InfoQ Homepage Management Content on InfoQ
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VersionOne Announces New UI and Embedded Forecasting in Release 8
VersionOne recently announced Release 8 of their agile project management and team organization tool suite. This new release features an all-new user interface, introduction of a release forecasting toolset, and additional plug-n-play integrations for some popular open source tools.
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Measure Teams, Not Individuals
Michael Dubakov recently expressed warning against the measurement of individual velocity and individual estimate accuracy. His view: measurement of these metrics not only provides no more useful information than is already available with their team-level equivalents, but may also have a tendency to encourage teams into behaviors that reduce effectiveness.
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Target Process 2.7: Agile Project Management tool for Distributed Teams
Target Process 2.7 has been released. Target Process is an Agile Process Management tool that automates many of the tasks associated with an agile project. Notable features in recent iterations include visual iteration planning, program level release planning, individual velocity reports, and more.
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Successful Collaboration Doesn't Happen by Accident
Partnership Coach Michael Spayd tells us that both contractors and permanent employees can find themselves playing a "consultant" role, and should consider using consulting contracts or "designed partnerships" with their clients - not regarding the exchange of money, but to create a climate for stellar results for the client, while also communicating their own values and preferences.
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Big Architecture Up Front - A Case of Premature Scalaculation?
Taking a look at the reaction in the blogosphere to the idea of "premature scalaculation". The question is - when designing your application, how much time should you spend on building out for scalability?
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Panel on Agile Leadership: Stories from the Trenches
InfoQ presents video of a panel from the APLN Leadership Summit at Agile2006, where four business leaders spoke about their experiences: Bud Phillips (Capital One Financial), Israel Ganot (BMC Software), Steven Ambrose (DTE Energy), Peter George (Cronos Inc.). Topics included top-down vs. bottom-up adoption, making the leap of faith to enterprise adoption and the value of the PMO.
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Leadership is not Obsolete for Self-Organizing Teams!
In this talk, software thought leader Mary Poppendieck reviewed 20th century management theories, including Toyota and Deming, and went on to talk about "the matrix problem", alignment, waste cutting, planning, standards and other topics including the role of measurement: "cash flow thinking" over "balance sheet thinking". InfoQ presents video of this popular talk from the Agile2007 conference.
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Ready! Set! Getting New Team Members off to a Good Start.
How long does it take a newcomer to become an effective member of your team? Learning is integral to agile methodologies, but the learning needs of the newcomer are different from established team members: in a standup meeting, "I did (unintelligible) yesterday" offers them more questions than answers. Pat Kua suggests some practices that specifically reduce the "setup time" for new team members.
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Without a Defined Process, How Will We Know Who To Blame?
"A fundamental premise of the 'train-wreck' approach to management is that the primary cause of problems is 'dereliction of duty'" said Peter Scholtes in his 2003 book on leadership. Mary Poppendieck's recent article on process, people and systems asked: "Which is more important - process or people?" and showed how Lean is an alternative to certified process improvement programs like ISO 9000.
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Presentation: Operational Manageability lessons learned from eBay
You're confident that your software will handle horizontal scale to thousands of servers. But how about your operational team? Have you also architected for managing that large collection of servers? Dan Pritchett will present lessons learned at eBay and lead a discussion on how to ensure your transactional scalability doesn't ignore your architecture's manageability.
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InfoQ Book Review: The Responsibility Virus
Agile teams can use a regular learning cycle to shift gradually and organically into a more collaborative mode. But the rest of the business may not be equally well equipped. Deborah Hartmann proposes that the Responsibility Virus is an important book for the change agent's library, suggesting that it may provide a tool to help other parts of the organization also grow into greater collaboration.
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Opinion: Do Agile Development Practices Always Help?
Are our efforts in Agile development really helping the organizations we work for? What does it mean to ‘help’ our organization anyway? That depends on our organization's goals – if what we are doing moves our organization towards its goals, then the answer is “yes”, otherwise the answer is “absolutely not”, we may even be inadvertently hurting the organization.
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Why do Agile Adoptions Fail?
Although agilists focus much of their energy on helping their agile projects succeed, it is helpful to periodically stop and consider what causes some agile projects and agile adoptions to fail. Armed with this knowledge, perhaps one can avoid these same pitfalls.
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InfoQ Article: Lean Kanban Boards for Agile Tracking
"Big Visible Charts" aren't unique to Agile - Lean manufacturing also has its Kanban Boards. "Kanban" roughly means "card or sign," and each Kanban card is "pulled" onto the board only when the work represented by an "in progress" card is retired. In this InfoQ article, Kenji Hiranabe proposes using Kanban Boards to track Agile project status (Time, Task, and Team) to enhance collaboration.
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InfoQ Article: Creating a Collaborative Workspace
We may imagine an extremely Agile team as working in a minimalist teamroom, surrounded by whiteboards. But that isn't enough - some of the comforts left behind in our traditional spaces were there for good reasons. In this InfoQ article several experienced coaches offer advice from experience, on creating collaborative team spaces that work.