Agile Development

Is Agile Coaching Becoming a Commodity Profession?

Last week alone I received five requests to be an Agile Coach, or a Scrum Master if you prefer (these two terms seem so interchangeable nowadays). The requests are always generic and ever so bland; in fact, I'm deleting them now... Oh I remember ever so fondly when Agile Coaching jobs were filled with people who actually knew how to coach teams. And even when they did not learn anything, at least they were actually interested in learning. Not anymore....

Zero Defects Philosophy in Software Development Environment

Zero Defects is a Lean philosophy introduced by Philip Crosby that aims to reduce and minimize the number of defects and errors in a process in hopes of getting things done right the first time. The ultimate aim of the theory is to reduce the level of defects to zero. Zero Defects certainly seems good in theory, but how does it actually apply to software development?

Continuous improvement should not be that hard. So why do so few companies actually do it?

Organizations that continuously improve their activities and find smarter and better ways to conduct business are the real game changers. They've figured out that the key to constant improvement is having a continuous improvement culture. I know this might sound strange, but it’s not complex to start working on building a continuous improvement culture.

How Prescriptive is Scrum?

This is a question asked frequently, especially by larger organizations that are struggling with scaling. On one hand, they want to keep the inherent flexibility and empowerment provided by Scrum – they have seen the great results that an engaged team can produce. At the same time, they need to keep consistency between the teams, create a common structure and scale a portfolio of projects. When team members want to make changes, how much leeway are they granted?

For higher productivity should we go even smaller?

There is something to be said about breaking up a big problem into smaller ones and then having small and focused teams resolve one small problem at a time. Agile has embraced this aspect and time and time again we have experienced how small teams are dramatically more efficient than large teams. The oft cited “truism” is that Agile teams should have 7 people plus or minus 2. Perhaps it is time to review this as the more time we spend looking...

A brief overview of Continuous Integration

Continuous Integration (CI) is a software development practice, which insures that changes to a project’s code base are built, tested, reported on, and rapidly made available to all parties after they are introduced. This framework frees developers from having to constantly create new builds for the Test and QA groups. Each subsequent build is established and promoted, then downloaded automatically for testing.