If you missed Steve Farley, VP NationWide or Sal Vella, IBM VP Product Development, discussing improving the customer experience for web and mobile applications at Innovate 2013, this is your chance to catch up with this condensed five-minute video of their key highlights. For more information on Monitor & Optimize solutions, please visit the IBM DevOps website.

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]

I'd like to welcome everyone to our new Agile Transformation Zone community.   I say community ... right now, while there is some great initial content .. the community part is just getting started. It's like we've just built a brand new house and the family hasn't moved in.   As we all know, just like a house is not a home, this community space is only a space.   It's the people that make a community work.    My experience with building communities over the last several years indicates that you need 2 types of members (actually, you can break... [More]

Innovate 2012will be very special this year!  Register here ! Let's face it, IBM Developers don't get out of the office toooften. But when we do, we're lots of fun and thrilled to meet ourcustomers and learn what we can do to help them become more innovative,and improve their experience with our products.   We will have tons of stuff to help make your Agile deployments rock and your competitors roll. Below are the 11 Reasons Why Innovateis a must attend event for Developers Make new connections with gaggles of developers  – Network and... [More]

Note: Community members, I'll be adding Rational's Agile training courses so members can find the training they need.  I'd encourage you to share any public training you'll be doing whether it's formal or informal.  To do so just post the the community blog and add the tags ( ibmagile training course ), if your course will be web based add the tag ( web ) and finally if your course is free add the tag ( free ).  Your courses will show up on an RSS feed I'm building for the Events and Training area in the zone (now in Beta).   Course... [More]

Please take a look at this great talk I'm watching live at IBM Impact. Grady Booch and friends are talking about history of development and the new reality of developing software. The key takeaways for me was the pressure and level of complexity developers are facing in the current era of computing. I remember testing applications for 3 browsers and 2 operating systems built with three or so programming languages. Today developers need to be fluent in 4,5,6 even as many as 10 different languages.  I cannot imagine testing today's apps in the... [More]

Agile Product Owner Enablement - Live, Virtual Training Course Tuesday, July 31, 2012 Agile Product Owner Enablement This special training course is a one-day, live, virtual event. The course is designed for product managers, business team members, and others who are involved in the planning and execution of Agile projects. Course Overview Agile software development employs certain principles and practices that enable development teams to quickly build and deploy high quality software products. An example of one Agile practice is to establish... [More]

GettingStarted with Agile in the Enterprise   If a team tries to adopt an Agile development approach unilaterally within the enterprise, you may make things somewhat better, but you will not realize the full benefits or potential and the team may end up very frustrated and dissatisfied with the outcome.  It is also likely that your agile adoption will not " stick" as people will return to their old behaviors over time.  Therefore,  moving to agile must be a combination of  a " top-down" and "... [More]

Read how IBM is adopting DevOps, and where this adoption is leading IBM to in this blog post written by Adrian Cho.  

  Ascendant Technology recently worked with a valued customer, Market Force Information, to help them implement Disciplined Agile practices on a business-critical software project.  See the case study at: http://na.atech.com/case-studies/market-force   “The Customer Intelligence Platform is transformational for our business. We have a lot invested in making this software successful. Ascendant definitely played a role in helping us create a high performance development team and great software. The discipline and... [More]

Join me (Matt Holitza) at Mile High Agile on April 3rd in Denver, Colorado.  This is the first year we are sponsoring the conference, and the good news for me is I only have to drive a few minutes to get there...   We'll be talking to the Agile practitioners in Denver about the new Agile Transformation community and hopefully get a few hundred more members!   To get more information or to register click here.

If you haven't seen this yet ... it's worth the 4 minutes.  As you can imagine, there are numerous stories behind this story. One of the goals of this community is to provide a space for people to have conversations around these type of stories.  Get to know the people behind the story.           

Calvin Powers, managing editor for security at developerWorks, hosted a panel in which Gene Kim discussed his new book, The Phoenix Project , with IBM DevOps experts, Ann Marie Fred and Michael Elder.   Gene has also written a "DevOps Distilled" article series for developerWorks. In that series of articles, Gene shares his unique perspective on the history of the DevOps movement and where it is heading today, with an eye toward how information security fits into the overall operations perspective of DevOps.   If you haven't already... [More]

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  Much of the mainstream agile discussion focuses on the construction of straightforward systems by a small, co-located team working in a collaborative and self-organizing manner. Yet we know that there is more to software delivery than just construction, that many teams are neither small nor co-located, and that many teams are working on complex systems within a complex environment. The evidence that agile approaches result in improved time-to-market, improved quality, and improved developer productivity compel us to tailor agile strategies... [More]