A Quick Synopsis of Agile 2010

Posted August 18th, 2010 by alshall

I came back from Agile 2010 and got right into things delivering my favorite Lean-Agile course – Transitioning Your Organization to Lean-Agile Methods. I must say, this was the best Agile Alliance conference I've been to. After 2008's conference, I was so upset with the way us sponsors were handled that I had decided to forgo 2009's conference – limiting ourselves to giving out our Lean-Agile Pocket Guide to Scrum.  read more »

Practices All Scrum Teams Should Follow

This page specifies basic practices we think virtually every Scrum team should do and a few that are recommended for most others. While wanting to avoid dogma or prescriptive practices, we've found these practices to be virtually universally useful for teams doing Scrum.  They have come from years of experience of assisting companies of all sizes in Lean-Agile adoptions. The importance of following these practices may be less the smaller or more experienced your teams are - but we strongly suggest considering them as ways of improving your Scrum implementations.  read more »

Setting the Record Straight: I Love Scrum

Posted August 7th, 2010 by alshall

"If you are in a shipwreck and all the boats are gone, a piano top buoyant enough to keep you afloat that comes along makes a fortuitous life preserver. But this is not to say that the best way to design a life preserver is in the form of a piano top. I think that we are clinging to a great many piano tops in accepting yesterday's fortuitous contrivings as constituting the only means for solving a given problem. Our brains deal exclusively with special-case experiences.  read more »

Scrum is a Silver Mirror - sometimes

Posted July 20th, 2010 by alshall

I saw an interesting blog today by Mike Dwyer called "Scrum is a Silver WHAT and you want to put it WHERE?" where he makes the pithy statement that "Scrum is not a silver bullet – it's a silver mirror." Now I definitely think this is a good blog and recommend you read it. However, I must admit to having had two simultaneous reactions to it – and realized it epitomized my concerns about how Scrum is promoted. My first reaction was – pretty cool.  read more »

BDSD Session 6: Acceptance Test-Driven Development

Mon, 07/19/2010 - 15:06 — andrea
Subtitle:

Bring the Customer, Developers and Testers Together to Understand Requirements Up-Front

Resource Type:
Webinar
Access Level:
Registered Access
Subcategory:
Lean-Agile
Author(s):
Alan Shalloway
This session is about how proper use of acceptance testing can avoid many problems instead of merely finding them at the end. It redefines the role of QA to one of avoiding errors and improving our system of development. Acceptance test-driven development is the process of having customers, developers and testers all talk about the requirements before any coding is done.  read more »
Link:
BDSD Session 6: Acceptance Test-Driven Development
Slide Link:
Publish Date:
07/19/2010
Length:
60 min

Agile Analysis, Estimation and Planning

Summary

Agile Analysis, Estimation and Planning blends several technologies together in a breakthrough two-day course that gives the tools the entire development team needs to uncover and manage the story discover/definition process. Software development is most like product development where most of the work is in discovering what the customer needs and how to build it. This course focuses on how to most efficiently discover those features that will return the highest benefit to the customers of a company. This is a very hands on course where participants go through the entire process of creating a product backlog. Students learn to drive story writing from business value.

Course Objectives

  • To give managers of agile projects an understanding of the Agile process
  • To prepare analysts, developers and testers for doing Agile projects
  • To emphasize the need for driving agile projects from business needs
  • To create a focus in the development team towards delivering high value, high quality software in a sustainable manner

Description

This course is designed within the context of Lean Software Development. This solves many problems in other Agile Analysis methods because it enables Agile practitioners to keep the big picture in mind (which focusing on business value requires) while working on the small pieces (which Agility requires).

This course deals with the following questions:

 read more »

Course Level

Intermediate

Course Outline

  • Lessons from Lean Software Development
    • The Scientific Method
    • Respect People
    • Respect Knowledge
    • Improving Process
    • Wastes in Software Development
      • Building what you don’t need
      • Complexity
      • Non-Maintainability
    • Market Risk Vs Technical Risk
  • Overview of Agile Methods
  • The Business Case for Agility
    • Add Business Value Quickly
    • Get Clarity on Customer Needs
    • Project Management
    • Help the Team
    • Technical Perspective
  • The Risks of Software Development
  • Starting Analysis
  • Selecting Stories for the Iteration
    • Prioritization
    • Risk Mitigation
    • Increasing Feedback
  • Stories and Testing
  • The Role of QA in Analysis
  • Refining our Test Cases
  • Agile Project Estimation
  • Agile Story Estimation
  • Kano Analysis
  • The Changing Role of the Analyst
  • Wastes in Analysis and How To Avoid Them
  • Products Vs Projects

You learn how to

  • build a product backlog to enable a team to develop the most important features
  • scope requirements with Minimum Marketable Features so only the most important features are built
  • how to improve the conversation between the customer and the development team while simultaneously improving the quality of the software developed
  • unfold requirements in a just-in-time manner that both eliminates waste and minimizes risk
  • estimate stories

Target Audience

- Primary: Managers,team leaders, architects, business analysts, product managers,  project managers
- Secondary: Any member of the development team

Room Setup and Equipment Needed

Classrooms require students at tables (round or long) as well as several white boards or flip-charts.  A projector with screen is also needed.

Prerequisites

- Required: None
- Highly Recommended: none
- Recommended: Experience in any aspect of software development, including management.

 

Course Length:

2 days

PDUs:

14 PDUs Category 4

Maximum Number in Class:

24

Layers in Tests

Posted June 18th, 2010 by kpugh

Dale Emery wrote an excellent article on Writing Maintainable Automated Acceptance Tests. It's at http://dhemery.com/pdf/writing_maintainable_automated_acceptance_tests.pdf. He showed how tfo do the testing in Robot. Bob Martin gave an alternative way to do the tests in Fit at http://blog.objectmentor.com/articles/2009/12/07/writing-maintainable-automated-acceptance-tests.

 read more »

The Real Differences between Kanban and Scrum

Posted June 7th, 2010 by alshall

This blog is the first in a two-part blog post. This one deals with the differences between Kanban and Scrum. The next one deals with what you can do with this knowledge. There are a lot of people who don't want to talk about the differences between Kanban and Scrum. Some say you can't compare them because they are like apples and oranges – different things. Many (almost all from the Scrum community) go so far as to say you should suspect the motives of those who even make such a comparison.  read more »

After Action Review

Mon, 06/07/2010 - 09:00 — Jim Trott
Subtitle:
Learning while doing
Resource Type:
Article
Access Level:
Subscriber Access
Subcategory:
Collaboration
Author(s):
Jim Trott
The After Action Review is a simple and powerful tool to help a team learn from their experiences in order to gain immediate, concrete improvements in performance. It is a more general and widely useful approach than the retrospection. An "action" is any major or routine activity or event that a team of people undertakes, especially those events that they or other similar teams will likely repeat in the future.

AARs are easy to do.  read more »

Link:
AAR Team Brochure
Slide Link:
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