Are You My Customer or My Partner?
"IT as a Business" (ITAAB) has been a common marketing slogan and business model promoted by thought leaders from firms such as Gartner, Forrester, and Forbes in the past ten years.1 At its core is a philosophy of managing IT as a self-sustaining ...
Spikes and the Effort-to-Grief Ratio
Your team has been working together for several sprints. Things are going fairly well. You're delivering stories each sprint and the product owner is content. But there's always technical debt accumulating, or a problem lurking in software. How do...
Transitioning to Agile
Introduction
I recently completed a long assignment implementing Scrum and decided that, in the spirit of continuous development and learning, it would be useful to run a personal retrospective while between jobs.
This paper articulates some of ...
Reviews and Agile
In software development, we see different types of reviews in different organizations. For example, there can be architecture review, design review, and code review, and they can occur in different phases of development. The aims of these reviews ...
Value of Behavior-Driven Development for Backlog Refinement in Scrum
As all good Scrum coaches know, backlog refinement is an important part of the team's sprint cycle, and as important a component of Scrum as any of the Scrum ceremonies. It allows the team to share its thoughts, forces the team to broach fundament...
We Iterate . . . So We Are Agile?
Do you know that working with iterations does not make you automatically an Agile team? Moreover, it does not even mean, necessarily, that you are using iterative development.
Paradoxically, it is possible to be Agile without use of iterations. T...
Enterprise Transformation to Agile with ISO Compliance
Introduction
An IT consulting company with two office locations and 100-plus people specialized in custom software development and testing services. The firm did in-house software development training for developers at both locations and had trai...