Agile Axioms from Paul Beavers

Paul Beavers, Senior Director of R&D at BMC Software, has been blogging about the successful BMC agile enterprise transformation experience. Paul was a collaborator of mine on that fun project, and as a senior director, he was personally responsible for driving much of the change that facilitated success. He has been synthesizing this experience [...]

Meeting Deadlines: What’s wrong with this Release Plan #2? (AERP8)

In my last post, Meeting Deadlines: What’s wrong with this Release Plan #1, I noted that the ability to commit to and deliver on near term deadlines is a reasonable and necessary accomplishment of a professional agile team and enterprise. To achieve this, we depend a lot on the release planning function (see Release Planning [...]

Meeting Deadlines: What’s Wrong with this Release Plan? (AERP7)

Ideally, we wouldn’t have deadlines in agile. As Tom Gilb noted “it’s as though I as a project manager weren’t allowed to know the projects end until the date arrived. The only instructions I’d get in advance would be to “be ready to pack whatever you’ve got every morning and deliver it by close of [...]

On Agile Maturity and Hardening Iterations

I’ve noted a teams need for an occasionally “hardening iteration” in SSA Chapter 13 as well as in a number of posts (Release Planning at Enterprise Scale: an Inside-out Narrative.) The hardening iteration is dedicated to eliminating technical debt, such as minor refactors, bugs, testing across multiple platforms, final QA, docs etc., that is [...]

Release Planning- Day 2 Narrative (AERP6)

Note: This is part of a series of posts (AERP1-n) highlighting the critical role that release planning plays in achieving enterprise agility. (These are organized under the Release Planning Category on this blog.) In my last post, Release Planning Day 1 Narrative, I described the program and content of the first day of a two [...]

Anti-patterns in Enterprise Agility

Based on my continuing experiences in applying agility at enterprise scale, I’ve observed a few anti-patterns (common but ineffective practices) that appear fairly frequently. If not addressed, any one of these could seriously limit the productivity and quality benefits that agile can deliver. Taken together,  it could be a real nightmare.
My short list includes:

Insufficient refactoring [...]

Enterprise Agility Tips from “Waltzing with Bears”

I admit to coming pretty late to DeMarco and Lister’s interesting (2003) book on risk management in software projects entitled “Waltzing with Bears“. While the book wasn’t written as a text on agile software development practices and not all of its recommendations are strictly agile, I found that it offers an interesting, mature and professional [...]

Building Scalable, Robust Architecture with Agile: Lessons Learned at Amazon

For any out there worried about whether or not large scale systems can be build with emergent (or intentionally emergent) architecture, I found the following post on the “High Scalability” blog by Todd Huff. http://highscalability.com/amazon-architecture.
In this post, Todd reflects on lessons learned at Amazon on architecture and scalability. The information was derived from various [...]

Release Planning at Enterprise Scale – An Inside-Out Narrative

Some of you may have been following the series I’ve been posting on Release Planning at Enterprise Scale. This series of posts is aggregated under blog the category “Release Planning” and identified as (AERP1-n.) You may find it most helpful to read the posts from oldest (#1) to newest (#n) as it makes a better [...]

Who Can Afford to Say they are NOT Agile?

In a recent post (Agile Adoption on the Rise? Problems Ahead), Pete Behrens notes that along with an increase in agile awareness comes an increase in the risk of what it means to be truly agile. Pete notes:
“This means that the rise in agile awareness and adoption will coincide with a rise in a veil [...]