Category: Project Management

Project management, product development management or whatever you may choose to call it. It is all about creating the right sets of circumstances to reach your goals together with other people.

Agile is not About Laissez-Faire

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Many people and companies think of Agile as some kind of Laissez-Faire approach to project management and software development. Agile is in fact a very rigid structure on how to do things so that there may be flexibility in what to do. Agile project management is based on advanced project…

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You don’t Need User Stories to be Agile

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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

Agile Change Requests

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Gold dollar symbols falling through an hourglass 3d Rendering.

There are change requests and then there are agile change requests. Now, I hear some of you saying to yourselves: “He is crazy, there is no such thing as ‘agile change request’!” You are right, partly, I agree that agile methods were designed to avoid change requests. But! All change…

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Success Factors for Agile Transition

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The Place de l'Opéra, before and after turning it into a roundabout

Surprisingly, perhaps, after over a decade of Agile methods there are still a lot of organizations that are not agile or are doing it badly? Why? According to one survey there are nine critical success factors for successfully introducing Agile Software Development in an organization.

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Backlog Prioritization for Value Based Agile Software Engineering

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Have you ever wondered why earned-value management is not really about value but about cost? According to EVM, as defined for instance in the PMBoK, value=cost aka budgeted cost of work scheduled.

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Are You Agile?

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A snip of the Agile Karlskrona TestSource: Owned by the author

The Agile Karlskrona Test

Are you Agile? Are you doing the “so called” 12 key agile practices? Have you taken the Agile Karlskrona Test? I am going to try it out on a customer today.

12 Key Agile Practices

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Which are the key agile practices? Researchers José Fortuna Abrantes and Guilherme Horta Travassos combed the research literature and were able to identify 12 key agile practices: test driven development, continuous integration, pair programming, planning game, onsite customer, collective code ownership, small releases, metaphor, refactoring, sustainable pace, simple design and…

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Attending Speech about Agile RUP

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I am attending a great speech by Julian Holmes on Agile RUP.

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Agile Practices Reduces Software Development Issues

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In a large study of the effects of switching to agile ways of working at a unit of Ericsson in Sweden researchers Kai Petersen and Claes Wohlin found a number of issues with Agile Software Development but far fewer than with the previous plan driven approach. The table below shows…

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Agile Developers Trust their Teams

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Four people using each others as support form a small spiral.

Yesterday, I wrote about the methodological challenges of correlation based research on software artefacts. The article which is the base for this post also has a fundamental methodological flaw. McHugh, Conboy and Lang have perfomed a post hoc study of trust in agile software development teams where they asked the…

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