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| SPONSORED BY: Soasta |
 Cloud Testing Bill of Rights
This white paper, authored by software system performance and software testing systems thought leader Scott Barber, addresses your rights to organize and champion change within your IT or development group. Barber's observations encourage people to see the Cloud Testing Bill of Rights as a series of revisions to commonly accepted software development practices and encourages citizens of the nation of software development to use the freedom of expanded options and pursue betterment of their current situation.
Click here to learn more.
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| MEDIA SPOTLIGHT |
Mission Critical Agility
What can we learn about agility from great inventors like Alexander Graham Bell and the pioneers at NASA who risked everything to change the world? Jeff Norris explores key principles of agility from a fresh and entertaining perspective by drawing on inspiring stories of people who demonstrated agile work practices long before anyone had heard of a ScrumMaster.
Read Mission Critical Agility
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| AGILISM |
"Project Goals"
Project goals provide the overall direction and answer the questions "Which part of the corporate mission statement does the project I'm working on support?" and "What business goal does this completed project meet?" Time for these goals ranges from several months to years. Suppose your company has a strategic goal to increase their product offerings. After some research, the managers decide to create an application that uses a camera to track the user's eyes and automatically move the cursor based on eye movement. The project charter should connect to the "increase product offerings" strategic goal. Using the project goals developers can connect today's work with the company's strategic goals. Since long term goals take months to years, we need interim goals to track how we're doing.
From Goal, Goal, Who's Got the Goal? by Don Gray |
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| FROM THE DOWNLOAD CENTER |
Lean Service Virtualization
Sponsored by HP
Many organizations are moving to composite applications to promote agility because the smaller units of functionality can be developed in parallel, accessed from third parties, and reused in multiple projects. The downside to this approach is that the entire process can slow down and become more costly if there are dependencies on services that are not available when developers and testers need them. This paper shares how you can address the challenges of developing and testing composite applications. Learn to simulate unavailable services in a virtual environment, which will enable functional and performance testing to take place earlier in the application lifecycle. Discover how doing so will save time and reduce the cost of developing and testing modern applications.
Click here to learn more |
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| CONTENT POINTER |
Low-tech Tools for the Thinking Tester
By Paul Carvalho
Over the past two decades, I have seen many advances in technology and processes for software development. From the evolution of computers, storage, and programming languages, to new social, organizational, and development models for businesses to consider. Of all these advances, I like how the Agile Manifesto returns the business focus to providing value quickly through human interaction and collaboration. Sometimes throwing more technology, processes, and tools at the problem won't help you develop better solutions.
Read Low-tech Tools for the Thinking Tester |
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| ADVERTISEMENT |
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Register by May 11, 2012, and save up to $200 off your registration!
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| BOOK REVIEW |
Essential Skills for the Agile Developer
By Alan Shalloway, et al.
Reviewed by C. David Moye
Essential Skills for the Software Developer is part of the Net Objectives Lean-Agile Series and seems primarily to be an accompaniment to one of the many courses taught by the Net Objectives group. This is not meant to disparage the book in any way. In fact, it is a fantastic distillation of several important modern concepts related to software engineering.
Continue reading the review of Essential Skills for the Agile Developer |
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| POWERPASS POINTER |
Magazine Archive
Designing an Agile Portfolio and Program Coordination System
by Arlen Bankston and Bob Payne
Scaling agile to the enterprise can be challenging once you start looking at the program and portfolio level. How do you design an effective coordination system that encourages collaboration, communication, and transparency that is flexible, easy to implement and rapidly evolvable? We will explore key aspects of creating a simple but effective agile-ready coordination system for managing such initiatives, based upon the authors' observations and experiences across widely differing companies.
Read Designing an Agile Portfolio and Program Coordination System |
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| THE AGILE EXPERIENCE |
Embracing Change and Complexity
By Louis J. Taborda
While many of us subscribe to agile methods and the ideals they represent, too often the organizations we work for force us to do things that are in direct conflict with agile principles. This is particularly the case for IT departments in larger organizations, where agility is evident as good intentions rather than being the reality on the ground.
Just over a year ago, the financial services company I was working with initiated an agile project with a lot of fanfare. It had management sponsorship, was given a catchy name, and the development team was led and trained by leading Scrum consultants. Today, the mention of that project, which resulted in the manager who led the initiative now maintaining a low profile, causes embarrassment among the remaining members of the development team. The project's failure to deliver on expectations has meant that other agile initiatives have suffered and the crater it leaves ensures that it will be some time before another agile project is given the same level of support.
Constrained agility
I'm sure this is not an isolated instance of well-intentioned agile projects going wrong; you may have your own stories to share. In this particular case, the reason team members gave for their failed attempt at agility is that the project did not have control over its own destiny: There were too many constraints and external dependencies to deal with. These constraints arose from the fact that the project had to work within the boundaries of the original business case that established the scope in advance and placed limits on the planning of each sprint. Furthermore, while the agile team members were "sprinting," other teams that the solution relied upon were progressing at their usual, relatively glacial pace. In other words, while the business saw the project as a singular independent initiative, the solution architecture relied upon other components to achieve the desired outcome. In reality, project success was dependent upon other teams in the enterprise.
This example shows that to be successful in large organizations, agile principles must encompass all aspects of a project. You must be agile early in the lifecycle when the project's business case is developed, rather than only being agile in the software construction phase alone—or worse, restricted to a single development team. Routinely creating such a business case calls for estimating the entire project scope and establishing the high-level solution design that often impacts multiple teams.
Continue Reading Embracing Change and Complexity
Visit the Iterations Archive to find out what you may have missed in past issues. |
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