A colleague was looking for a way to move toward agile but not really transition all the way. “I don’t think we’re ready for two- or three-week iterations,” he said. “We want to move a little more slowly than that. But, we do want to do something more agile than waterfall. And, we want to […]
I often receive emails from readers asking questions such as “We have ten developers and two testers. How do we compare to our industry?”; “We have six-week iterations and a two-month hardening iteration at the end of our release. How agile are we?”; “We finish twelve stories in a four-week iteration. How many stories do
Sophie strode down the hall to Randy’s office. “Randy, what is this?” she asked as she waved a sheaf of papers. Randy looked up and said, “I have no idea. What are you waving around?” “Your plans for your group!” “Oh, my predicted project portfolio for the next six months?” “Yes! When were you going
As organizations have transitioned to agile projects and programs, what happens to the managers? Do we need managers any more? If so, what good would they do? Yes, we need managers. And in a truly agile organization, where the managers are freed from the day-to-day tactical project tasks, we need them more than ever as
Agile approaches work for projects. Have you considered how to make agile work for a program? A program is composed of several projects, typically across the organization. Each of the sub-projects delivers value. But the real value to the organization is when all of the projects deliver results in a synchronized fashion. Since agile approaches
Summary: As a lead and manager, your job to remove obstacles that impede work is most important. But of all the obstacles you find, whether they be people’s perceptions, bottlenecks in the work flow, or an ill-fitted chair or desk, which do you tackle first? Johanna Rothman has cleared countless of obstacles for numerous teams.
Summary: Your developers are already working feature-by-feature in iterations, but your testers are stuck with manual tests. How do you make the leap to agile testing when the nature of agile’s iterative releases challenges testers to test working segments of a product instead of the complete package? In this week’s column, Johanna Rothman explains that
Summary: If you’ve been tasked with creating an agile team, first consider what differentiates an agile team from a non-agile team. In this week’s column, Johanna Rothman highlights six behaviors of people on successful agile teams that candidates for an agile team should possess. Are agile team members different from people on other teams? Yes
Agile projects, especially if you are starting your agile transition, can have plenty of problems. Some are technical debt problems, such as the build taking too long or having insufficient automated tests to know if your changes are helping or hurting the system. But there’s another insidious management problem when many teams transition to agile:
Summary: If you’re a test manager–or any sort of manager, for that matter–in a company that’s transitioning to agile, you might be curious about where you stand in the new environment. Many of the traditional management roles are gone, but managers still have their place. As Johanna Rothman explains, it’s time to think about coaching,