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| SPONSORED BY: Microsoft |
 Implementing Process Improvement Got Easier
For development teams seeking to become best-in-class, the InCycle Blueprint is a comprehensive management tool for implementing ALM best practices with Visual Studio. Microsoft has collaborated with InCycle Software to make the BluePrint available for free.
Click here to learn more.
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| MEDIA SPOTLIGHT |
Navigating Conflict on Agile Teams: Why "Resolving" Conflict Won't Work
by Lyssa Adkins
On great agile teams, conflict is constant and welcomed by all as a catapult to higher performance. It is about human beings working together, day after day, in the maelstrom of constant collaboration and change. In this turbulence, how can teams chart a course through conflict and turn it into a force for greatness? Lyssa Adkins reveals a conflict model that helps you do just that, walking you through five levels of conflict from "Problem to Solve" to "World War," with each step finely tuned to view conflict in a deeply human and humane way.
Read Navigating Conflict on Agile Teams: Why "Resolving" Conflict Won't Work
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| WHAT'S HAPPENING AT TECHWELL AND STICKYMINDS.COM |
TechWell Blogs
Experts including Lisa Crispin, Steve Berczuk, and Naomi Karten have years of industry experience and are ready to share their insight and interact with you at TechWell Blogs. Join in at http://techwell.com/blogs.
@StickyMinds on Twitter
Want to get a daily dose of what's new and popular on and in Better Software magazine? Follow @StickyMinds on Twitter for regular updates about weekly columns, news, forums, newsletters, and more. |
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| AGILISM: The Plan |
The Plan
At the center of any project management approach—agile, or otherwise—is the plan: the list of tasks that your team is working on during an iteration. In addition to providing the team a focus, the plan also can help developers identify the goal of a coding episode, prioritize their work, and inform design and implementation decisions.
From Steve Berczuk's "What Are You Doing?" |
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| FROM THE DOWNLOAD CENTER |
Extend Agile Beyond Development with Jama Contour
Sponsored by Jama Software
Does everyone understand what we're building and why? Agile methodology teaches us to embrace change at any time within the development process. But how do you track those changes and keep your team and stakeholders in sync when plans evolve? Contour is the industry's most collaborative solution for requirements management and the only solution with the agile Review Center, which provides teams with a fast way to review requirements and get buy-in from stakeholders. Embrace change, collaborate, stay connected!
Try Jama Contour free for 30 days. |
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| CONTENT POINTER |
Getting to "Done"
By Brian Bozzuto
When the tasks in the "Done" column needed more attention, the team created a "Done Done" column. Later, they created a "Done Done Done" column. In this article, Brian Bozzuto discusses how you can stop adding columns and honestly get to "done" without having to kid yourself.
Read Getting to "Done" |
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| BOOK REVIEW |
Rescue the Problem Project
By Todd C. Williams
Reviewed by James A. Ward
Rescue the Problem Project by Todd C. Williams is an excellent project management book. If you are involved in managing a problem project, there is a great deal of information in this book that will prove valuable. The discussion at the end of the book on how to ensure that projects do not get into trouble in the first place makes it a good buy if you want to ensure that your project doesn't need rescuing.
Continue reading the review of Rescue the Problem Project |
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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 and 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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| SOFTWARE QUALITY ENGINEERING OFFERS |
Final Days - Combine and Save on Agile Training
November 6-8 in Orlando
Help your organization become as nimble as possible with agile training courses from SQE Training. Attend any of the following courses in conjunction with Agile Development Practices East in Orlando and Save $300: Agile Testing Practices, Certified ScrumMaster Training, Fundamentals of Agile Certification, or Product Owner Certification.
Register Now! |
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| THE AGILE EXPERIENCE |
Edit Those Epics: Stories Don't Span Iterations in Agile
By Johanna Rothman
I've been working with folks making their transition to agile. One of the hardest transitions is for the managers and technical leaders.
Managers are accustomed to working in timeboxes. To them, the iteration is a timebox. But, they also are accustomed to features spanning multiple timeboxes, and that's not OK in agile.
They are accustomed to predicting the end of the project, and they now want to use the team's velocity and the story sizes to predict the end of the project. That's OK, but it's not always wise. It assumes nothing will change, but agile is for fast change. The managers' fixed mindset is bumping up against the technical team's change mindset.
This leads me to a root cause. If you think your job is prediction, you don't change the size of the stories, and that means the stories are too big. The stories are epics.
It's fine to start with epics—very large stories. But, in order to have releasable product at the end of an iteration and to keep iterations short enough to get feedback often enough, you need small stories. That means you'll start with epics and decompose them into stories. At first, this seems impossible.
Here's one way to start. What's the first valuable thing—the smallest chunk that delivers business value to the customer, to the developers, to the testers, to someone—that we can do that we can show to someone at the end of a short iteration? Is that small thing a story? Is it small enough to be completed inside an iteration, maybe by the entire team? If so, complete that story in the iteration. If that thing is not a story, what would make it a story? If it is not small enough, can you decompose it further?
Making stories small enough to finish in a one- or two-week iteration is a common stumbling block for many teams in their transition to agile. Until a team can do that, they can't move to agile. They can't take advantage of kanban either, because their stories are too big—nothing will move across the board.
Continue Reading "Edit Those Epics."
Visit the Iterations Archive to find out what you may have missed in past issues. |
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