During my career, I have used many Agile methods/processes. IBM’s Agile with Discipline (AWD) happens to be one of them; therefore, I would be remiss if I did not share my experiences learning and using it. I first stumbled upon AWD in 2008 while evaluating a Scrum implementation for a major telecommunications company.  I heard the company had, at one time, considered AWD and then decided to hire another company that used Scrum.  As I was an IBM employee and this was an IBM offering, my already inquisitive nature was definitely... [More]

10.    We are highly interactive virtual community--not just a forum or distribution list The DevOps Community provides a collaborative environment with discussion groups, work groups focused on hard topics, interaction with some of the world's recognized thought leaders, webinars with interactive Q&A, training for specific practices and more. Better yet, these opportunities are almost always free. 9.      We are community-driven and focus on topics of greatest interest to the community The enablement... [More]

And, so it is with sadness that the Zone departs Disney ... ahem... Innovate 2013    But, with Tropical Storm Andrea moving in....   (The Zone apologizes to Walt....) Hiiiiii Hoooo!!!!!   Hiiiiii Hoooo!!!!! Hi-Ho... Hi-Ho.... It's off to TSA we go.... With the world famous Darrel Rader Sr Mgr, WW Capability and Community Development at IBM Rational http ://w ww.l inke din. com/ in/d arre lrad e r http s:// twit ter. com/ darr el_r ade r http s:// www. face book .com /dar rel. rade r   ... and then to home. M Kevin... [More]

The Zone had an early morning skip level meeting.... more like skip three levels to kick off the day.... to start off a rockin' day.   It is with profound gratitude that the Zone wishes to thank Dennis Schultz of IBM Rational Unleash the Labs. Dennis took time in his busy schedule to meet with one of the Zone's clients to walk through Rational Functional Tester.  The session was highly educational for the client.  It cleared up one of the architectural hurdles they face in implementing an improved Requirements->Test... [More]

Tags:  agile ibminnovate

Today was a busy day for the Zone.   1) A client arrived at the Zone with an agile planning conundrum.  It seemed that the development cycle time of two different types of software (two different languages) we so incompatible that the best the team could do sprint length wise was in the order of months.  Upon review, it turned out that the client needed finer grained impact analysis between the two sets of software.  When this could be understood, assessment of the difficulty (read story points) would be more accurate. ... [More]

Tags:  agile ibminnovate

Since 2007, IBM has been enabling agile teams from smaller independent teams to those working in large-scale complex environments to become more agile. While others were focused on implementing electronic task boards and questioning whether agile at scale was even possible, IBM Rational was delivering Rational Team Concert on the Jazz platform and enabling distributed teams to embrace the core values and principles of agile, including collaboration, transparency, continuous improvement and adaptability. In 2013, seven years after the bold... [More]

Tags:  agile scrum ibminnovate alm

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

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

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]

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]

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

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

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 challenges agile

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