InfoQ Homepage Contracts & Negotiation Content on InfoQ
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Value vs Time: an Agile Contract Model
An agile contract model can help us to focus on the value delivered to the customer. It allows for rewarding teams and people, and can drive continuous improvement towards common goals. InfoQ interviewed Andrea Zomer, CEO at Zupit, about their experiences with an agile contract model.
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Bringing Intelligence to Enterprise Content Management, Google Releases Document Understanding AI
At the recent Google Cloud Next Conference, Google announced a new beta machine learning service, called Document Understanding AI. The service targets Enterprise Content Management (ECM) workloads by allowing customers to organize, classify and extract key value pairs from unstructured content, in the enterprise, using Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML).
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Adding Agile to Lean at Toyota Connected
Adding agility to Lean Product Development enabled Toyota Connected to deliver faster, with higher quality, and reduced costs. Nigel Thurlow presented “Lean is NOT enough” at Lean Digital Summit 2018 where he showed how they embraced agile for colocated teams and outsourcing, and how portfolio planning evolved to an executive prioritization model to increase business agility.
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Contracting to Enable Agile Behaviour
InfoQ interviewed Martin Kearns about how agile contracts differ from contracts for waterfall projects, how contracts can deal with scope changes, major disturbances or delays during development, how contracts can enable agile behaviour and help all those involved to work together based on an agile mindset, and the role that lawyers can have when organizations want to use contracts with agile.
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#NoEstimates Applied to Software Contractors
InfoQ spoke to Vasco Duarte on how the #NoEstimates technique may apply to a contracting environment, facing tipical needs of sizing a project, establishment of agreements, signature of contract and building of trust.
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Flexible Contract Template Now Available
Following on from the announcement of the Flexible Contract model that supports agile development at the Agile 2013 conference, Susan Atkinson and Gabrielle Benefield have released a version of the contract under Creative Commons licensing and made it available for download.
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Change and Permanence
How do we embrace agile software development, while protecting business transactions from harm, and dispute? The legal profession is risk adverse, and seeks permanence over change. But complex software development require adaptation to change. This article summarizes one angle on this debate.
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Agile Contracts Primer Available for Download
Tom Arbogast, Bas Vodde and Craig Larman have released a sample chapter from their upcoming book on scaling Lean and Agile. The chapter deals with the difficult topic of writing contracts for agile development.
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How to Write a Lean and Agile Contract
Agile and Lean projects are run differently from traditional projects. But will those projects' contracts support or undermine Lean and Agile concepts? Here are some tips on how to write an effective contract for a Lean or Agile project.
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Using the RFP Process to Hire Agile
In large organizations and projects, it's not unusual for an Agile team to find itself shackled to a non-Agile partner/vendor/supplier. Friction ensues, energy is wasted. While the solution might appear to be: "hire better teams", Scott Ambler goes to the root of the problem, providing a strategy for creating better RFPs: ones that attract Agile teams.
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Contracts for Agile Software Development
While the Agile Manifesto says "Customer collaboration over contract negotiation", contracts are a reality for many developers and firms. Peter Stevens has analyzed 10 different types of development contracts, shedding light on how well each style fits an agile project. He has uncovered a couple that seem to fit much better than either fixed-price or time-and-materials.
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Working Group Formed to Produce Reusable Agile Contracts
Traditional software contracts have often pitted the customer and vendor against each other. Several Agilists in the past have taken a stab at defining an Agile contract which improves the relationship between the customer and the vendor. A working group is collaborating on OpenPlans taking a step further in this direction and coming up with a reusable Agile contract.
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Presentation: Do The Hustle
In this presentation at RubyFringe, Obie Fernandez shares his experience selling consulting services for both Thoughtworks and Hashrocket and gives advice on how developers/consultants can deal with clients by setting minimal requirements, saying "No" and how to choose hourly rates and much more.
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Agile Contracts Require Trust
Contracts are the seam that tie together different organizations. Traditional contracts are based on mistrust and a CYA philosophy. Fixed price contracts don't take into consider the uncertainty of software development. Time-for-money projects are not based on value delivered - a team can work for a long time and not have much to show for. The Agile community is looking for something better.
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An Agile PM Walks a Mile in a Customer's Shoes
Last year Ternary COO Alexia Bowers walked a mile in a project customer's shoes, and told us how it felt in this Agile2006 Leadership Summit presentation. She stressed the need to meet deadlines through creative solutions, instead of simply cutting scope.