Lean-Agile for Executives

The Business Case for Agility. We cover the five most important reasons for going Agile and how it is that understanding the whys of Agile helps you with this transition.

Product Portfolio Management

Using Product Portfolio Management to Improve the Efficiency of Teams. Alan Shalloway. 4/10. Many organizations fail in rolling out Agile methods to the organization because they never truly address the real impediment their development organization is facing - too many, too large, poorly understood, projects.

Driving Enterprise Agility from the Program Management Office. Kelley Horton & Guy Beaver. 7/10. This is an experience report from one of our clients that discusses how they improved their IT effectiveness by focusing on the Program Management Office. Kelley is from Premier while Guy is the Net Objectives consultant who assisted them.

Lean Portfolio Management: Guiding IT Projects with Business Value by Guy Beaver.

Becoming Lean-Agile

An Overview of Lean-Agile Methods. Alan Shalloway. 9/10. This article provides an overview of the more popular Lean-Agile methods of the last decade, including XP, Scrum, Kanban and Lean.

Using Lean-Agile to Provide the Real Value of ALM. Alan Shalloway. 10/10. This article discusses how to use Lean-Thinking to guide Agile transitions.

Where to Begin Your Transition to Lean-Agile. Alan Shalloway. 12/09. Too many organizations assume that the place to start their Agile transition is at the team. It often is not. This article discusses what to consider when starting a transition to Agile methods.

Becoming Lean - The Why, What and How. Alan Shalloway. 12/10. This article presents a different way of looking at Lean Software Development - one that is independent of Lean's manufacturing heritage. It begins by presenting Lean as a collection of a body of knowledge applying Lean principles to software development. It then shows how this creates a new paradigm of management, one that does not inevitably lead to micro-management or chaos. Finally, it concludes with a discussion about how organizations can use Lean to improve their ability to learn.

Lean Anti-Patterns and What to do About Them. Alan Shalloway. 8/07. In this article, we will discuss a few common Lean Anti-Patterns. Anti-Patterns are commonly recurring practices that are counterproductive. We call them "Lean" Anti-Patterns because these anti-patterns result from violating Lean principles. Lean principles form the basis for Scrum practices. Looking at how Lean Anti-Patterns violate lean principles gives us insight into how we need to modify our practices to be more effective.

Agile Conversations. Guy Beaver, Alan Chedalawada. 3/08. This article is a collection of conversations that demonstrates some of the tangible and intangible benefits of a successful Agile implementation.

Team Agility

Demystifying Kanban. This article describes Kanban as a systems approach to software development that affects many different types of behaviors. It also mentions a few of the common misconceptions people have about Kanban in order to help clarify what Kanban is and is not.

Challenging Why (Not if) Scrum Works. Alan Shalloway. 9/07. Why does Scrum work? The answer may surprise you. It also opens up why you must always go beyond practices and look at the principles on which they are built.

Technical Agility

An Introductory Acceptance Test. Ken Pugh. This article is an excerpt from Ken Pugh's Lean-Agile Acceptance Test Driven Development: Better Software Through Collaboration.

Acceptance Test-Driven Development: An Introduction. Short introduction on Acceptance-Test-Driven Development.

Avoiding System Bankruptcy: How to Pay Off Your Technical Debt. Amir Kolsky introduces the concept of technical debt, what practices and attitudes cause it, and what we can do to prevent it or pay it off.

Can Patterns Be Harmful?  This article discusses what patterns truly are - an effective thought process - not merely solutions to recurring problems in a context.

Shalloway's Law. Chapter 4 from Essential Skills for the Agile Developer: A Guide to Better Programming and Design, this chapter discusses how to truly avoid redundancy.