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Facilitating the Spread of Knowledge and Innovation in Professional Software Development

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  • Increasing your Agility: An interview with Dave Thomas

    At the GOTO Amsterdam 2015 conference Dave Thomas gave a keynote presentation titled "agile is dead". While the "Agile" industry is busy debasing the meaning of the word, the underlying values are still strong. Dave Thomas suggests to stop using the word agile and switch to agility: repeatedly taking small steps towards where you want to be and evaluate what happened.

  • Why We Fail to Change: Understanding Practices, Principles, and Values Is a Solution

    There’s no reward for being a Scrum or kanban shop if we are not delivering value to customers. We see virtually no impact of agile or lean on the bottom line of success rates of improvement initiatives, because organizations often look for recipes. We need to change our mindset, and focus on the principles that people follow and values they share and the bigger whole: organizational culture.

  • Emotion and Cognition

    Agile values "individuals and interactions over processes and tools." Understanding individuals and how they interact requires insight into how and why people make decisions. The mind works more like a network than a computer. Emotion influences cognition-often from the driver’s seat. This is why emotional intelligence (EQ) is so crucial to Agile development.

  • Inviting over Imposing Agile

    We are at a crossroads in the agile-adoption narrative. Early in the story teams were the “bottom-up” vector for agile spread. Next the way agile spread started to shift away from teams to executives and “management”. Recent developments move us towards consultancy for bring agile to larger enterprises that struggle with change. Which way is agile going to go next?

  • The Agile Coaches' Coach Shares Her View on SAFe

    This article conveys one agile coach’s journey coming to terms with Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe). Lyssa Adkins shares her thoughts about SAFe and the Agile Manifesto from the viewpoint of the discipline of agile coaching. She explains how using biased views can help us to look out wider and farther to develop a "Yes AND" approach, combining SAFe with Scrum.

  • Taking Back Agile

    Tim Ottinger's blog post I want Agile back earlier this year led to discussions in the agile community about the way that organizations are adopting agile and the services that the industry provides to supports them. Together with Ruud Wijnands he started "take back agile" which focuses on technical practices and craftsmanship in agile.

  • Liz Keogh: 10 years of Agile - the Prophecy of Failure, and the Failure of Prophecy

    Liz Keogh, recipient of the Gordon Pask award in 2010, discusses the predictions of Agile as a fad and how the movement has stood the test of time over the last ten years. She warns against complacency and of ignoring the manifesto value of "individuals and interactions over processes and tools" in our examination of Agile principles and practices - Agile itself must evolve to remain relevant.

  • Laurent Bossavit: Agile Ten Years On

    Laurent Bossavit discusses the importance of learning from history and reflects on the historical influences that have contributed to emergence of agile practices and techniques. He examines the impact agile approaches are having and the emergence of the new discipline of agile software development, and calls for formulation of a new generation of more inclusive Agile institutions.

  • New book - Individuals and Interactions: An Agile Guide

    Ken Howard and Barry Rogers have written a book that focuses on the first value from the Agile Manifesto. They provide advice, tools and techniques to help teams and individuals improve their communications and interpersonal interactions. The book presents a set of tools that work together more effectively. They provide guidelines for a workshop to put the techniques into practice.

  • What has happened and is happening in Japan’s Agile movement

    Kenji Hiranabe is a recipient of the 2008 Gordon Pask Award for Contributions to Agile. He discusses the current state of Agile in Japan, and reflects on the influence that Japanese approaches (such as the Toyota Production System and Lean) have had on the Agile movement. He examines changes happening in the Japanese software industry that is creating an Agile friendly environment.

  • Agile Schools: How Technology Saves Education (Just Not the Way We Thought it Would)

    People from President Obama to Bill Gates propose that technological innovation is the key to improving our schools. But tech products and concepts may not be as influential as tech processes and culture. Applying the Agile methodology to school operation could catalyze dramatic change by bringing a proven systematic solution to one of the most challenging social issues of our age.

  • Agile's Teenage Crisis?

    Philippe Kruchten attended the 10 year anniversary event at Snowbird. He discusses a number of elephants in the agile room (topics that need to be addressed, but have been pointedly ignored) that were identified at that meeting. Ranging from politics to lack of context when implementing agile to the role of the agile alliance the participants raised these points for the community to consider.

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