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| SPONSORED BY: ThoughtWorks |
Mingle-Agile Project Management Solution
Mingle does not dictate an alien process, but adapts to XP, Scrum, Kanban—and any process you've developed. Maximize your responsiveness to rapidly changing business requirements and centralize your project's system of record by putting your global team on the same page. Mingle enables Agile best practices while adapting to the way you work.
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| MEDIA SPOTLIGHT |
Agile Development Practices Conference Video
Pollyanna Pixton's "Collaborative Leadership: A Secret to Agile Success"
When members of a development project are asked to become a self-directed agile team, some claim that leadership and leaders are obsolete. Or, is a different type of leadership exactly what agile teams need to truly flourish? Whether you are a senior manager, product owner, customer, ScrumMaster, or an individual contributor, Pollyanna Pixton's collaborative principles will empower you and everyone on your team to become better leaders and deliver the business value that stakeholders deserve.
Watch "Collaborative Leadership: A Secret to Agile Success"  |
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| WHAT'S HAPPENING AT STICKYMINDS.COM |
Blog Pointer
Why Recognition Programs Don't Work
By Naomi Karten
I was consulting to an IT organization in which employee morale was rapidly slithering to the bottom of the employee satisfaction chart. These people, hard workers all, felt unappreciated. It was as if, no matter what they did, their managers barely noticed. My task was to help turn things around and we were making progress. So when I attended an IT division meeting at which one of the managers excitedly announced that two employees had earned the recently implemented "Superstar Award," I cringed. Not because two individuals were being recognized for their efforts, but because 187 others weren't. And hadn't been.
Continue reading "Why Recognition Programs Don't Work"
@StickyMinds on Twitter. Want to get a daily dose of what's new and popular on StickyMinds.com and in Better Software magazine? Follow @StickyMinds on Twitter for regular updates about weekly columns, news, discussion boards, eNewsletters, and more. |
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| AGILISM: DEFINING THE MOVEMENT |
Prospect
A prospect is a potential buyer for whatever you are selling. Generally, prospects for software testing are those who are at risk, because it costs them time, money, or reputation as a result of errors or downtime. This obviously includes the end users but may also include less obvious people. Developers, for example, may be required to perform late-night fire drills in a failure situation. Auditors—believe it or not—have a stake in whether the software correctly enforces internal controls. And, if the failure is bad (or public) enough, top management may feel the repercussions.
From Linda Hayes's "Channeling Your Inner Salesperson" |
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| CONTENT POINTER |
Good Idea! Now What?
By Esther Derby
A good idea is a valuable asset, and a lot of good ideas can be like a treasure trove. But what do you do with those ideas? Here, Esther Derby describes an idea maker who isn't very good at following through and then suggests four important things to remember to keep your own ideas from withering on the vine.
Read "Good Idea! Now What?" |
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| BOOK REVIEW |
Agile Testing
By Lisa Crispin and Janet Gregory
Reviewed by Noreen Dertinger
Lisa Crispin and Janet Gregory have addressed many questions about testers and testing on agile projects in this book. The book covers where testers and testing managers fit in, how to transition from a traditional project to agile, how testing can be completed in short iterations, and how to overcome barriers in test automation, and other topics. One message that comes across quite clearly in this book, as well as during Web seminars that I've attended featuring Lisa Crispin, is that quality is not just the responsibility of the testers; it is the responsibility of the entire organization.
Continue reading the review of Agile Testing |
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| POWERPASS POINTER |
Conference Archive
Agile: Resetting and Restarting
By Alistair Cockburn
The Agile Manifesto—ten years in the making—was published in 2001. Now, with years of practice, the manifesto has greatly influenced the process of software development. During these years, agile practices have moved forward and continued to mature, adopting ideas from lean manufacturing and the theory of constraints to add more rigor to our work. Still, many agile projects today tend to fail because they are overly tactical and do not take the long-term view. Join Alistair Cockburn, one of the seventeen original signers of the Agile Manifesto, as he re-examines the original thinking behind the manifesto, where it has succeeded, how it has been perverted, what is happening in the agile world today, and how agile practices might evolve in the coming years.
Read "Agile: Resetting and Restarting" |
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| SOFTWARE QUALITY ENGINEERING OFFERS |
Agile Development Practices East 2010
November 14-19, 2010 | Orlando, FL
Learn the latest in agile methods, technologies, tools, and leadership principles from thought leaders who deliver inspiring keynote presentations, in-depth tutorials, and a wide range of conference classes. Network with your peers during informal gatherings and discuss your challenges with experts in agile practices.
