Agility@Scale: Strategies for Scaling Agile Software Development
Agile Stakeholders at Scale
ScottAmbler
Tags: 
agility-at-scale
outside-in-development
xp
modeling
scrum
disciplined-agile-deliver...
agileadopt
amdd
analysis
agile
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The popular Agile literature can often seam naive when it comes to how Agilists work with project stakeholders:- Extreme Programming (XP) has a practice called On-Site Customer where one or more people work closely with your team to provide information and to make decisions in a timely manner.- Scrum has the role of Product Owner who is the one single person that the development team goes to for decisions about requirements. - Agile Modeling (AM) has the practice of Active Stakeholder Participation which extends On-Site Customer to get the stakeholder(s) actively involved with the modeling effort through the use of inclusive tools and techniques.
These are great strategies for small, co-located teams doing straightforward development, but they quickly fall apart at scale. This occurs for several reasons:1. Stakeholders are a diverse group. Your stakeholders include end users, business management, project funders, enterprise architects, operations staff, support staff, other system development teams, and many others. Different people have different, and often contradictory, requirements and they certainly have different priorities. It's questionable whether a single person, or a handful of persons, can adequately represent this diverse group.2. One person becomes a bottleneck. Even with a small co-located team this is a problem, let alone one that is geographically distributed or one that is very large. There's no way that a single person can be available 24/7 in a responsive manner to support distributed teams.3. It's a difficult role. The Product Owner/Customer (POC) is responsible for representing the business to the development team. They're making important decisions on a regular basis, decisions which they'll be held accountable for.4. One person becomes a serious project risk. Not only is it questionable whether a single person can fairly represent all stakeholders, even if they could what happens if you lose that person? They effectively become a single point of failure for your team. To scale this role, consider the following strategies:1. Recognize the true scope of the POC role. Not only are they stakeholder proxies they also are a development team representative to the stakeholder community as a whole. As stakeholder proxies they'll make decisions and prioritize the work, they'll run requirements elicitation sessions, they'll negotiate priorities, and they'll put the development team in contact with stakeholders who have expertise in specific aspects of the domain. As team representatives they'll often demo the current version of the system to other stakeholders, communicate the status of the project to people, and respond to various requests for information from the stakeholders.2. Have multiple people in it. A single POC works well for small, co-located teams developing simple software. At scale you'll soon discover that you need multiple people in this role so that they don't become a bottleneck. For distributed teams it's common to see each subteam have one or more POCs who are managed by a primary/chief POC. The primary POC typically works on the coordinating team with the chief architect (I'll talk about this role in a future blog posting) and the program manager (also a topic for a future blog posting).3. Train them in business analysis skills. The person(s) in the POC role need good business analysis skills. If fact, it's common for people who were formerly BAs for traditional teams to step into the POC role, particularly with BAs who originally come from the business side of your organization. This strategy has its advantages and disadvantages. As a BA they've likely got solid business knowledge but their instincts may motivate them to take a documentation-driven approach to providing information to the development team instead of a collaboration-based approach. Be careful.4. Consider the full system development lifecycle. There's far more to the POC role than supporting the development team during Construction iterations. During "Iteration 0", the Inception phase for an Agile RUP project or the warm-up phase for an Eclipse Way project, the POC(s) will often lead the initial requirements envisioning efforts. The product backlog, or better yet your work item list, needs to come from somewhere after all. During the release iteration(s), the Transition phase for RUP or the End-Game phase for Eclipse Way, the POC(s) will focus on communicating the upcoming release to the stakeholder community, will be actively involved with any final user acceptance testing (UAT), and may even be involved with training end users. In my January 2008 column in Dr Dobb's Journal, posted at http://www.ddj.com/architect/204801134 , I provide detailed advice about how to scale the way that you work with stakeholders on Agile projects by applying the practices of Agile Model Driven Development (AMDD). There's no magic solution, you just need to choose to organize yourself effectively. The good news is that you can easily work with stakeholders at scale.[Read More] |
Agility at Scale at Rational Software Conference
And now, a brief message from our sponsor. ;-)
Just wanted to let you know that Agility@Scale will be a major theme at this year's IBM Rational Software Conference being held in Orlando May 31 through to June 4. I'll be giving two presentations, Agility at Scale: Mitigating the Percieved Risks of Agile Adoption and Distributed Agile Software Development: Best Practices, facilitating a panel entitled Experience Reports from the Agile Trenches: What's Really Working, What's Not Working, and Why, and running a half-day workshop entitled Become as Agile as You Need to Be: Scaling Agile Software Development to Meet Your Real-World Situation. As usual, it will be a busy conference for me. ;-) There are of course other sessions and workshops specific to agile topics. Some highlights include:
Of course there's a lot more going on at the conference when it comes to scaling agile software development than just these sessions, but I thought I'd give you a feel for what's going on. Hope to see you at the conference. There's a "March Madness" sale going on right now at the registration page where if you purchase one pass you get the second for half price. Further reading:
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Agility at Scale Poster Now Available
I'm happy to announce Rational's Agility at Scale poster which is currently available free of charge from the Rational poster order page.
