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: 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,
If you are anything like me, you have a to-do list a mile long. Because I work for myself, I have an integrated list of everything I need to do: projects for clients, books to write, articles to write, columns to write, presents to buy, house maintenance, clothes to organize, office cleanup. The list is
Some agile teams build and maintain their project’s rhythm, happily developing the system. Sure, they may encounter issues–but they can manage those problems and they successfully release the product. No one works overtime, the product owner is happy and the users are happy with the system. Then there are the other teams. I meet many
Have you ever waited weeks for one piece of functionality so you could release a large project? Have you been in the situation where the software is waiting for the hardware? Or where the database admin held up the entire release because his work wasn’t coordinated with the feature-based teams? That’s because you were working
I originally wanted to write about how to start an agile project, possibly the pilot agile project in your organization—if it was starved of resources, people, machines, space, whatever. But I can’t write that article because no advice is worth the space. You shouldn’t even start that project. An important tenet of agile project management
If you’ve started to use agile approaches to your projects, you’ve reaped the benefits of seeing completed work, reduced work in progress, and making project risks more transparent earlier. But there’s another benefit of moving to delivering work in smaller chunks: incremental funding for projects. Few organizations have embraced the idea of incremental funding. It’s