Tracking change and innovation in the enterprise software development community
QCon San Francisco
Nov 19-21:
+ 80 sessions & tracks
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At NFJS Venkat Subramaniam, author with Andy Hunt of "Practices of an Agile Developer," shared his pragmatic approach to some of the important technical and non-technical factors contributing to project success, including: coding, developer attitude, debugging, mentoring and feedback.
Having difficulty prioritizing the backlog? Luke Hohmann has described a method to make quantitative decisions about which backlog items should be considered first. In addition to the usual attributes such as implementation effort, Luke suggested adding attributes to measure stakeholders needs, strategic alignment and to ask whether the item is driving profit.
Struggling with Agile Adoption? Amr Elssamadisy ran a session on what makes adopting Agile processes difficult. He provided the audience with three models for understanding the problems seen during adoption.
The relevance of a traceability matrix is to easily perform impact analysis to a changed requirement.However, does a traceability matrix have a place in an Agile project? The post looks at various view points across blogs and mail groups to find a solution.
The discussion of applying lean principles to software development has largely focused on identifying and eliminating waste (in Japanese: muda). Lean Thinking equally aims to remove overburden (muri) and unnecessary variation (mura). Roman Pichler discusses the relationship of the "three M's" and proposes to eliminate overburden as the first step toward a leaner process.
In this InfoQ article Kenji Hiranabe applies lessons learned while working with Japanese manufacturers. While many Agile teams are optimizing only a portion of the value stream, Hiranabe proposes a simple way to adapt lessons from Lean Manufacturing's "Kanban" visual tracking system to make process visible to more of the organization, for better communication and process improvement.
At QconLondon 2007 Jim Coplien spoke with "Pragmatic" Dave Thomas for InfoQ. This energetic 30-minute interview runs the gamut of Dave's wide-ranging interests: 'agile' publishing; how to turn what you love doing into a book; programming (and methodology) monocultures; staying limber with code "katas"; and advice for academics: help your students live with the passion of a 5-year old!
Agile, once the territory of "early adopters" is coming into the mainstream and meeting resistance. Does this mean Agile can't work in more traditional teams and organizations? Not necessarily, say coaches Michael Spayd and Joe Little, in this InfoQ interview taped at Agile2006. What's needed is an awareness of the need to facilitate organizational change.
Of course, "anything more than 'barely sufficient' process is waste," but what does that mean for your team, or my next project? In this 60 minute presentation from the APLN Leadership Summit at Agile2006, Todd Little shared a model to help choose the right "flavour" of Agile for different kinds of projects, and discussed the importance of 'steering' throughout the project's duration.