Although I'm obviously biased as I was involved with its creation, the poster includes some really good information about how to scale agile software development practices effectively. It summarizes the scaling factors, such as large teams, distribution, regulatory compliance, application complexity, and so on that you should be concerned with. It also presents a full agile software development lifecycle that goes beyond the construction focused lifecycles of common "agile in the small" processes. It also summarizes the practices of lean development governance, giving you some insight into how to govern your IT environment more effectively. I think it's a pretty good poster that's worth checking out. It's free, so it's hard to argue with the price. Most importantly, it would look pretty good hanging on your office wall. [Read More] |
Agility at Scale: Become as Agile as You Can Be
I recently wrote an "e-book" for Internet Evolution overviewing agile software development at scale. The goal of the Agility at Scale: Become as Agile as You Can Be ebook is to get people thinking outside of the box a bit when it comes to agile development strategies and see that they really are ready for primetime.
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Agility@Scale whiteboard video
I recently did the voice over for our Rational.Everyware Agility@Scale whiteboard video, which is a bit less than 4 minutes in length. As I narrate a whiteboard sketch evolves, sometimes using sticky-notes and index cards, to help explain what I'm talking about.
In the video, I describe:
So, it's basically a cool marketing video for a bunch of free stuff. |
Answering Questions about Disciplined Agile DeliveryOn April 25, 2013 I gave a webcast for the Global Rational User Community entitled Disciplined Agile Delivery: Going beyond Scrum . During the webcast a large number of questions were asked but unfortunately I couldn’t get to all of them. So I’ve taken the opportunity to write up the answers in this blog posting.
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Are You Ready to be Certified in Disciplined Agile?
The Disciplined Agile Consortium recently launched a certification programme for practitioners of Disciplined Agile Delivery (DAD). There are three practitioner certifications:
Differentiate yourself in the marketplace. Certification in Disciplined Agile Delivery (DAD) means something to clients and employers because it needs to be earned. Certification in DAD tells the marketplace you understand how to deliver an agile solution from end-to-end with experience in enterprise-class development. As an aside, the Disciplined Agile Consortium is proud to have IBM Rational's Richard Knaster and Carson Holmes the president of the Global Rational User Group (GRUG) on our board of advisors. For more information about DAD, see the IBM Press book Disciplined Agile Delivery for more details as well as numerous postings on this blog.
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Bureaucracy Isn't Discipline
ScottAmbler
Tags: 
culture
disciplined-agile-deliver...
antipattern
agileadopt
repeatability
7 Comments
16,679 Views
Again and again I've seen IT organizations suffering from what I call the "Bureaucracy is Discipline" antipattern. For example, filling out forms and reviewing documents are both bureaucratic activities, neither of which require significant skill nor discipline to accomplish. However, agile practices such as developing potentially shippable software every iteration is easy to say but requires great discipline to accomplish. Respecting the decisions of your stakeholders, particularly those pertaining to requirements prioritization, is easy to talk about but proves to require great discipline in practice (particularly when you don't agree with a decision). It's easy to talk about taking a test-driven approach to development, but in practice it requires significant skill and discipline to actually do.
