In a recent workshop, a participant asked me, “What does agile mean? How do you know if you are agile?” He wants to use kanban to see the flow of work through his group. Someone told him he needed to use iterations to be agile. (I had a little rant about this in What Does Agile Mean […]
Lisette Sutherland posted a podcast we recorded about geographically distributed agile teams. See Organize Your Distributed Team over on the CollaborationSuperpowers site. We covered how you can think about your geographically distributed agile team: Why you want a distributed agile team (yes, there are some great reasons) How you might organize your team. Here are
I’m a new contributor to the TechBeacon site. I have an article up, called Small-world networks: a lightweight alternative to SAFe for scaling agile. Yes, it’s based on Agile and Lean Program Management: Scaling Collaboration Across the Organization. Hope you enjoy the article.
I sent my newsletter, Scaling Agile and Lean to Programs to my subscribers yesterday. (Are you one of them? No? You should be!) If you are trying to use agile for several projects that together deliver value (a program), you might be wondering what the “right” approach is. You’ve heard of frameworks. Some of them
In Part 1, I discussed the agile project system. In Part 2, I discussed the tester’s job in agile. In Part 3, I discussed expectations about documentation (which is what the original question was on Twitter). In this part, I’ll talk about how you “measure” testers. I see a ton of strange measurement when it
In Part 1, I discussed how an agile approach changes testing. In Part 2, I discussed how the testers’ job changes. In this part, I’ll talk about expectations. Since the developers and testers partner in agile, the testers describe their approach to testing as they work with developers on the code. (This is the same
Last week, I attempted to have a Twitter conversation about agile and testing. I became frustrated because I need more than 140 characters to explain. This is my general agile picture. For those of you can’t see what I’m thinking, the idea is that a responsible person (often called a Product Owner) gathers the requirements
In Part 1, I discussed the project system of agile. In this part, I’ll discuss the need for testing documentation. In a waterfall or phase-gate life cycle, we needed documentation because we might have had test developers and test executors. In addition, we might have had a long time separating the planning from the testing.
I spoke with a potential client last week. She said, “I’m waving the agile flag. But no one cares.” I wrote a Pragmatic Manager to sort through what I wanted to say to her. Read it at Feeling Alone on Your Agile Journey. If you feel stuck in the middle, or you’re alone, or you
A number of my clients are attempting to use agile as they transition from a strict waterfall to a more adaptive approach to their projects. One problem the change artists have is this: The managers, product managers, and maybe even the customers want to define all the requirements up front. I have not found the