Show me the money - cost justification of Agile migration is a thorny issue. Agile approaches are more successful, deliver value sooner and produce better quality products, but how do we prove it? This article discusses measurements and presents results that help to justify adopting Agile methods.
An executives job is not over once they've justified agile to their teams and paid for training. To make a transition successful, its required this executive provide sustained support. Esther Derby takes a moment to describe what she believes to be the 3 most important aspects of this ongoing support.
In this interview by Floyd Marinescu, co-founder of InfoQ, Linda Rising talks about the book "Fearless Change: Patterns for Introducing New Ideas" and offers examples of how the patterns presented in the book can ease Agile adoption.
Ryan Cooper picked up Agile Adoption Patterns: A Roadmap to Organizational Success by InfoQ's own Amr Elssamadisy and gives this book a positive: This book belongs on the bookshelf on anyone who is interested in helping a traditional software organization make an effective transition to a more agile way of working.
Agile brings to organizations, among other things, small teams coupled with constant change. Navigating this effectively requires understanding what this means to Software Configuration Management practices. The July edition of CM Journal's "cm//crossroads" is dedicated to helping people meet this challenge successfully.
In February 2008, Dr. Dobb's conducted a survey on Agile adoption and the success rate of Agile software development. The survey revealed some interesting results on various parameters, including: adoption, scalability, iteration length, and team location.
In this interview taken by InfoQ's Deborah Hartmann during the Agile 2007 conference, James Shore, a prominent figure of the Agile community, talks about the book "The Art of Agile Development".
Most Scrum adopters have their first doubt in terms of its scalability. Tobias Mayer suggests that before looking into quick solutions for complex problems, adopters should focus on understanding the principles of Scrum. Once the foundation is correctly laid, Scrum will take care of scaling itself.
This recent inquiry, by InfoQ China editor Jacky Li, looked at five very different cases of Scrum adoption in China, which got different results. He asked: Why did you use Scrum? How did you adopt it? What problems did you encounter, and why did it succeed or fail? Despite the small sample size, it's an interesting comparison, pointing out that improvement doesn't ensure success.
Trying to explain the benefits of Agile Software Development to your CIO? Does your boss want some outside validation? Esther Schindler asked more than 50 developers and Agile practitioners one question: "If you could get the boss to understand one thing, just one thing, related to agile development...what would it be? Why that?".
Going agile seems a pretty trivial task. We pair up, write unit tests, integrate regularly and support our teams with an easy to manage framework such as Scrum. In reality, however, this is not the case. All too often the benefits are not achieved and team does not function as expected. Ross Petit's recent article sheds some light on why things go wrong when the rubber hits the road.
Here is a story about Agile's use in a governmental organisation: at the 2006 APLN Leadership Summit Mark Salamango and John Cunningham looked at the problems and opportunities of introducing Agile in Army environments. True Agile practices cannot be 'commanded' or 'directed’ but frequent delivery offers Agile leaders a "soft" kind of power that is, in fact, very effective.
InfoQ presents video of a panel from the APLN Leadership Summit at Agile2006, where four business leaders spoke about their experiences: Bud Phillips (Capital One Financial), Israel Ganot (BMC Software), Steven Ambrose (DTE Energy), Peter George (Cronos Inc.). Topics included top-down vs. bottom-up adoption, making the leap of faith to enterprise adoption and the value of the PMO.
The PM of the Eclipse Process Framework project explained in this presentation how IBM's Eclipse-based process tools allow teams to select the practices they want, to create a customised methodology that works for them. With a wiki and hooks to insert custom in-house documentation and practices, it provides a framework to configure the approach you want, or to grow into the approach you need.
In this amusing presentation from Agile2006, Jean Tabaka compares impediments and obstacles encountered by an Agile mentor with those detailed in Homer's classic. In this 73 minutes presentation, discover who plays which classical roles in Agile adoption: Cyclops, the Sirens, Poseidon, Circe, Cicones, the Lotus-Eaters, and even the good-and-faithful dog Argus.