A "process smell" which indicates that your organization is suffering from this antipattern is a focus on following repeatable processes instead of focusing on repeatable results. An example of repeatable processes is following the same route to work every day regardless of driving conditions. An example of repeatable results is getting to work on time every day, but being willing to change your route as required, bicycling into work instead of driving, taking public transit, and so on. Nobody really cares how you get to work each day (the process), what they really care about is that you got to work on time (the result). Sadly, we've been told for decades now that repeatable processes are critical to our success in IT, yet when you step back and think about that's really a reflection of a bureaucratic approach. On the other hand, a focus on repeatable results is a reflection of a more disciplined approach. Interestingly, the DDJ 2008 Process Framework survey found that given the choice that people would much rather have repeatable results over repeatable processes when it comes to IT. Mistaking bureaucracy for discipline, or rigour if you prefer that term, is a reflection of the cultural damage that has occurred over the years in IT organizations as the result of traditional philosophies and techniques. Unfortunately, this mistaken belief is a significant inhibitor to software process improvement (SPI) efforts, in particular agile adoption efforts, which must be addressed if you're to be successful. Overcoming this challenge will require a significant cultural shift in some organizations, and many people (particularly the bureaucrats) will find this uncomfortable. Further reading:
I'd like to leave you with this parting thought: Bureaucracy is bureaucracy and discipline is discipline, please don't confuse the two.[Read More] |
Challenges in Scaling Agile Development
Timo Tenhunen has recently published his master's thesis, Challenges in Scaling Agile Software Development , and has been kind enough to make it available online. I suspect you'll find it to be an interesting read.
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Collaborative DevOps
I recently recorded an audio podcast about Collaborative Development and Operations (DevOps) and how it relates to Disciplined Agile Delivery (DAD). The podcast is 17 minutes long and covers a range of topics including:
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Context Counts - Choose the right tools for the job
For some reason, it seems as if everyone's grandfather at one point in time recommended to use the right tools for the job. That's practical wisdom from my point of view, one that is certainly an issue for agile development.
One of the primary messages, I hope, of the Agile Scaling Model (ASM) is that context counts. Although the focus of the ASM is on describing a contextual framework for tailoring your process to meet the needs of the situation that you find yourself in, it's also applicable to your tooling selection. For example, the tool choices of a co-located team will be much different than that of a geographically distributed team. A co-located team will likely use a whiteboard or paper for their agile modeling efforts, whereas distributed team members may need to capture their diagrams using a more sophisticated tool such as Rational Requirements Composer (RRC) so that their work can be shared electronically. Having said that, RRC would be overkill for a co-located team (unless they had regulatory compliance issues). Different teams, different situations, therefore different tooling choices. One of the concerns that I run into from customers is that some of our legacy products don't support agile very well. Once again, it's a matter of context because many of our legacy products reflect the realities faced by more traditional teams. The challenge occurs when you try to take a legacy product which is well suited for traditional development, such as Rational ClearCase, and try to apply it on agile projects. Although ClearCase makes sense in certain scaling situations, particularly very large teams that are geographically distributed, you'd be better advised to use something like Rational Team Concert (RTC) for configuration management on most agile teams (note that RTC does far more than just SCM). So, if you're taking an agile approach you should consider Rational tools such as RTC, RRC, Rational BuildForge, Rational AppScan, and others which support agile development. Granted, some you would only use at scale -- for example Buildforge is a good option in really complex environments, but if you don't face that complexity then you'll likely find that RTC's build engine is sufficient. Similarly, if you're taking a traditional approach to development then you'll likely consider products such as ClearCase, Appscan, RTC, and Rational Software Architect (RSA) instead. Different situations, different tooling choices. What's even more confusing is that some products support a range of process paradigms. For example, RTC supports agile, lean, iterative, and traditional approaches to development. The same can be said of Appscan and several other products. Notice how I listed RTC and Appscan for both agile and traditional development above. So, if anyone tells you that Rational tools don't support agile development don't believe them. Ask them which tools that they're talking about, and ask them if they're aware of the Rational products that do support agile development. Context counts. |
Criteria for a Disciplined Agile Team
ScottAmbler
Tags: 
disciplined-agile-deliver...
