Agile Programming

How can a group of people – all of whom are individually capable and reasonable, form a team that is incompetent and unreasonable?  This is an intriguing topic being discussed on the Scrum Alliance Google group site.    Normally when we think of teams we think of a “greater collective intelligence” or how the “whole is greater than the sum of its parts”.   However, sometimes teams can also be “incompetent”, “unreasonable” or dysfunctional.  How can that be if the individuals within the team are not that way?  One view being expressed by the person that raised the topic is that team problems are often caused by people being afraid to open up about uncomfortable truths.  During meetings they will nod their heads in agreement, but in private, they fume.    Is this because they do not know how to voice their disagreement in a non-confrontational manner?  Or is it because team members do not have transparency into the complete status of the project and what other team members are doing and therefore their decisions may be biased due to lack of information and empathy?  Scrum tools and agile games are great because they address these “people issues”.     Using Scrum helps to create an environment of transparency which in turn leads to better communication and understanding among all team members .    If you have an opinion on this topic – jump into the conversation.

Posted: June 4th, 2010 under Agile ALM, Agile Programming, Scrum.
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Dave Thomas (Bedarra Research Lab) and Mike Cohn (Mountain Goat Software) will be keynote speakers for the Agile2010 Conference. Click here for details. Dave’s presentation should be an interesting retrospective on the last 10 years of Agile, as well as highlight some of the challenges and opportunities ahead of us. If you are new to Agile, it will be interesting to learn how the movement evolved over the last 10 years. For those that have been practicing for awhile, it will be interesting to hear more about what the future holds for Agile. Mike Cohn’s presentation abstract is not yet posted but you can go here to keep updated as the event planning proceeds. According to the Agile 2010 blog the program sessions and content will be scheduled with specific time and rooms by the week of April 26^th. This year’s event should be not only informative but fun as it will be held in Nashville, Tennessee.

Posted: April 23rd, 2010 under Agile ALM.
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In a blog post on the SDTImes website (“Agile Making ALM Teams Work Faster, More Open”), Jeff Feinman takes a moment to share one aspect of a larger article he’s working on about agile life-cycle management (ALM), but that one aspect is a big one. According to Feinman, as he’s surveyed dozens of ALM companies about how they deliver their processes, ALL of the companies he’s talked to report that “100% of their customers are at the very least thinking about adopting agile processes.”

Though agile has soared in popularity over the past year or two, this is still a staggering update, illustrating just how widely agile adoption truly is. Still, one enduring impediment to adoption is the desire for organizations to implement a tool, rather than a process. Anders Wallgren, CTO of Electric Cloud, explains: “Part of what takes a thing like agile some time to get adopted is, I think, naturally, we want to buy a tool, not a process. So if I hear about this thing called agile, I’ll say well, ‘Where do I buy the agile software package?’ It’s a little difficult to get people to change their processes.”

Of course, some tools are designed specifically to reinforce that process. As I’ve mentioned here before, my team manages its projects using Scrum. Because Danube’s tool ScrumWorks Pro was created with the framework in mind, it complements my team’s activities perfectly, while giving new team members a guide rail to help them follow Scrum’s processes.

Posted: March 17th, 2010 under Agile ALM, Agile Programming, Careers In Scrum, Scrum.
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