by David Anderson
  The book provides specific and useful guidance to those attempting to adopt kanban management in software development. The books is very well written and presents the material in a very easy to digest manner. It is so packed with information it is very difficult to mine even a significant portion of the value in one read. The organization allows for easy reference as you need to focus on any specific topic to find that topic and get an excellent review in minutes.

• Agile Estimating and Planning: by Mike Cohn
  Highlights include: - Why conventional prescriptive planning fails and why agile planning works - How to estimate feature size using story points and ideal days—and when to use each - How and when to re-prioritize - How to split large features into smaller, more manageable ones

• Succeeding with Agile: Software Development Using Scrum by Mike Cohn
  Succeeding with Agile is for pragmatic software professionals who want real answers to the most difficult challenges they face in implementing Scrum. Cohn covers every facet of the transition: getting started, helping individuals transition to new roles, structuring teams, scaling up, working with a distributed team, and finally, implementing effective metrics and continuous improvemen

• User Stories Applied: For Agile Software Development by Mike Cohn
  The concept of user stories has its roots as one of the main tenets of Extreme Programming. In simple terms, user stories represent an effective means of gathering requirements from the customer (roughly akin to use cases). This book describes user stories and demonstrates how they can be used to properly plan, manage, and test software development projects. The book highlights both successful and unsuccessful implementations of the concept, and provides sets of questions and exercises that drive home its main points. After absorbing the lessons in this book, readers will be able to introduce user stories in their organizations as an effective means of determining precisely what is required of a software application.

Management Articles

• Lean Programming - part 1 of 2 by Mary Poppendieck
  "Assembly-line production techniques apply to software, too."

• Lean Programming - part 2 of 2 by Mary Poppendieck
  "Total Quality Management still rings true for software." Not a perfect representation of Deming's ideas (in our opinion) but an example of Deming's ideas continuing to spark interest.

• Eight Reasons Retrospectives Fail by Esther Derby
  "Choosing Actions the Team Doesn’t Have Energy For... They may have tried before and failed, the task may be too difficult or time-consuming given the other work they have to do, or the work may be plain unpleasant. In any case, when the team doesn’t have energy to work on an improvement, chances are pretty good it won’t get done. Go with the task the team has the energy to complete."

• The Role of Leadership in Software Development by Mary Poppendieck
  "In this 90-minute talk from the Agile2007 conference, Lean software thought leader Mary Poppendieck reviewed 20th century management theories, including Toyota and Deming, and went on to talk about 'the matrix problem', alignment, waste cutting, planning

• Scrum-ban by Corey Ladas
  Great article on lean software development ideas: "One simple technique that brings us much closer to our kanban definition is to set a multitasking limit for individuals. You might have a simple principle like: prefer completing work to starting new work

• Introduction to Planning Poker by Damon Poole
  "One of the biggest benefits of Planning Poker is the sense of team that it creates. The whole team is participating in the estimation. This creates a greater sense of team ownership and team responsibility for each story. Another major benefit of planning...

• Kanban Systems by James Shore
  "In the field, I've seen Kanban work best in chaotic environments where upcoming features don't have much in common. I don't think it's a coincidence that the initial examples of Kanban come from those sorts of environments. David Anderson's team was...

• Metrics and Software Development by John Hunter
  "I find looking at outcome measures (to measure overall effectiveness) and process measures (for viewing specific parts of the system 'big picture') the most useful strategy. The reason for process measures is not to improve those results alone. But those process measures can be selected to measure key processes within the system..."

• IT the Toyota way
  "The IT department is also building a custom dealer management system to help dealers introduce the principles of the Toyota Way into their own workplaces. It's looking internally at its own processes; instead of the waterfall approach to development -- where a lot of planning and building of solutions is done up front and then given to the customer -- Toyota has adopted an agile process."

• The Lean Influencer’s Mantra by Siraj Sirajuddin
  Video presentation on leading change to adopt lean thinking.

• Thoughts on how Kanban Differs from Scrum by David Anderson
  "Kanban uses the WIP limit as its control mechanism to provoke conversations about change. Failure to respect the WIP limits and discuss problems will lead to stagnation and a failure to improve. Improvement discussions are objective as the visualization, measurement, explicitness of policies and the models from Lean, Theory of Constraints and the teachings of W. Edwards Deming, allow a team to scientifically analyze their problems and propose solutions."

