Archive for August 20th, 2009

Open & Agile

Like most I think I am a fan of all things open (it sounds better than closed) the term “OpenAgile” recently caught my eye.  The group pushing this term has a nice e-book pdf of their concept.

One of the people out in front on this is Mishkin Berteig. He seems to be combing some Scrum stuff, some Lean stuff, and something called the Learning Circle from the education world.  Other than having the e-book out there, I am not sure what is “open” about it, but the e-book is a quick read, and may prove useful to teams trying to find a form a Agile that works for them well.

- Michael Grollman

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This entry was posted on Thursday, August 20th, 2009 at 9:26 am and is filed under Agile Development, Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

Taking Scrum up a Notch with Smoother Agile

John Scumniotales , the co-creator of Scrum and the first Scrum Master (his words) did a really cool webinar on why agile environments needs more than Scrum.  Among other things, he lays out four key elements that are part of securing a successful agile environment, none of which are really top of the list in a pure scrum philosophy although not in any way antithetical to scrum, just a layer on top of it.):

  • Cross-functional teams that include the customer (or their proxy), development, test, documentation and anyone else required to create “the whole product”;
  • Incremental delivery of production quality capabilities at regular intervals;
  • Test-driven development that builds quality in from the beginning;
  • Automated and unattended build, test and reporting and I maniacal focus on build quality.

I particularly like the test driven development stuff.  You can check out the whole webinar here.

- Michael Grollman

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This entry was posted on Thursday, August 20th, 2009 at 9:25 am and is filed under Agile Development, Entrepreneur, Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

Getting performance measurements right in Agile environments

One of the hardest things to do in any agile development environment is the production of good metrics on productivity.  Jeff McKenna, one of the earliest leaders in agile development, put out a blog entry on just this point.  A key issue, Jeff points out, is that at all development varmints are based on team dynamics, and it is always difficult to separate out team productivity from individual productivity.

He suggests the following rule of thumb to help build evaluation and performance systems for ads all environments.

To summarize:
50% Team performance
25% Team evaluation
25% Individual growth in functional area

Read more here.

- Michael Grollman

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This entry was posted on Thursday, August 20th, 2009 at 9:22 am and is filed under Agile Development, Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.