InfoQ Homepage Delivering Value Content on InfoQ
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Microsoft Counting On Scrum and XP
When Microsoft launched SQL Server 2005 last fall, ending a five-year wait for major revisions, Steve Ballmer acknowledged "It's been a bit long in the making, we're committed to a much closer cycle time."eWeek reports that they will do this using agile development methodologies, such as XP and Scrum. Yet they won't mandate methodology, stressing product quality instead to encourage improvement
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Jim Highsmith Proposes An Adaptive Performance Management System
Jim Highsmith, Director of Cutter Consortium's Agile Project Management Practice told the APLN Leadership Summit audience yesterday: "...to achieve truly agile, innovative organizations, a change in our approach to performance management systems is necessary... 'Conforming to plan' while delivering scant business value will seriously impede agility, whether in projects or the entire enterprise.
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Ken Schwaber: Sacrificing Quality should be an Executive Management Decision
At Agile2006, Co-founder of the Scrum methodology Ken Schwaber argued that as professionals we should not accept business requests to sacrifice quality in order to meet timelines, and if quality does need to be sacrificed such a decision should be made by executive management and reflected in the financial statements of the company.
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Online Discussion on Scrum Requirements Basics
The ScrumDevelopment list has seen lively discussion lately on Requirements issues frequently faced by new teams: "Can the ScrumMaster be the Product Owner too?", "How do we prioritize our Product Backlog?" and "QA's role in a SCRUM process". New teams quickly discover that a poor-quality Product Backlog can frustrate and undermine a team that is otherwise raring to start delivering value.
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Synergy: Agile and User Experience Design
Scott Ambler believes that User Experience Design (UED) is critical to the success of agile software development techniques, because it increases a team's chances of building the right software to meet customers' real goals. This article describes how Agile and UED communities can work together closely for project success.
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SOA Mission Accomplished--90 Percent Complete
A recent Aberdeen survey of over 120 IT firms indicates that nine of every ten companies are adopting or have adopted service-oriented architectures and will exit 2006 with SOA planning, design, and programming experience.
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Statistics on Agile Practices Problematic
Keith Ray questions the value of statistics for software processes, including Agile processes.
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Google's Lean Software Process
On the Manageability.org blog, Carlos E. Perez asked "how closely do Google's development practices match Lean software development?" and compared their process against the seven Lean Software practices: Eliminate Waste, Amplify Learning, Empower the Team, Deliver as Fast as Possible, See the Whole, Build Integrity In, Decide as Late as Possible.
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Outsourcing Gone Bad - Another Reason to Consider Agile
Proponents of Agile methods suggest they can spare organizations some outsourcing nightmares, by helping in-house teams produce ROI comparable to outsourced solutions. Stories from Sprint and Sears provide incentive to at least give them a hearing.
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Good, Fast, Cheap: Pick Two
Ron Jeffries is at it again. Always on the lookout for a great opportunity, he has made an unparalled online offer: send me your money and I'll send you (some kind of) software :-D
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Value-Driven Planning and Metrics
A stable Agile team can cost roughly the same each week, but value delivered changes over time. Agile planning takes into account the customer's view of value, allowing the team to deliver the most important business value right away, and allowing their customer to halt the work when cost exceeds value delivered. Why aren't all teams measuring Business Value? Dan Rawsthorne shows one way to do it.
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Strategies for Remaining Focussed on Your Project's Goal
Catalysts' Christoph Steindl describes strategies for how you can stay focused on the true goal(s) which your project team is chartered to achieve via effective use of strategic objectives maps and related agile project management strategies.
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Should We Manage Both Features and Tasks?
Although it keeps people busy, managing tasks is neither interesting nor useful. Managing value created provides greater leverage and greater risk management. Jon Kern blogged last week on creating good features (rather than tasks) by focusing on value and testability. But do we sometimes need to manage tasks, too? David Anderson used the Theory of Constraints to back an unexpected answer.
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Ron Jeffries Overviews Financial Implications of 80-20 Rule
Pareto's rule, also known as the 80-20 rule, tells us that we can acheive 80% of the benefits from 20% of the software. The implication is that we might want to stop at that 80% level whenever possible.
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Microsoft Motion Light: Rapid Business Architecture Techniques
Microsoft Motion is a dynamic and systematic approach to decomposing a businesss into discreet capabilities. It organizes, measures and evaluates these capabilities and is a compliment to process mapping.