agile
This story, sponsored by CollabNet, outlines why leading organizations have moved measurement and reporting to the forefront of their engineering and release processes. It provides an overview about best practices for reporting infrastructure choices, as exemplified by CollabNet TeamForge.
In the agile community there is a movement called “no estimates”—where people are challenging the value and validity of estimating the work required to develop software. Scott Sehlhorst looks at the different perspectives of those who challenge estimation.
When the government suddenly passes regulations that impact the development of a product, an organization's investments could suddenly turn to waste. Venkatesh Krishnamurthy explains how to deal with the waste as well as some methods to better handle inventories.
Working with vendors can pose challenges to an agile team, especially when it comes to contracting practices. How do you deal with contract relationships when trying to follow a philosophy that values collaboration over negotiation? Kent McDonald gives some suggestions for creating agile contracts.
Agile practices add value by helping teams detect problems early and avoid repeating them; these practices also help teams get feedback early and often. To extend the feedback loop into deployment, teams are taking a DevOps approach by including the needs of operations teams into the process early.
There are two ways to think about scope—a list of things to be done or a list of goals to accomplish. As long as scope is defined as a list of things, then your project process is not agile, even if your team is using the mechanisms of agile development within the code creation cycle.
Joe Townsend explores whether or not agile and Lean Six Sigma can coexist. Since agile is a development methodology and Lean Six Sigma is mainly associated with manufacturing, it would appear that the two are completely incompatible with one another. However, that's not always the case.
Steve Berczuk explains that developers are most interested in whether or not an SCM tool is capable of branching, thus allowing more than one related stream of code to evolve in parallel. However, minimizing branching may be the best approach for agile teams.
There has been a lot of news recently about increasing transparency in government. While government operations pose significant challenges to ensuring transparency, agile projects can suffer from these challenges as well. Technical debt and documentation are areas where project teams can improve.
Some believe that a large investment of time and money in requirements gathering and process oversight will lead to a more reliable or safer software product. But is that really the case? Steve Vaughn writes that in agile the team members are responsible for the successful delivery of their product.