spi
agileadopt
criteria
governance
5 Comments
14,460 Views
Although it might not be obvious, and important success factor in adopting agile techniques is to be able to determine whether a team is agile or not. The challenge that many organizations face is that many teams will claim to be agile, yet management, who often has little or no experience with agile approaches, cannot tell which claims are true and which are over zealous (I'm being polite). The following are the criteria that I suggest you look for in a disciplined agile team:1. Produce working software on a regular basis. This is one of the 12 principles behind the Agile Manifesto, and in my experience is a critical differentiator between the teams that are agile and those that are merely claiming it. Ideally the team should produce potentially shippable software each iteration. That doesn't mean that they'll deploy the system into production, or the marketplace, each iteration but they could if required to do so. Typically the team will deploy into a pre-production testing environment or a demo enviroment at the end of each iteration (or more often for that matter).2. Do continuous regression testing, and better yet take a Test-Driven Development (TDD) approach. Agile developers test their work to the best of their ability, minimally doing developer regression testing via a continuous integration (CI) strategy and better yet do developer-level TDD. This approach enables development teams to find defects early, thereby reducing the average cost of addressing the defects, it also helps them to deliver higher quality code and to move forward safely when adding or changing functionality.3. Work closely with their stakeholders, ideally on a daily basis. A common practice of agile teams is to have an on-site customer or product owner who prioritizes requirements and provides information on a timely manner to the team. Disciplined agile teams take it one step further and follow the practice active stakeholder participation where the stakeholders get actively involved with modeling and sometimes even development.4. Are self-organizing within a governance framework. Agile teams are self-organizing, which means that the people doing the work determines how the work will be done, they're not told by a manager who may not even be directly involved with the work how it will be done. In other words the team does its own planning, including scheduling and estimation. Disciplined agile teams are self governing within an effective governance framework.5. Regularly reflect on how they work together and then act to improve on their findings. Most agile teams hold a short meeting at the end of each iteration to reflect upon how well things are working and how they could potentially improve the way that they are working together. Sometimes this is done in a more formalized manner in the form of a retrospective, but often it's done informally. The team then acts on one or more of their suggested improvements the next iteration. Disciplined agile teams take this one step further and measure their software process improvement (SPI) progress over time: the act of taking these measures, perhaps via a product such as Rational Self Check, helps to keep the team on track in their SPI efforts.
I have yet to discover an ad-hoc development team which met all five criteria, and most of them rarely meet two or three. Further reading:
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Defining Disciplined Agile Software Development
When adopting agile software development techniques across a large number of teams within your organization it is important to provide a definition for what agile software development is, in addition to criteria for what it means to be agile. Many people will point to the four values of the Agile Manifesto and claim that's a good definition. Well... it might be a good definition for the visionaries and early adopters among us, but for people on the right-hand side of the technology adoption chasm (the early majority, late majority and the laggards) this isn't enough. Don't get me wrong, I'm a firm believer in the agile values but I like to cast them as philosophies instead of as a definition.
At IBM Software Group, the definition of disciplined agile software delivery which we have been sharing with our customers is:Disciplined agile software delivery is an evolutionary (iterative and incremental) approach to delivery which regularly produces high quality software in a cost effective and timely manner. It is performed in a highly collaborative and self-organizing manner, with active stakeholder participation to ensure that the team understand and addresses the changing needs of its stakeholders. Disciplined agile delivery teams provide repeatable results by adopting just the right amount of ceremony for the situation which they face. I think that this is a pretty good definition, although I have no doubt that we'll evolve it over time. I also suspect that the agile community will never settle on a common definition for what agile is and more than likely are smart enough not to even try. ;-) Further reading:
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Disciplined Agile Delivery
At IBM Rational we define disciplined agile delivery as:
Disciplined agile delivery is an evolutionary (iterative and incremental) approach which regularly produces high quality solutions in a cost effective and timely manner via a risk and value driven life cycle. It is performed in a highly collaborative, disciplined, and self-organizing manner within an appropriate governance framework, with active stakeholder participation to ensure that the team understands and addresses the changing needs of its stakeholders to maximize business value provided. Disciplined agile delivery teams provide repeatable results by adopting just the right amount of ceremony for the situation which they face. Let’s explore the key points in this definition:
Suggested reading:
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Disciplined Agile Delivery (DAD) Lifecycles
ScottAmbler
Tags: 
agileadopt
scrum
disciplined-agile-deliver...
discipline
dad
lifecycle
25 Comments
59,933 Views
This blog posting has been replaced by the more detailed article: Full Agile Delivery Lifecycles. Thank you for your patience.
