Johanna Rothman, Management Consultant
Expert in Managing Product Development
We might start to think about agile approaches as a project change. However, if you want to “scale” agile, the entire culture changes. Here is a list of the series and how everything changes the organization’s culture: Defining “Scaling” Agile, Part 1: Creating Cross-Functional Feature Teams. Without feature teams, I don’t see how you can …
Continue reading “Defining “Scaling” Agile, Part 6: Creating the Agile Organization”
People often ask me, “When is agile right or not right for a project?” I’ve said before that if the team wants to go agile, that’s great. If the team doesn’t, don’t use agile. That answer is insufficient. In addition to the team, we need management to not create a bad environment for agile. You …
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. …
If you are a leader for your agile efforts in your organization, you need to consider participating in The Influential Agile Leader. If you are working on how to transition to agile, how to talk about agile, how to help your peers, managers, or teams, you want to participate. Gil Broza and I designed it to …
Continue reading “Early Bird Ends Soon for Influential Agile Leader”
Way back when I was a developer, my professors taught me structured design and design by contract. Those were supposed to be the silver bullets for programming. You see, if you specified things enough, and structured things enough, everything would all work out. I thought I was the only idiot that structure and specification didn’t …
Continue reading “Change is Learning: No Silver Bullets or Quick Fixes”
While I was on vacation in early January, there were two interviews posted on InfoQ: Ben Linders interviewed Esther Derby, Don Gray, and me about the Change Artistry book. I’m really pleased about the way the interview came out. Thanks, Ben! Back at Agile 2013, Shane Hastie interviewed me. The interview is here. We spoke …
I just finished the electronic version of Manage Your Job Search, integrating my comments from my beta reviewers. I’m getting the book ready for print and audio now. One of my realizations is that a job search is an emergent project. As much as you might want to, you cannot predict an end date. Other …