*Register by August 27, 2010, and receive a $50 Amazon.com gift card PLUS up to $400 off!*
For more information visit www.sqe.com/adpeast |
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FEATURED WEB SEMINAR
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Scaling Agile in 7 Smooth Steps
Sponsored by Rally
Is your organization ready to scale agile from teams to projects and from programs to portfolios? Are you preparing for multiple teams to work on the same project? Prepare for a successful agile rollout by learning the seven steps that will help you smoothly scale agile across your enterprise. Join speaker Alan Atlas, certified Scrum trainer and coach and agile coach, as he goes through the steps and shares tips and tactics gleaned from his extensive experience helping companies like Amazon scale agile across multiple teams. Join us Tuesday, July 27 at 2 p.m. EDT.
Register now for Scaling Agile in 7 Smooth Steps |
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| THE AGILE EXPERIENCE |
Using Goals to Prioritize
With Kent McDonald
It's funny—not always in a humorous way--how we so often assume that people will figure out exactly how to do something if we provide them with some very cursory guidance, such as "Prioritize the product backlog so that you deliver all the high-value functionality first."
Recently, I was working with the product owner of a new contracting system. We brainstormed the features. The product owner then stared at the feature list and asked, "How should we prioritize what we do?"
I then found out how un-humorous it was when I replied, "Let's rank them by business value."
The product owner gave me a dirty look, shook her head, and sighed. "How can we tell which features provide the highest value? This system will never generate revenue, and each individual feature will not make the overall process much better. We all agree that this is a worthwhile project, but prioritizing based on business value seems a stretch."
I mulled her comments for a minute. She was right. It was very difficult to assign specific monetary value to any one of the features that we had listed. Yet, we needed some mechanism to objectively prioritize our work.
Then, it occurred to me. As part of our project governance process, we map our projects to specific business goals the projects will achieve. These goals include not only the usual suspects--cost savings and revenue generated--but also other measures that increase process performance. For our contracting system, we had established goals for how long it would take to process a contract, the number of QC reports we could reduce, and the number of contracts we would deliver electronically. Having these goals in place gave us a natural way to prioritize.
In our project planning, we had also used the Purpose Alignment Model (created by Niel Nickolaisen and described in chapter two of Stand Back and Deliver). Taking our project through this model helped us recognize that ours was a parity project. In other words, while the contracting system was mission critical, it was not something that would differentiate us in the marketplace and gain market share. (Stated differently: We would never create billboards or advertisements that touted our excellence in contracting). Because our project was to support a parity business process, the features we included in the system—and the system itself—needed to be simple and just good enough to accomplish our goals. That meant we should avoid gold-plating the system.
The combination of our project's goals and its purpose gave the product owner the perfect framework to prioritize and filter the features. The high-priority features were those that would achieve the project goals in the simplest, standardized, "parity" way. Features that did not accomplish the goals, independent of their approach, got bumped off the list. If a feature accomplished the goal but did so using creative business rules or bleeding-edge thinking or technology, the product owner asked us to find a simpler, more parity way to achieve the goals.
Using this framework, the product owner and the rest of the team were able to identify a clear tie between the features and the problem we were trying to solve. This focused us on the important features and the best way to deliver them.
* * *
Kent McDonald is coauthor, along with Pollyanna Pixton, Niel Nickolaisen, and Todd Little, of the book Stand Back and Deliver: Accelerating Business Agility published by Addison-Wesley Professional, June 2009, ISBN 0321572882, Copyright 2009 Pearson Education, Inc. http://www.informit.com/title/0321572882
Visit the Iterations Archive to find out what you may have missed in past issues. |
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| ADVERTISEMENT |
Agile Development Training Available at the Agile Development Practices East 2010 Conference
November 14-16, 2010 | Orlando, Florida
Join SQE Training at the Agile Development Practices East 2010 conference to assist teams in creating a more effective software development process and encourage personal success and self-improvement.
Choose from these courses:
ScrumMaster Certification
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Combine any of these training classes with the Agile Development Practices East 2010 conference and save $500! Click here for more information.
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iterations is an extension of StickyMinds.com and Better Software magazine—and a reminder that your "online resource for building better software" is just a click away at www.StickyMinds.com. |
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