Overcoming Impediments to Test-Driven Development

Recently, I had the chance to sit down with Scott Bain, author of Emergent Design and an expert in Test-Driven Development. He wanted to talk about what he has seen as impediments to implementing Test-Driven Development: impediments that arise before an organization decides to adopt TDD and impediments that arise after adopting TDD. He bases this on his conversations with clients who are in the midst of implementing TDD, on his coaching experience, and on own personal journey with TDD has he has incorporated the concepts into Net Objectives training in Design Patterns, TDD, and Analysis.

Post-Agile Scrum (audio of the webinar)

The Agile Manifesto and the Agile movement have ushered in a new way of developing software. Today, many practitioners are discovering limitations to the usual approach to Agile which focuses mostly on local teams and projects. This limited focus developed as a reaction to heavy processes and teams' inability to make their own commitments. This resulted in many leading Agile practitioners to advocate an approach to "let the team figure it out," going so far as to state that the beauty of the Agile approach (such as Scrum) is that it avoids any kind of prescriptive formula. Yes, prescriptive formulas can be dangerous; however, having a set of principles to guide Agile practices can be extremely useful. Moreover, incorporating Lean management practices are critical for extending the capabilities of an organization using Agile methods.

Today, what is required is helping the entire enterprise become Agile. What is an Agile enterprise? An enterprise that can respond quickly to customer, environment and internal changes to create a competitive advantage. This requires much more than merely trying to apply practices that work for local teams to the entire enterprise - that approach is too simplistic. This Agile Enterprise-perspective is one of the biggest differences between current Agile practitioners and those going beyond Scrum.

These and other questions are pondered by Alan Shalloway in a webinar on Post-Agile Scrum, presented January 24, 2008. The webinar is available to registered users of the Net Objectives website for 30 days and to Net Objectives customers always. However,  read more »

 Scrum and Management: Planning and Focusing

Over the last several years, teams of developers have been trying Agile and getting success at their level. Now, management is getting engaged, both to figure out how to do this across divisions and the enterprise, as well as how to do a better job in less-than-simple situations that most enterprises face.

There have been notable examples where things did not go as well as expected when teams face complexity, where the fit is not exactly good, where maybe the initial approach taken was just too simplistic. It is management's job to help teams look at ways to improve.

This is why at conferences, we are encountering more and more mid-level managers. And they are asking very different sorts of questions than technical, development teams ask. This is stimulating and exciting. Clearly, Agile is beginning to enter the mainstream as a better way to manage software product development.

In this podcast, we will touch on two topics Alan that are concerns for management: Release Planning and Focus.  read more »

Emergent Design (audio of the webinar)

What is design? An opportunity to mitigate risk. A way to look for eliminating waste. It is certainly not simply the "thinking" part of software development.

Enterprise Agility

Often, organizations invite us in to help them think about how to bring Agile into their development practices. The initial focus is often at the local team level. Our experience is that this is not the best place to start. Instead, we prefer to look for pain points that the organization is feeling in their development work, and we talk with local teams to get indicators of these points.

• What is stopping you from delivering the value to customers that you feel you should?
• What opportunities do you see and what waste is there?

We can predict some of the answers depending on whether it is an IT organization or a product organization. IT organizations tend to have people working on more than one project at a time whereas in product organizations, people usually focus on one project. This means that IT organizations often have less connection to the business and have more contention for resources. These are all opportunities for improvement that may or may not involve changes at the local team level.

Enterprise Agility, Systems Thinking

“Enterprise Agility” focuses on helping the overall development organization be more able to respond to the needs of the business. It starts by looking at what needs to be done and then on how to do it. Probably, this will involve Agile at the local team level, but that might not be the best place to start.  read more »

 Announcing Scrum Certification by Net Objectives 

Scrum Certification by Net Objectives is a new program by Net Objectives to help the industry and especially our clients have a reliable, repeatable, and meaningful process by which to assess the competency of individuals and teams to be on a Scrum Team, to be a Scrum Master, or to be a Product Owner. This podcast announces the program and the motivations behind it, including the following:

• What this program is and what it covers
• The motivation behind this program
• Why the industry needs certification in Scrum
• What we mean by “certification”
• What certification will involve
• When it will be ready

The need for this is borne out of our experience having trained almost 20,000 people in Scrum and working with many major corporations rolling out Scrum, what people need to get proficient with Scrum.

 read more »

Lean-Agile and the Process-Innovation Pendulum

Alan was the keynote speaker at the SQE Better Software Conference in Las Vegas this year. Conferences are great for stirring up ideas and generating insights. For this podcast, I wanted to continue the series on Lean Anti-Patterns, sharing some more from what we are learning as we write this book. But you cannot always control a conversation. One of the hardest things to know as a facilitor is when to re-focus an individual or a group and when to let the ideas flow. You want the ideas to emerge and you want them to create the result. Today, I went with the passion, letting him share because I knew we’d get back to the other topic another day.

Lean Anti-Patterns: Overview

It doesn’t have to be this way. Haven’t you felt that in your tummy sometimes. You and your team end up doing the same thing again and again, and you just get the same results again and again. And here you area again, starting out on that familiar path and it is going to be painful again. Around and around. That is an “anti-pattern”: Repeated patterns of work and behavior that produce counterproductive results.

Alan Shalloway has been training companies across the country in lean for software development.  read more »

An Overview of Lean - Agile Software Development

Since my days working with manufacturing, I’ve been hearing about Six Sigma and about Lean. There is a lot to these programs. The “elevator speech” says that Six Sigma focuses on reducing variation and Lean focuses on reducing waste.

Last year, I gained my Six Sigma Green Belt certification helping an internal help desk to improve self-service. We used a Lean Six Sigma approach and was a great process, very customer-centric which surprised me. I had thought six sigma was all about statistics. OK, well it had a lot of statistics, which made my little mathematical heart go pitter pat. But there was a lot of human focused work, too. It was fun… and it worked to improve their process.

 read more »

Completing the Agile Development Puzzle

Bob Hartman is Net Objectives’ Vice President of Business Development and Marketing. He has over 20 years experience in the software industry and has seen it all. Maybe it is all those years in the trenches or maybe it is the gray in his beard or maybe it is living in Colorado, but I find his perspectives to be refreshing. He sees what organizations truly need and does a great job helping them.  read more »