Recently, while visiting a client site, I was excited to see a large breakout room labeled “Agile Room”.  You can only imagine my surprise when I walked in the door.  I saw a series of cubicles.  I saw people working very quietly and independently.  I saw a scantly populated dusty board with only a few sticky notes and one single column labeled “Done”.  When I asked about the naming of the room, they replied,   “Oh, well, we just call ourselves ‘agile’ because we... [More]

Last year, Alan Brown, Scott Ambler and I collaborated on a technical paper that captures IBM Rational's experience in achieving agility in large scale enterprises. This paper was recently accepted for publication at the International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE). We will present and officially publish this paper in May 2013 in the proceedings. Below is an abstract for the paper. The full (draft) version can be accessed  here. We are still editing and finalizing for publication but it is close to camera ready. ... [More]

Tags:  economic first process software governance accelerating development steering measured disciplined improvement delivery integration leadership agile

IBM is hosting the “Open Cloud Summit” on Sunday, March 3rd at the IBM Pulse Conference. Through a series of interactive discussions, the event will broaden the importance of supporting, adopting and participating in cloud related open standards and open source software. You will hear from leaders from The Open Stack Foundation, Cloud Standards Customer Council, OASIS as well as other leaders to discuss the direction standards are taking to increase interoperability and portability across the Cloud and how you can influence the standards. The... [More]

In this blog post , I would like to share some practical experiences gained over past couple of years in Implementing Agile in our team. I intend to write this as a multi part series with each one walking through a different adoption phase for a set of practices we felt were important to implement at particular point in time. I would also like to share on what worked well for us and some pitfalls to avoid . Part 1 : The beginnings Part 2 : Agile Planning And Tracking

Tags:  agile rtc scrum

Virtual Roundtable Discussion: "Realizing agility with discipline: Addressing the needs of agile adoption in a government environment" You are invited to participate in a virtual roundtable on Agility in Government. This is a follow on discussion to IBM's webcast on "Realizing agility with discipline: Addressing the needs of agile adoption in a government." Many agencies are adopting, or want to adopt Agile practices to drive faster delivery, higher quality, and improved collaboration. Government agencies spend billions... [More]

Tags:  government virtual-roundtable agile hazel-woodcock

OK, so you and the rest of your team members have decided you want to “try agile” on your next big project.  Maybe you’re getting pressured by management to do something (anything) different to get things out the door quicker or to improve your project success rate, and they think agile is just the thing you (and they) need. Maybe some of your team members have used it on prior projects, in prior lives. Or maybe you’ve been reading about all the benefits others have been reaping and have decided you’re ready... [More]

Tags:  global sparacin agile distributed team

Today, Agile practices are being adopted in virtually every industry to deliver softrware-driven innovation from mobile applications to safety-critical medical devices.   Leveraging Agile provides organizations with a competitive edge, allowing these organizations to deliver working products faster and with higher quality.   The IT Symposium is designed to appeal to both IT managers and their Agile team members, experts will cover the spectrum of the Agile journey, including tips for successful Agile adoption, techniques for... [More]

Tags:  governance skills software agile innovation continuous-delivery it-symposium adoption scaling event

Continuous Integration (CI) Practice and Challenges, Part 1 Today, CI is given more attention than ever,because it is becoming more and more complex to use. Large projects involvehundreds of developers working together on a huge volume of components. As aproject scales up in size and complexity, it becomes harder and longer tointegrates all pieces together. The effort required for integrating asystem increases exponentially over time and without a Disciplined Agile Delivery (DAD), CI adoption might fail.Taking a CI approach to software... [More]

Tags:  dad continuous-integration practices ci process agile challenges

Early on, when I first started coaching teams on their transition to Agile, it was quite common for teams to come to me and tell me that they hadn't completed any User Stories by the end of an iteration. Initially, teams wanted to use this as a reason to increase the length of their iterations (I recommend two-week iterations – and teams always seem to want longer iterations). What they were failing to realize is that there were fundamental reasons why they weren't completing stories, and iteration length by and large had nothing... [More]

Tags:  stories practices whole-teams user-story agile team iteration

Agile development is often deemed best for projects having variable scope with prioritized backlog, low number of critical dependencies on other applications, limited or no regulatory requirements, subject matter experts availability, technology, teams level of experience with Agile. When any of these boxes are not ticked, teams often find it challenging and difficult to use Agile development and move over to other traditional development methods like waterfall. My thoughts in this blog are based on experiences and best practices which have... [More]

Tags:  complex-projects agile-development agile-planning planning agile

The use of agile techniques for executing software projects continues to grow. However, acceptance isn't universal yet. There are still organizations that haven't switched from their more traditional, waterfall approach and are reluctant to do so. This post will look at the situation from the perspective of an external consultant experienced in agile (me) and my observations working with organizations that haven't made the jump to agile yet. There have been a number of surveys on barriers to agile adoption. One consistent theme is... [More]

BAs, product owners, Agile team...be at this session tomorrow (Tuesday: RDM track) and get to know more about the BAs agile practices. Unfortunately I will not be there but Kevin Brennan and Jared Pulham will take you through the journey of a BA in an agile world. Please provide your comments too after attending the session.  Cherifa....   The International Institute for Business Analysis’s (IIBA) Body of Knowledge (BABOK) framework is today the foundational standard for business analysts (BA). It provides a clear description of... [More]

When I first heard about collaboration for development teams it seemed to have very soft benefits, and was hard to quantify.  But I've been thinking about it in the context of lean, and realised collaboration is critical to improving a development process - and collaborative tools may well be the key to unlocking that improvement. When you think about software development in terms of a lean process, then an average team will have a process efficiency of about 20% ( i.e. only 20% of the time taken to deliver a feature is spent on useful... [More]

Tags:  lean agile rational

Realize Your Agile Potential at Innovate 2013 – Go, Grow and Scale! For those that are coming to Innovate this will serve as an insider’s guide to get the most out of your week in Orlando.  For those that haven’t registered, this is what you’ll be missing! We’re finalizing the curriculum, the Solution Center and all the other activities that will make this year’s agile experience at Innovate the best yet!     Amazing speakers and curriculum Innovate 2013 will feature two development... [More]

Tags:  innovate2013 agile ibmagile