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  • Experimenting with #NoProductOwner at F-Secure

    Maaret Pyhäjärvi experimented with no product owner and reported the benefits on team performance. The team developed a cross-team ownership that increased their ability to solve problems, they improved the flow of value, delivered solutions faster, and drove innovation as they anticipated features that were not expected by the business. they introduced data driven feedback mechanism.

  • 2019 State of Testing Survey: Call for Participation

    The 2019 State of Testing survey is now seeking participation, and aims to provide insights into how the testing profession develops and to recognize testing trends. Anyone completing the survey will receive a complimentary copy of the State of Testing 2019 report once it is published.

  • Examining the Value of Agile Certifications

    Ben Linders has recently authored several blog posts examining the benefits of living by the principles and behaviours of Agility over pursuing certifications or adopting frameworks. Knowledge Hut’s recent survey of Agile certifications indicated that those with a greater focus on work-based experience tend to correlate with higher earnings. We report on recent thinking around certifications.

  • Building the Roadmap for Portfolio for Jira

    When your product backlog is a prioritized list of problems instead of a list of features, it becomes easier to respond to change; you don’t have to commit early to delivering features and can use new technology when it becomes available. Visualizing your roadmap and regularly taking in new information and using it to reassess your roadmap helps to keep you agile.

  • The Customer is Not Always Right and Neither Are You

    At the recent Agile 2018 conference, Natalie Warnert gave a talk titled "The Customer is Not Always Right, and Neither Are You!” in which she gave the audience thought-provoking concepts on how to make sure we are building the right thing. She presented three traps that teams fall into - incorrect customer, premature solution and drowning in data, and provided advice on how to avoid them.

  • Focusing on Business Outcomes at Barclays: Overcoming the "Urgency Paradox"

    Jonathan Smart, head of working ways, and Morag McCall, PMO at Barclays, spoke last month at the DevOps Enterprise Summit in London about re-thinking the entire flow of work, from initial idea triage until releasing to production. This means introducing agility into how the application and services portfolio is managed, as well as changing the role of the PMO and finance departments.

  • BDD Tool Cucumber is 10 Years Old: Q&A with its Founder Aslak Hellesøy

    Cucumber was created as a way to overcome ambiguous requirements and misunderstandings, but if you think Cucumber is a testing tool you are wrong, Aslak Hellesøy, who created Cucumber in 2008, stated a few years ago. In an interview with InfoQ he described his experiences using Behaviour-Driven Development (BDD) and Cucumber, and what he thinks about the future for a tool that’s now 10 years old.

  • 12th State of Agile Report Published

    The 2018 State of Agile Report has been published by CollabNet VersionOne. Some of the conclusions from the report are that the need for customer and user satisfaction is increasing, more and more organizations are scaling agile, distributed teams are becoming the norm in agile software development, and many organization have started or plan to start a DevOps initiative in the next 12 months.

  • Agile Transformation at KPN iTV

    The management team became a leadership team that created a working environment for the squads where they facilitate instead of direct, autonomous squads were co-created using self-selection, and work is not organized in projects anymore but brought to stable autonomous teams: these are some of the major changes done in the agile transformation at KPN iTV.

  • Agile and the Use of Paradoxes

    Paradoxes support agile transformations; they make you stop, think, and discuss by using a shared language. They also help to show empathy and provide a way forward. VIVAT, a Dutch insurance company, uses paradoxes in training and everyday work to drive their agile transformation.

  • Should Teams Decouple Cadences?

    Recently a Twitter discussion took place about allowing teams to have multiple cadences, for instance by using a different rhythm for planning the work and for learning and improving. Decoupling cadences gives teams room to explore and learn what works best for them; it can lead to more adaptability and autonomy and better outcomes.

  • Agile at LEGO

    Agile has been part of LEGO for more than a decade, but it is still spreading seeds and finding applications in business areas outside digital and IT. Some of LEGO's core values are play and learning which resonate very well with the agile principle of iterations, experimentation, and retrospectives.

  • ThoughtWorks Sold to Private Equity Firm Apax Partners

    Global software development and digital transformation company ThoughtWorks is to be acquired by London-based private equity firm Apax Partners. The terms of the deal were not disclosed and it is expected to close in Q4 2017.

  • Perfect Software, Measuring Continuous Delivery, and Exploring the Future: Agile on the Beach 2017

    At Agile on the Beach 2017, the key takeaways from the final afternoon of the conference included: delivery teams can add value more rapidly by embracing lean, iterative and continuous deployment methodologies; and although highly beneficial, implementing continuous delivery is hard due to the need for principles to be applied in your context.

  • The Importance of Learning, Psychological Safety, and Continuous Delivery: Agile on the Beach 2017

    At the Agile on the Beach 2017 conference, run in Cornwall, UK, several hundred speakers and attendees gathered to discuss the latest developments within the field of agile and post-agile software development methodologies.

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