I spoke with another writer, Sam, earlier this week. He’s pretty sure a colleague, John, is plagiarizing his blog posts. Not in writing, but in conversation. Yes, John is using Sam’s original words and phrases and passing those words off as John’s ideas. In videos, podcasts, all kinds of “thought leader” work. This happens. All […]
What risks does your project have? Do you need feedback loops so you can: Cancel the project at any time (to manage schedule and cost risks. Assess technical risks so you can rework the architecture or design to manage feature set risks. Manage what you release to customers so you can manage defect, feature set,
The original signatories of the Manifesto for Agile Software Development wanted to solve these specific problems: How can we: Bring more adaptability to software development? Stop “plan the work and work the plan” thinking? Release something of value earlier? Especially since teams now had these levers, from the iterative and incremental approaches: Prototype something for
I discussed the origins of the agile approaches in Part 5. In this post, I’ll discuss how you can create an agile approach that fits your context. Why should you create your own agile approach? Because your context is unique to you, your team, project, product, and culture. You deserve an agile approach that helps
Which levers does your team need to manage risk in your project? Do you need to cancel the project if you can’t finish a phase? You might not have the time. You might not have the ability to do this project. That’s the point of Serial lifecycles in Part 1. Maybe you need feedback from
So far, we’ve discussed the lever of canceling a project at any time with the serial lifecycles in Part 1. That’s assuming you replan and/or cancel. We added another lever of looking for more feedback with iterating over the requirements in the iterative lifecycles in Part 2. Teams have another lever. They can release increments
Back in Part 1, I wrote about how stage-gate approaches were as agile as we could use at the time. We had one delivery, so our agility was about canceling the project if we couldn’t finish it. However, some smart people also realized that we had another lever, aside from estimation, to replan the project.
Are you trying to make an agile framework or approach work? Maybe you have technical or schedule risk. Or, maybe you’ve received a mandate to “go agile.” Maybe you’d like to experiment with better ways of working. Or, maybe you’re trying to fit an agile framework into your current processes—and you’ve got a mess. You’re
Your team says they use Scrum in two-week iterations. And, in order to “finish” everything inside the timebox, you don’t do any of these things: Refactor to simplify the code or the tests. Create automated tests. Use formal acceptance criteria on a story or for the iteration or the project. That means you have work
While a pandemic might bring out the best and the worst of us, scams persist. I received an email this morning from a so-called “self-publishing” company. They are quite happy to help me get my book to traditional publishers. They didn’t say what it would cost, but they wanted the pdf of the interior and