Agile is NOT new and not enough

So people keep talking about the Agile – Waterfall dichotomy. About agile and un-agile practices. I decided to have an unscientific look at what Agile isn’t. If there is a true dichotomy between Agile and Waterfall, then things opposite of Agile should be either entirely out of scope for projects…

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Agile Training, Best Enjoyed Fresh

When I perform Agile Training I do it as a part of a larger Agile Coaching engagement with a customer. I do it as a directed intervention based on my ongoing diagnostic of how things are actually working at this point in time, with this client. I am a huge…

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The link between agile research and practice

How good is the link between agile research and practice? Not good enough I guess. Follow this interesting discusison on LinkedIN.

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Agile Contracts

Agile contracts, what are they? There is a kind of bad old tradition that software development contracts should be one of the following types: Fixed-price OR Time & matertials (T&M or TM) Fixed Price is Bad There is no doubt in my mind that fixed price contracts are a bad…

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My Journey towards Becoming an Agile Driver

A car turned over in the road.

What’s an Agile Driver? I have always been driving kind of ad hoc. Getting from A to B with no particular plan. If I were a programmer you would call it “cowboy coding” but I’m not, so we can call it “cowboy driving”. People, everyone it seemed — my boss,…

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Agile Configuration Management

I love configuration management! “But”, you ask, “isn’t configuration management boring?” Well, configuration management can be boring and tedious if you do it manually. With modern tools it is not all that bad. Even if it is boring, that is out-weighed by the sheer importance of proper agile configuration management for a successful software development team.

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Agile Estimation Units

Coffee cups as agile estimation units.

Which agile estimation units should you use? You can use any arbitrary units to estimate backlog items in an agile project. It does not matter if you do your estimation with story points, ping pong balls, man days, man hours, kLoCs. After a while your teams will converge on a…

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Brainstorming Does Work for Agile

Does brainstorming work? The post has lead to a few follow ups. As always, there is a question of is it done right? To take a quote from the article linked: “Group brainstorming sessions might produce a higher volume of ideas than a single person would but groups don’t produce…

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Agile Things to Remember

Here are a few “agile things to remember”: There is a difference between how and what. The responsibility for each is distributed to different people. Cheating contributes to technical and project debt. You will only fool yourself because debts must be paid. There is a difference between a supporting and…

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Agile in Regulated Industries

Agile in regulated industries — could that work? That is the topic of an upcoming webinar. I find this a bit ironic. Can we make Agile not work in regulated industries? Did Agile cause the Ariane V crash or was it “GRC (governance, risk and compliance)” that caused it?

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