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Disciplined Agile Delivery and DevOps
The basic idea behind DevOps is that your development strategy and operations strategy should reflect one another, that you should strive to optimize the whole IT process. This implies that development teams should work closely with your operations staff to deliver new releases smoothly into production and that your operations staff should work closely with development teams to streamline critical production issues.
DevOps has its source in agile software development, and it is an explicit aspect of the Disciplined Agile Delivery (DAD) process framework. As a result there is a collection of agile development strategies which enable effective DevOps throughout the agile delivery lifecycle. These strategies include:
There’s more to it though than simply adopting some good practices. Your process must also embrace several supporting philosophies. The Disciplined Agile Delivery (DAD) process framework not only adopts the practices listed above, and more, but it also promotes several philosophies which enable DevOps:
For more detail about this topic, I think that you will find the article I wrote for the December 2011 issue of Cutter IT Journal entitled “Disciplined Agile Delivery and Collaborative DevOps” to be of value. |
Disciplined Agile Delivery: An Introduction white paper
My new white paper, Disciplined Agile Delivery: An Introduction, is now available free of charge from IBM.com. The paper overviews the Disciplined Agile Delivery (DAD) process framework, a hybrid comprised of strategies from Scrum, XP, Agile Modeling, and other agile methods which is people first, learning oriented, and enterprise aware. DAD is the basis from which you can scale agile.
Topics covered:
I hope you enjoy this whitepaper. Stay tuned for more information about DAD in the coming months. Also, the Disciplined Agile Delivery website is now up.
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Eliminating Waste Depends on ContextOn Twitter one of the people that I follow recently tweeted in jest "I am waste". He had been tweeting about the problem that people will often pay consultants for their advice yet will not follow that advice once it's been provided (yet will often still keep paying for more advice). Perhaps in this situation his efforts were a waste, or perhaps the real issue was that the customer had a long learning process and hadn't yet come to the point where they were willing to act on the advice, we may never know. But I have to think that there are other situations where this person isn't a waste, regardless of his claims. This got me thinking that something is a waste in one context yet in another context may be quite valuable. Or, as the old saying goes, one man's trash is another man's treasure. For example, consider the following simple value stream: [Activity A: 10 min] [Wait time: 20 min] [Activity B: 10 min] Without considering the context, the wait time of 20 min represents 50% waste in the overall process that we should try to eliminate. What if that wait time provides people with a much needed rest? With time to contemplate? With time to destress? Eliminating that wait time, or even reducing it, could result a degradation of performance. In this case, one person's waste (the wait time) is another person's treasure (rest time). The implication is that we need to work closely with the people intimately involved in a process if we're to help them to improve it. Context counts. |
Examining Acceleration
ScottAmbler
Tags: 
velocity
governance
acceleration
agileexec
agile
metrics
2 Comments
12,747 Views
I've been getting a lot of questions lately about applying the acceleration metric in practice. So, here's some answers to frequently asked questions:
1. How do I monetize acceleration? This is fairly straightforward to do. For example, assume your acceleration is 0.007 (0.7%), there are five people on the team, your annual burdened cost per person is $150,000, and you have two week iterations. All these numbers are made up, but you know how to calculate acceleration now and IT management had darn well better know the average burdened cost (salary plus overhead) of their staff. So, per iteration the average burdened cost per person must be $150,000/26 = $5,770. Productivity improvement per iteration for this team must be $5,770 * 5 * .007 = $202. If the acceleration stayed constant at 0.7% the overall productivity improvement for the year would be (1.007)^26 (assuming the team works all 52 weeks of the year) which would be 1.198 or 19.8%. This would be a savings of $148,500 (pretty much the equivalent of one new person). Of course a 20% productivity increase over an entire year is a really aggressive improvement, regardless of some of the claims made by the agile snake oil salesman out there, although at 10-15% increase is a reasonable expectation. What I'd really want to do is calculate the acceleration for the year by comparing the velocity from the beginning of the year to the end of the year (in Western cultures I'd want to avoid comparing iterations near to the holidays). So, if the team velocity the first week of February 2008 was 20 points, now the same team's velocity the first week of February 2009 was 23 points, that's an acceleration of (23-20)/20 = 15% over a one year period, for a savings of $112,500. 