18 top agile practices

Haitian vodou altar - embodying top practices

Big ideas are dangerous. Something worked somewhere some when but it will not work everywhere and always. Teams and companies are likely to pick some agile practices while they disregard others. Keep reading for a list of the most agile sectors and the most common agile practices.

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Budget for Technical Debt Reduction

If you do not take care of technical debt reduction, you will end up like this house.

The foolish man builds his house on loose sand but the rains and the winds will crash it. (Matthew 7:24-27) Things have not changed that much in the last two thousand years. Technical debt remains a major challenge for software development teams.

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Agile Offshoring in Practice

How is Agile offshoring done in practice? Julian Bass studied seven different companies doing off-shoring London-Bengaluru. He had expected that the companies would have adapted a continuum of practices from Scrum and XP. Findings about Agile Offshoring To his surprise he found that this was not true. Instead, all of…

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You don’t Need User Stories to be Agile

Someone probably told you that you must have user stories to be Agile, right? But really, you don’t need user stories to be agile! I would have you consider what kinds of stakeholders and requirements you have and are trying to meet. Continue reading

Benefits of Kanban

In a recent, well written but smallish study, a team of researchers from Finland have tried to find where KanBan has benefits. In their setup, teams of master students were instructed to use KanBan in their software development projects and then interviewed about their subjective perception of the benefits of…

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Podcast on Agile on the Enterprise Level

Here is yet another great installment of the Business 901 podcast. This time on being agile on the enterprise level part 1, part 2. I agree with most of what is said in the podcast, especially that there is no “one size fits all solution“. Different teams have different needs.…

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Requirements Lifecycles

SDLC requirements life cycle phases

Requirements are highly controversial in software development. There is always too much and too little requirements. They are often blamed for project failure or seen as required for project success. I have seen cases where there were too detailed and complex requirements. The result was that everyone worked around the…

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Did Agile Ruin your Life?

Did agile ruin your life? These pair programmers do no seem that concerned.

Daniel Markham has written a rant about how many people feel that Agile has “ruined their lives”. Basically, he is saying that to these people Agile is just a new name for snake oil. Agile coaches are nothing but scamsters. The books they write are nothing but positively biased stories…

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