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Large-Scale Agile Design & Architecture: Ways of Working

During my 2011 QCon London keynote on "Scaling Lean & Agile: Large, Multisite or Offshore Delivery", I mentioned — as an aside — that, "Architecture is a bad metaphor. We don't construct our software like a building, we grow it like a garden." This prompted many a tweet, and some people were interested in clarification or elaboration.

Craig Larman
on Mar 18, 2011
The Accidental Agilist: A Personal Look Back at 10 Years of the Agile Manifesto

Johanna Rothman reflects on her journey to pragmatic agility. She discusses the way in which agile practices work together to improve project outcomes, and how this is not restricted to software development. She challenges teams to embrace the transparency that agile brings and stop talking about becoming agile and start doing it properly.

Johanna Rothman
on Mar 03, 2011
Estimation Toolkit

No matter what kind of software you write, or the size company you work for, you probably have to provide estimates to someone. There are many techniques agile teams can use to help guide their estimation efforts. The toolkit described in this article consists of a number of novel approaches to estimating agile software projects that will help you answer the question – “When will we be done?”.

James King
on Dec 28, 2010
Doing Kanban Wrong

Kanban as a tool to support lean software development continues to increase in popularity all the time. However, like countless tools before it, Kanban will be unfairly blamed for many project failures by people who are doing Kanban wrong. This article discusses some ways the author has tried to give Kanban a bad name. Hopefully these examples will keep you from falling into similar traps.

Tim Wingfield
on Dec 22, 2010
Agile Goal Setting

It is well understood that too succeed in developing great applications or even great things in our lives we need goals. Goals that motivate and push us to go beyond the ordinary. However if we Google Agile Goal Setting there are few items that give much consideration to what these should look like or how to create them. Jurgen Appelo looks at what it takes to make great goals.

Jurgen Appelo
on Oct 26, 2010
Technical Debt a Perspective for Managers

Developers often talk about Technical Debt saying its slowing your projects down. What are they really saying? What measures can you take to reduce it before it cripples your projects?

Mark Levison
on Sep 27, 2010
Introducing New Technology in Agile

This article combines the case-study experience of the author and a general decision-making framework for agile teams facing the challenge of introducing a new technology, mid-stream in a project.

Paritosh Ranjan
on Sep 14, 2010
Use of Kanban in the Operations Team at Spotify

In this article, InfoQ spoke with Mattias Jansson, Operations Engineer at Spotify (an online music streaming service) about the adoption of Kanban by the Spotify Operations team. Jansson offered a lot of detail about the choice to adopt Kanban as well as the experiences that the Operations team at Spotify has gained while implementing a Kanban-based approach to dealing with their workload.

Mattias Jansson Michael Prokop
on Sep 14, 2010
Skills for Scrum Agile Teams

The skills required to be hyper-productive in agile projects are different from those required by a traditional one. This article identifies behavioral and technical skills required for a team to have that edge. Anyone who acquires these "delta" traits should be equipped with the right set of behavioral and technical skills, which enable them to work effectively in an agile project.

Prasad Prabhakaran
on Jul 26, 2010
The Limits of Agile

The problems faced by teams that are attempting Agile in non-traditional settings aren't that Agile principles are inapplicable, nor that the feedback cycle is doomed to failure; but rather, outside of a certain Agile sweet-spot there are additional barriers and costs to applying Agile techniques. None of these obstacles prevents Agile in itself but each increases the cost of getting to Agile.

Alan Kelly
on Jul 19, 2010
Agile Team Meets a Fixed Price Contract

Fixed price contracts are evil - this is what can often be heard from agilists. On the other hand those contracts are reality which many agile teams have to face. But what if we try to tame it instead of fighting against it? How can a company execute this kind of contract using agile practices to achieve better results with lower risk? This article will try to answer those questions.

Marcin Niebudek
on Jun 30, 2010
Multitasking Gets You There Later

It's now well understood that multi-tasking on a personal level is bad and slows down the rate at which we work. One of the key challenges of new Agile/Scrum teams is the number of projects that they have on the go. Agile teaches us that a team should work on one project at a time or it will thrash. Roger Brown shows in depth why this happens.

Roger Brown
on Jun 29, 2010