Is Scrum and/or SAFe the Framework you want to go for? Are you in Systems Engineering with HW, FW and SW Teams and need to maintain a rolling lookahead plan with lots of dependencies ? Are your Teams distributed all over the world? If you can answer some of the questions with YES I highly recommend you to give the brand new Rational Team Concert  Timebox Planning Widget V2.8.7  with  SAFe  support a chance. It fully supports  SAFe  on the Levels  Value Stream ,  Program  and  Team Of course we... [More]

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About two years ago, we started the Learning Circles initiative to provide simple and structured educational material on some IBM Rational products. There are now 11 published Learning Circles that you can leverage for your own enablement, or for self-paced training in your organization. To align the material with latest product releases, the CLM and the RTC Learning Circles have been recently updated. They now include specific material on CLM 5.0 (and even 5.0.2 for RTC). Earlier this year, we also worked with Scaled Agile Inc. to update... [More]

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A few weeks ago during an agile adoption seminar with a program manager considering using agile, I was asked to evaluate approaches to scaling agile practices to support adoption by a large program for their enterprise.  This program had already adopted some basic agile practices (such as daily meetings, stories and Scrum) but felt they weren’t getting the benefits that other, smaller teams, got from “going agile”. At first I thought this would be an easy exercise, given over the years I have had to assist several large... [More]

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This week, we have released Rational Team Concert 5.0.1 with new features to improve support for agile teams who are using Scrum and Kanban. Among other things, this new RTC version provides enhancements for planning, reporting, usability, traceability, and performance. It also includes a “hidden” capability, the “ Quick Planner Technical Preview ”. Those who are familiar with the cloud offering  IBM DevOps Services  may already know the Quick Planner. A similar capability is now available as... [More]

Tags:  quickplanner agile clm rtc 501 scrum kanban

Evaluating Different Scaled Agile Approaches In evaluating a process we often look at the following Understand the Process: o      What are the Principles, Activities, Roles, Practices, and Deliverables? o      Determining how well each approach span the three levels of development? o      Does the process meet the organizations needs, the needs of the team, and the individuals involved While each approach has slightly different principles, most adhere to the core... [More]

Tags:  approach relationships scrum project waterfall development rup devops tips agile change agile-adoption culture up customer traditional hybrid rational ibmstory communication management

More and more businesses are attempting to adopt agile across their whole IT portfolio.  From maintenance to small projects to large enterprise programs, these organizations want to take advantages of the speed and quality improvements seen by many agile teams. However as an Agile Coach, I often hear questions such as: We need to increase our time to market to stay competitive. However, our organization and culture is heavily based on a waterfall SDLC so how do we make sure our agile teams are successful in the interim?” How can we... [More]

Tags:  relationships agile-adoption management scaled-agile-framework tips #agile agile change disciplined-agile-deliver... hybrid communication waterfall project approach discipline​d-agile-de​liv... scrum customer traditional culture development scaled-agi​le-framewo​rk devops ibmstory

In a recent post, see here , I summarized four of the key DevOps principles, namely:  Automate as much of the deployment pipeline as feasible Develop and test against a production-like system Deploy frequently Continuously validate operational quality characteristics Programs and projects adopting continuous delivery practices must create software in such a way that the software can be released to production at any time.                              ... [More]

Tags:  team practices scrum ibmrationa​l bluemix software developmen​t rational-t​eam-concer​t scaled-agi​le-framewo​rk ibminnovat​e agile_tran​sformation cloud agile-alm-​study-grp story agile-plan​ning process #agile saas rational dad lean softlayer governance rtc agile-deve​lopment enterprise agile ids agile-alm-​template alm agile-safe scaling enablement how-to clm discipline​d-agile-de​liv... scale continuous​-integrati​on ibm agile-alm tip continuous​-delivery ibmstory adoption testing ibmagile devops safe event

DevOps in Practice – Best Practices for Adopting Continuous Delivery In many respects, delivering software updates the last mile to production is often one of the biggest challenges. Product development has worked with the business on defining a innovative product, the architects have architected a first-rate technical solution, the team is designing a great mobile app and the solution has passed the testing suite ensuring quality. However, releasing it to product is often the most difficult and dangerous part  of the process. The... [More]

Tags:  dad agile iterations ibmagile deploy devops ibmstory development it safe scrum waterfall quality

During the Innovate conference earlier this month in Orlando, we delivered a 3-hour workshop on how to use Rational Team Concert with Scrum in agile projects. If you have not been able to travel to Florida, you can access the workshop material and do it on your own. To complete the hands-on exercise, you will access to an RTC environment. Workbooks and instructions are provided here:  http://bit.ly/Innovate1063 (File 1_AgileALM_Tutorial_SetupGuide.pdf describes how to set up and configure an RTC environment for the workshop)   For... [More]

Tags:  rtc agile-alm agile agile-alm-template workshop scrum