InfoQ Homepage Delivering Value Content on InfoQ
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Why 1994 and 1998 CHAOS Stats Differ Widely
Jim Johnson, creator of the CHAOS Chronicles on project failure, answers a question outstanding after our August interview: How does he explain the amazing change in cost overrun from 189% in 1994 to 69% in 1998? Apparently Standish planned to publish a CHAOS report in 1996 but held it back due to these unexpected results. Johnson shares what their research revealed happened.
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Presentation: Jeff Sutherland on The Roots of Scrum
Jeff Sutherland, an Agile Manifesto signatory, ran the first Scrum at Easel Corp. in 1993. At JAOO 2005 he covered the history of Scrum from its inception to its impact at Easel, Fuji-Xerox, Honda, WildCard, Lexus, Google. Along the way Sutherland shared interesting stories & looked at Scrum types A, B, and "all at once" type C, reminding listeners that cultural change is the hard part of Scrum.
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New Book on Lean Software Offers Practical Advice
In 2003 Mary and Tom Poppendieck adapted the revolutionary principles of Lean manufacturing for software development. Their new book offers a blend of history, theory, and practice, drawing on their experience optimizing the software "value stream". They present the right questions to ask, the key issues to focus on, and techniques proven to work for those implementing a lean software process.
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Opinion: Putting Overtime in Perspective
Agile work, when done in a disciplined, creative way, tends to be very intense, so Agile leaders encourage balanced lives for team members and promote "sustainable pace". Mitch Lacey, a Microsoft Program Manager, recently blogged about his emerging understanding of how to use this XP practice appropriately.
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Presentation: Agile Project Management Planning and Budgetting
What happens to planning when teams "self organize"? Agile methods are empirical: plan it, do it, evaluate, plan again. David Hussman reviews practices for planning a project, release, iteration.
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InfoQ Interview: Jim Johnson, Creator of the CHAOS Chronicles
InfoQ editor Deborah Hartmann interviewed the creator of the CHAOS Chronicles, Standish Group founder and chairman Jim Johnson. The Standish Group's statistics on project failure are widely quoted, as they have been since the first survey results came out in 1994. Jim spoke with Deborah about his research, and the role of Agile in changing the IT industry.
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Opinion: Inability to Adopt Agile May Signal Bigger Problems
Peter Coffee, IT industry veteran, blogged on the recent Digital Focus survey of the state of Agile practice, noting that obstacles to Agile adoption are also general danger signs of development dysfunction.
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Tackle Testing Debt Incrementally
Technical debt can shorten a product's life. But when technical debt mounts, it can be difficult to see how to pay it off. In her StickyMinds column, Johanna Rothman explains practices to help teams start paying off that debt - thereby easing their product's development and maintenance for a long time.
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Industry Survey Reveals The Bitter Truth About IT ROI
A Ziff-Davis CIO Insight survey on Business Value reveals little improvement in how, or how well, IT is measuring value, even though most firms now try to use metrics such as IRR, NPV, return on assets, or activity-based costing. There's no consensus or consistency on which measures to use, or when to use them. And half of respondents doubt that the measures are even accurate.
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Tips for Effective Kaizen Process Improvement
Agile software development and Lean Thinking go hand-in-hand for many practitioners. Six-Sigma blackbelt Mike Wroblewski has blogged some lessons learned from a recent kaizen session. People are a key variable in both manufacturing and software environments, so his lessons learned in manufacturing are also interesting for Lean Software practitioners using kaizen events for process improvement.
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Survey: The State of Agile in Practice
In March Scott Ambler surveyed over 4,200 people to discover the actual rate of Agile process adoption and effectiveness. His conclusion: Agile is not only growing in popularity, it's working so well that adopting an Agile approach appears to be an incredibly low-risk choice. Ambler recently published not only his conclusions but also the raw data he collected.
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The Creeping Featuritis Chart
Creeping Featuritis is an insidious sort of product rot, reducing useful software into heaps of expensive widgets and aggravating help features. Peter Abilla brings us a chart by Kathy Sierra, capturing what it looks like from the customer's point of view, and reminds us to "focus on the customer and abandon the competitor-focused strategy all-together."
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Measuring Performance in the Adaptive Enterprise
Traditional thinking has turned budgets into fixed performance contracts that force managers at all levels to commit to specified financial outcomes, despite the fact that many of the underlying variables are beyond their control. As Agility increases the futility of this exercise becomes apparent. Thought-leader Jim Highsmith proposes a helpful alternative more harmonious with Agile values.
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Naked Agile and Naked Skydiving
Prompted by recent discussions on the ScrumDevelopment list, Alistair Cockburn and Jeff Patton sound a call to focus on the basics: "Listening, Designing, Coding, Testing. That's all there is to software. Anyone who tells you different is selling something."
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Mary and Tom Poppendieck Discuss Their Next Book
Bob Payne interviewed Mary and Tom Poppendieck at Agile2006 about their next Lean book, which focuses even more on software than the last. Mary summarizes it as "So you think Agile is a good idea: now what?" saying it will help people get started with Lean, going beyond the recipes of the first book to provide practical information and case studies to help teams do their own process experiments.