Tracking change and innovation in the enterprise software development community
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In large organizations, it’s simply not practical to just "flip a switch" and have your IT department start doing agile all at once. In these situations, agile pilot teams and non-agile teams/departments find themselves having to figure out how to work together during the transition.
The Agile software development community discusses it successes on a regular basis, but rarely do we publicly discuss our failures. Robin Dymond has taken the first step by documenting one of his.
Scrum talks about having minimum disruptions during the sprint. However, in the real world, if the system is already in production, within each sprint there is a strong possibility of getting production support issues. The post tries to uncover some ways to take care of these interruptions with Scrum.
Do "empowered" organizations outperform their command-and-control competitors? Business school dean Roger Martin saw this promising approach fail too frequently. His diagnosis: he calls it the Responsibility Virus, and offers tools to help those who would treat the Virus in their own workplace. Reviewer Deborah Hartmann found this book a good explanation of why process is not enough.
"But does Agile scale?" Emerging stories and case studies indicate that it certainly does. InfoQ brings you two excerpts from Dean Leffingwell's book "Scaling Software Agility: Best Practices for Large Enterprises". Chapter 1 presents how Agile methods respond to the need for competitive advantage, and Chapter 2 revisits "Why the Waterfall Model Doesn’t Work".
Called "the grandmother" of the agile methodologies, DSDM V1 was released in 1995. The methodology is owned and collaboratively developed by the members of the not-for profit DSDM Consortium, and until V4.2 was only available to members. But the recent V5 or "Atern" release is now publicly available. Director Hugh Ivory provided an overview at Agile2007.
InfoQ presents a one hour video from the APLN Leadership Summit at Agile2006, where a panel of business leaders spoke about their experiences: Bud Phillips (Capital One Financial), Israel Ganot (BMC Software), Steven Ambrose (DTE Energy), Peter George (Cronos Inc.). Topics included top-down vs. bottom-up adoption, making the leap of faith to enterprise adoption and the value of the PMO.
Creating a successful Scrum team is only the first step on the road to an Agile company. In most enterprises today, you must create a successful product portfolio delivered by distributed/outsourced teams. Even then, to win in a market segment, an Agile approach to the enterprise product strategy is needed to dramatically improve opportunity for success.
This half hour presentation looks at a Fortune 500 company's effort to achieve faster time to market by transitioning from RUP to Agile. At Agile2006 Hussman & Stenstad revealed the gradual process from readiness assessment and chartering through education and practice to the creation of an adaptive culture with a "living plan", sharing lessons learned along the way.
This book guides the reader on crafting their own agile adoption strategy focused on their business values and environment. This strategy is then directly tied to patterns of agile practice adoption that describe how many teams have successfully (and unsuccessfully) adopted them. Business values are also a component of these patterns so your adoption is always focused on addressing your particular environment.