2. Is acceleration really unitless? For the sake of comparison it is. The "units" are % change in points per iteration, or % change in points per time period depending on the way that you want to look at it. Because it's a percentage I can easily monetize it, as you see above, and use it as a basis of comparison. 3. How do I convince teams to share their data? This can be difficult. Because acceleration is easy to calculate for agile teams, and because it's easy to use to compare teams (my team has .7% acceleration whereas other teams down the hall from mine have accelerations of .3% and -.2% of teams), people are concerned that this metric will be used against them. OK, to be fair, my team might be OK with this. ;-) Seriously though, this is a valid fear that will only be addressed by an effective governance program based on enablement, collaboration, and trust instead of the traditional command-and-control approach. Management's track record regarding how they've used measurements in the past, and how they've governed in general, have a great effect on people's willingness to trust them with new metrics such as acceleration. The implication is that you need to build up trust, something that could take years if it's possible at all. 4. Why does this work for agile teams? Agile teams are self organizing, and an implication of that is that they will be held accountable for their estimates. Because of this accountability, and because velocity is a vital input into their planning and estimation efforts, agile teams are motivated to calculate their velocity accurately and to track it over time. Because they're eager to get their velocity right, and because acceleration is based on velocity, there's an exceptionally good chance that it's accurate. 5. What about function points or similar productivity measures? Function points can be calculated for projects being developed via an agile approach, or other approaches for that matter, but it's a very expensive endeavor compared to calculating acceleration (which is essentially free) and likely will be seen as a bureaucratic overhead by the development team. My rule of thumb is that if you're not being explicitly paid to count function points (for example the US DoD will often pay contracting companies to create estimates based on function point counts) then I wouldn't bother with them. 6. What about calculating acceleration for iterative project teams? Iterative project teams, perhaps following Rational Unified Process (RUP), can choose to calculate and track their velocity and thereby their acceleration. The key is to allow the team to be self organizing and accountable for their estimates, which in turn motivates them to get their velocity right just like agile teams (RUP can be as agile as you want to make it, don't let anyone tell you differently). 7. What about calculating acceleration for traditional project teams? In theory this should work, in practice it is incredibly unlikely. Traditional teams don't work in iterations where working software is produced on a regular basis, they're typically not self organizing, and therefore there really isn't any motivate to calculate velocity (even if they do, there is little motivation to get it right). Without knowing the velocity you can't calculate acceleration. If you can't trust the velocity estimate, and I certainly wouldn't trust a traditional team's velocity estimate, then you can't trust your acceleration calculation. So, my fall back position to calculate productivity improvement would be to do something like function point counting (which is expensive and difficult to compare between teams due to different fudge factors used by different FP counters) and then looking at change in FPs delivered over time. 8. How can I apply this across a department? It is fairly straightforward to roll up the acceleration of project teams into an overall acceleration measure for a portfolio of teams simply by taking a weighted average based on team size. However, this is only applicable to teams that are in a position to report an accurate acceleration (the agile and iterative teams) and of course are willing to do so. 9. What does a negative acceleration tell me? If the acceleration is negative then productivity on the team is going down, likely an indicator of quality and/or team work problems. However, you don't want to manage by the numbers so you should talk to the team to see what's actually going on. 10. What does a zero acceleration tell me? This is an indication that the team's productivity is not increasing, and that perhaps they should consider doing retrospectives at the end of each iteration and then acting on the results from those retrospectives. Better yet they can "dial up" their process improvement efforts by adopting something along the lines of IBM Rational Self Check. Further reading:
[Read More] |
Free Agile/Jazz Seminar in Milwaukee on January 29, 2009
As part of the Agile/Jazz event In Milwaukee on the 29th I'll be giving a talk about the realities of agile software development. The URL for the event is http://www.iconatg.com/lp/events/jazz/jazz_milwaukee.html and I hope to see you there.
- Scott[Read More] |