Mini-Waterfall Smells – How agile are you Really?

More and more companies are adopting agile development practices (or are trying to).  Instead of delivering software once a year, more companies are now able to deliver every quarter.  More projects are working from a product backlog instead of massive requirements documents.  An increased number of developers are practicing TDD.   However, achieving true agility on a [...]

“Shout-out” Shoebox – Boosting Team Morale

I mentioned this idea at the agile conference and have had several emails about it over the last week asking for the details of how this works.  So, I thought it would just be easiest to post it here.
Celebrating accomplishments is something I am pretty passionate about on teams.  On a recent project, we implemented [...]

Why is Self-organizing so hard?

I was talking with a former co-worker last night who is working on a team that is struggling to adopt Scrum.  It appears that one of their biggest road-blocks is the teams’ inability to self-organize.  As soon as the sprint planning meeting is over, the team kinda waits around for someone to tell them what [...]

“Tests” to Determine how Agile you are

I just finished reading “Making Agility Stick:  What’s Working, What’s Not” from the Cutter Consortium(http://www.cutter.com/offers/makingagilitystick.html).  It starts with an article called “On the Stickiness of Agility in Software Development” by Laurie Williams.  There were 3 “tests” from Scott Ambler to determine if a company is truly agile or not:

 Do you have an automated test suite, [...]

Agile 2007 conference review

I spent all of last week in DC at the Agile2007 conference.  All in all, it was a great week and I learned a lot.  There is definitely some room for improvement next year in terms of the schedule, hotel layout, and organization.  However, for the most part, the speakers I listened to were excellent and [...]