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

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

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

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

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]

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 disciplined measured improvement delivery integration leadership agile

  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]

The trends in changing executable software baselines and particularly the cost-of-change trends are the true measure of the agility. Agility means changing easily so we need to quantify change trends. Both architectural integrity and process effectiveness will drive the cost-of-change. Therefore, agility is NOT just a process attribute, it is equally, if not more, an attribute of good design. In the past, it has always struck me that most of the value of modeling was attributed to better representation of the architecture, namely more accurate,... [More]

The Rational user experience team is looking for participants who play any role in an agile team for a 45-60 minute interview. No experience with Rational products is required.    Serious inquiries only, please. We will present an honorarium to selected interviewees. If interested, please email Corrie Kwan (chykwan -at- ca.ibm.com) with your name and contact information.

So 2012 is in the past and it's time for your team to look ahead to 2013.  Brian Bryson, Rob Retchless and I recently discussed New Year's Resolutions in our latest Software Threads podcast.   We agreed that 2013 is about fostering an environment that supports an extended agile team by implementing new practices that enable continuous software delivery.  With a heavy focus on three areas, DevOps, Customer Collaboration and Incremental Design.   Resolution #1: Connect with operations Agile teams must include... [More]

An light-hearted article on "What Three-Year Olds Can Teach Us About Software Development" from Scott Ambler. Click here to read the DeveloperWorks article.     About Scott Ambler Scott Ambler is a Senior Consulting Partner with Scott W. Ambler + Associates , a boutique consulting firm specializing in helping organizations to successfully adopt disciplined agile strategies.  He is based in Toronto and focuses on disciplined agile training and process-related advisement.  Scott lives and works in the Toronto area... [More]

Thankyou for participating in the AgileMetrics Virtual Round Table event . It was a very successful event for ourcommunity with 190 posts, 28 participants, 8 countries represented in 4discussion threads. During the discussion, we also welcomed over 80 new membersto the community! It was really great to see such lively discussion with some key topics emergingfrom the conversation, including: • Agile metrics and metrics that matter most at the project level • Metrics at the enterprise level • The importance of measuring business... [More]

I cringe whenever I hear an executive or a manager say something like, "Yeah, we got some development teams doing that agile thing." Which is usually followed by something like, "I don’t know what the impact is, but we have a directive to have more teams doing agile."   There are so many problems with those two statements my head usually starts spinning…   "What exactly do you mean, you are doing agile?" "Why are only the developers participating?" "What metrics are you using... [More]

Agile Testing - Mobile application testing challenges Several months ago, I was challenged by the Release Quality Manager, at a large financial institution, to demonstration the value agile on large projects where several of his development teams were struggling with quality with their mobile application (mobile app) development.  Here is a summary of the challenges, recommendations and outcomes from this engagement. Current Situation My customer was in the middle of an extensive agile transformation with many teams adopting a combination... [More]

Tags:  mobile application enterprise leigh mobile-app-dev-sig mobile_application ibm safe williamson rational devops development agile-alm tags: agile-testing dad testing