• Summing it all up by Hemal Kuntawala
  "So testers, to summarise, if you have a 'QA' column on your task wall, you’re doing it wrong. Go pair with a developer, now. Don’t just wait to bat back a list of bugs to them, go help them avoid having to work on the same thing twice. ... Ask which scenarios are important and forget about the ridiculous edge cases for now. Now build it and get real feedback."

• Agile Team Meets a Fixed Price Contract
  "We need to get back one more time to the point where we changed fixed scope into fixed budget. The 300 story points from the previous examples allows us to exchange the contents of the initial user story list. This is one of the most important aspects that we want to achieve with a fixed price contract done the agile way. Agile embraces change, and what we want to do is to streamline change management within the fixed price contract."

• The Achilles’ Heel of Agile by Jurgen Appelo
  "In the case of shared resources, whether it concerns money, space, or system administrators, someone outside of the development teams must keep an eye on long-term sustainability instead of short-term gains by individual teams. The Tragedy of the Commons is the Achilles’ heel of Agile. It takes management to protect that heel, in order to prevent teams from depleting resources, and crippling the organization."

• Adding Customer Value in Development at Xerox
  "Business901 Podcast featured Patrick Waara talking about Xerox’s use of Agile techniques... Our conversation originally was designed to discuss swarming and Lean problem solving. However we ventured off into the subject of how Lean, Six Sigma and Agile all work under the same umbrella"

• Why the retrospective is not a lessons learned meeting
  "Just real, useful, insightful and timely agreements about what we're doing NOW to be even better than we were last time. That's the retrospective."

• Why Do Some Testers Find The Critical Problems?
  "Testers who find problems successfully can link tests, test activities, and test results to the mission. They’re far more concerned about the quality of the information they provide than the quantity... Testers, to be successful, must be given the freedom and responsibility to explore and to contribute what they’ve learned back to their team and to the rest of the organization."

• Demystifying the Product Owner
  "This usually requires the product owner to lead product discovery, to help identify and describe requirements, and to ensure that the product backlog is ready for the next sprint planning meeting. It also means that the product owner has to engage in product planning, visioning and product road mapping, decide what functionality is provided by a release, carry out release planning, and answer questions from the team, review work results, and collaborate with customers, users and other stakeholders."

• Why I Run a Flat Company by Jason Fried
  "At 37signals, however, we have a different position on ambition. We're not big fans of what I consider 'vertical' ambition—that is, the usual career-path trajectory, in which a newbie moves up the ladder from associate to manager to vice president over a number of years of service. On the other hand, we revere "horizontal" ambition—in which employees who love what they do are encouraged to dig deeper, expand their knowledge, and become better at it. We always try to hire people who yearn to be master craftspeople, that is, designers who want to be great designers, not managers of designers; developers who want to master the art of programming, not management."

• You are Solving the Wrong Problem
  "The problem was the problem. Paul realized that what we needed to be solved was not, in fact, human powered flight. That was a red-herring. The problem was the process itself, and along with it the blind pursuit of a goal without a deeper understanding how to tackle deeply difficult challenges. He came up with a new problem that he set out to solve: how can you build a plane that could be rebuilt in hours not months. And he did. ... When you are solving a difficult problem re-ask the problem so that your solution helps you learn faster. Find a faster way to fail, recover, and try again."

• It's Not Just Standing Up: Patterns for Daily Standup Meetings by Jason Yip
  "It is too easy to confuse effort with work. The stand-up should encourage a focus on moving work through the system in order to achieve our objectives, not encourage pointless activity. ... Post raised obstacles to an Improvement Board. This is a publicly visible whiteboard or chart that identifies raised obstacles and tracks the progress of their resolution. An Improvement Board can be updated outside of stand-ups and serves as a more immediate and perhaps less confronting way to initially raise obstacles."

