I’ve been in the process of introducing agile over at NetDoktor for over a year. I really like the sound of “in the process of introducing agile”. It’s kinda like the permanent Gmail Beta (or Flickr Alpha). It means there will never really be a “final” agile process here and that’s a great thing! Why? [...]
From the category archives:
Agile Methodologies
Writing software that doesn’t suck is hard – even for the pros. The problem doesn’t lie in solving a hard problem, but in creating a solution which is easy to understand, robust, and easy to change.
A lot of problems in teams and organizations stem from bad code. Bad code ruins the motivation of your team, [...]
One finding from our survey was that a lot of you want to read more about agile basics. As most of you haven’t followed Agile Web Operations since Day One, here’s a list of the top three posts about agile and kanban:
Jeff Patton’s talk at agile 2009 about Pragmatic Personas is quite interesting. I’ve seen talks about personas way back at agile 2007 already, but, at that time, I found them quite “bulky” to use. In pragmatic personas I see more value.
When we start optimizing our processes, it happens quite often that we only optimize our area of influence instead of addressing the whole process of creating customer value. When we’re responsible for a software development or an operations team, we tend to optimize the process of our team. We adapt agile practices and our teams [...]
Too often people complain that to become agile they need to start using iterations, fancy story points and time boxes even though it simply does not fit the way they work.
But, that’s not true. Agile is much simpler than that. And much harder. In essence, agile is about fast feedback. But the feedback needs to [...]
If you want to get things done, focus is the key. Single piece flow (focusing on only one task at a time) might be too extreme, but limiting your work to your capacity is mandatory. No matter whether we’re talking about a team, an organization or about your personal productivity.
I will continue my course about agile methodologies at the University of Augsburg with both a Scrum and a Lean project simulation. The Scrum simulation will introduce the students to concepts like User Stories, Backlog, Iteration, etc.
After doing lots of Gantt Charts, Use Case Diagrams etc. in the waterfall simulation, it’s time now to break [...]
Matthias and I started this blog over a year ago because we had first-hand experiences with the rift between developers and sysadmins. We knew this was a lose-lose situation not only for those directly involved, but the companies they were working for as well. We’ve described many real-life examples of how to overcome this rift, [...]
The first simulation in my course about agile methodologies will be waterfall style. Here’s how I plan to do it.
Before we go into the details of the waterfall simulation, I want the whole group (around 20-30 people) to come up with requirements for the product to build: an online office suite (maybe the most boring [...]