• How an automotive secret can make for better software by David Anderson
  "Kanban is still in the very early stages of adoption. It is true that most people in the software industry have never heard of it. However, there are many hundreds of companies on 5 continents already doing it. Some have very large, successful and well documented implementations. Firms such as the BBC in London, Globo and Petrobras in Brazil, Amdocs in Israel, Vanguard is a well known American adopter."

• You can’t be Agile in Maintenance?
  "Agile development naturally leads into maintenance – the goal of incremental Agile development is to get working software out to customers as soon as possible, and get customers using it. At some point, when customers are relying on the software to get real business done and need support and help to keep the system running, teams cross from development over to maintenance. But there’s no reason for Agile development teams to fundamentally change the way that they work when this happens."

• Hiring for an Agile Team, 4 Reasons to Up Your Hiring Game by Esther Derby
  "In agile teams, people collaborate, negotiate, make trade-offs, handle conflicts. These interactions require a high level of interpersonal skill and emotional intelligence... People on agile teams need an exceptional ability to learn and apply that learning–both in growing 'generalizing specialist' skills and in improving team processes..."

Management Web Sites and Resources

• Curious Cat Management Improvement Articles by John Hunter
  Hundreds of useful management articles hand selected to help managers improve the performance of their organization. Sorted by topic including: Deming, lean manufacturing, six sigma, continual improvement, innovation, leadership, managing people, software development, psychology and systems thinking.

• Curious Cat Management Improvement Blog by John Hunter
  Blog by John Hunter on many topics to to improve the management of organizations, including: Deming, lean manufacturing, agile software development, evidence based decision making, customer focus, innovation, six sigma, systems thinking, leadership, psychology, ...

• Visual Management Blog
  Blog by Xavier Quesada Allue, from Argentina. The goal of the blog is to create a space for the discussion of ideas and examples of Visual Management (the practice of using information visualization techniques to manage work) applied to agile teams and agile project management.

• Agile Software Development Made Easy! by Kelly Waters
  Blog by Kelly Waters agile development and agile project management.

• Dennis Stevens
  Blog on agile software development.

• Leading Agile by Mike Cottmeyer
  

• Agile Management Blog by David Anderson
  

• Agile Blog
  The Agile Blog provides advice and resources for people actively looking to advance their Agile practices by Rally.

• Kanban Chronicle
  Purpose: To provide insight by sharing our experiences in adopting Kanban. Why: When we started, we found that the real examples were the most useful. We would like to add to that body of knowledge. We also wanted to share with our colleagues at work. Our aim: To provide a full lifecycle example from as many perspectives as possible... Why did we choose Kanban, what we read first, what we started with, how we adapted, what worked. by Andrew Walker

• Curious Cat Management Improvement Connections by John Hunter
  The aim of Curious Cat Management Improvement Connections is to contribute to the successful adoption of management improvement to advance joy in work and joy in life. The site provides connections to resources on a wide variety of management topics to help managers improve the performance of their organization. The site was started in 1996 by John Hunter.

• Hemal, Developer in Test by Hemal Kuntawala
  "I'm a test-developer enhancing testing practices using kanban and lean principles. ... I'm keen to see more development teams, agile-adopters or not, move away from the end-of-cycle testing model and embrace true quality assurance by testing throughout the production line."

• Benjamin Mitchell's Blog by Benjamin Mitchell
  "I'm a London-based independent consulting focussed on Systems Thinking, Intervention Theory and Lean / Kanban applied to IT businesses. I am a follower of Ohno, Deming, Seddon and Argyris."

• Succeeding With Agile
  By the founder of Mountain Goat Software, an agile training and consulting firm.

• Agile consulting
  Insights on Agile, Lean, Kanban, and Flow by Jeff Anderson and Alexis Hui.

• Edge of Chaos | Agile Development Blog
  From Target Process, covering scrum, lean, kanban, extreme programming and complex adaptive systems.

• Startup Lessons Learned by Eric Ries
  By the author of the very popular book: Lean Startup.

• Customer Oriented Software Development
  "This blog contains thoughts, ideas, and tips about modern and efficient software development methods." By Henrik Larsson.

• Agile Six Sigma
  "I'm going to use this blog to share and capture ideas on quality - with a primary focus on application of Lean Six Sigma in a Technology setting."