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  • Weeding out real agile from buzzword agile in an interview

    - by indyK1ng
    I've been interviewing for co-ops (paid internships) lately and a large number of the companies I've been interviewing with have been saying they use Scrum or some other agile methodology (scrum being the most popular). I know that there are real agile shops and there are places which say they use an agile methodology but are really doing something else and using agile as a buzzword. My question is, what are some questions I can ask in an interview which would separate these shops out?

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  • Is Agile the new micromanagement?

    - by Smith James
    Hi, This question has been cooking in my head for a while so I wanted to ask those who are following agile/scrum practices in their development environments. My company has finally ventured into incorporating agile practices and has started out with a team of 4 developers in an agile group on a trial basis. It has been 4 months with 3 iterations and they continue to do it without going fully agile for the rest of us. This is due to the fact that management's trust to meet business requirements with a quite a bit of ad hoc type request from high above. Recently, I talked to the developers who are part of this initiative; they tell me that it's not fun. They are not allowed to talk to other developers by their Scrum master and are not allowed to take any phone calls in the work area (which maybe fine to an extent). For example, if I want to talk to my friend for kicks who is in the agile team, I am not allowed without the approval of the Scrum master; who is sitting right next to the agile team. The idea of all this or the agile is to provide a complete vacuum for agile developers from any interruptions and to have them put in good 6+ productive hours. Well, guys, I am no agile guru but what I have read Yahoo agile rollout document and similar for other organizations, it gives me a feeling that agile is not cheap. It require resources and budget to instill agile into the teams and correct issue as they arrive to put them back on track. For starters, it requires training for developers and coaching for managers and etc, etc... The current Scrum master was a manager who took a couple days agile training class paid by the management is now leading this agile team. I have also heard in the meeting that agile manifesto doesn't dictate that agile is not set in stones and is customized differently for each company. Well, it all sounds good and reason. In conclusion, I always thought the agile was supposed to bring harmony in the development teams which results in happy developers. However, I am getting a very opposite feeling when talking to the developers in the agile team. They are unhappy that they cannot talk anything but work, sitting quietly all day just working, and they feel it's just another way for management to make them work more. Tell me please, if this is one of the examples of good practices used for the purpose of selfish advantage for more dollars? Or maybe, it's just us the developers like me and this agile team feels that they don't like to work in an environment where they only breathe work because they are at work. Thanks. Edit: It's a company in healthcare domain that has offices across US, but we're in Texas. It definitely feels like a cowboy style agile which makes me really not wanting to go for agile at all, esp at my current company. All of it has to do with the management being completely cheap. Cutting out expensive coffee for cheaper version, emphasis on savings and being productive while staying as lean as possible. My feeling is that someone in the management behind the door threw out this idea, that agile makes you produce more so we can show our bosses we're producing more with the same headcount. Or, maybe, it will allow us to reduce headcount if that's the case. EDITED: They are having their 5 min daily meeting. But not allowed to chat or talk with someone outside of their team. All focus is on work.

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  • Is Agile the new micromanagement?

    - by Smith James
    This question has been cooking in my head for a while so I wanted to ask those who are following agile/scrum practices in their development environments. My company has finally ventured into incorporating agile practices and has started out with a team of 4 developers in an agile group on a trial basis. It has been 4 months with 3 iterations and they continue to do it without going fully agile for the rest of us. This is due to the fact that management's trust to meet business requirements with a quite a bit of ad hoc type request from high above. Recently, I talked to the developers who are part of this initiative; they tell me that it's not fun. They are not allowed to talk to other developers by their Scrum master and are not allowed to take any phone calls in the work area (which maybe fine to an extent). For example, if I want to talk to my friend for kicks who is in the agile team, I am not allowed without the approval of the Scrum master; who is sitting right next to the agile team. The idea of all this or the agile is to provide a complete vacuum for agile developers from any interruptions and to have them put in good 6+ productive hours. Well, guys, I am no agile guru but what I have read Yahoo agile rollout document and similar for other organizations, it gives me a feeling that agile is not cheap. It require resources and budget to instill agile into the teams and correct issue as they arrive to put them back on track. For starters, it requires training for developers and coaching for managers and etc, etc... The current Scrum master was a manager who took a couple days agile training class paid by the management is now leading this agile team. I have also heard in the meeting that agile manifesto doesn't dictate that agile is not set in stones and is customized differently for each company. Well, it all sounds good and reason. In conclusion, I always thought the agile was supposed to bring harmony in the development teams which results in happy developers. However, I am getting a very opposite feeling when talking to the developers in the agile team. They are unhappy that they cannot talk anything but work, sitting quietly all day just working, and they feel it's just another way for management to make them work more. Tell me please, if this is one of the examples of good practices used for the purpose of selfish advantage for more dollars? Or maybe, it's just us the developers like me and this agile team feels that they don't like to work in an environment where they only breathe work because they are at work. Thanks. Edit: It's a company in healthcare domain that has offices across US. It definitely feels like a cowboy style agile which makes me really not wanting to go for agile at all, esp at my current company. All of it has to do with the management being completely cheap. Cutting out expensive coffee for cheaper version, emphasis on savings and being productive while staying as lean as possible. My feeling is that someone in the management behind the door threw out this idea, that agile makes you produce more so we can show our bosses we're producing more with the same headcount. Or, maybe, it will allow us to reduce headcount if that's the case. EDITED: They are having their 5 min daily meeting. But not allowed to chat or talk with someone outside of their team. All focus is on work.

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  • Agile project management, agile development: early integration

    - by Matías Fidemraizer
    I believe that agile works if everything is agile. In software development area, in my opinion, if team members' code is integrated early, code will be more in sync and this has a lot of pros: Early integration helps team members to avoid painful merges. Encourages better coding habits, because everyone makes sure that they don't break co-workers' code everyday. Both developers and architects (code reviewers) may detect bad design decisions or just wrong development directions in real-time, preventing useless work. Actually I'm talking about getting the latest version of code base and checking-in your own code to the source control in a daily basis. When you start your coding day (i.e. you arrive to your work), your first action is updating your code base with the latest version from the source control. In the other hand, when you're about an hour to leave from your work and go home, your last action is checking-in your code to the source control and be sure that your day work doesn't break the project's build process. Rather than updating and checking-in your code once you finished an entire task, I believe the best approach is fixing small and flexible personal milestones and checking-in the code once you finish one of these. I really believe that this coding approach fits better in the agile project management concept. Do you know some document, blog post, wiki, article or whatever that you can suggest me that could be in sync with my opinion?. And, do you find any problem working with this approach?. Thank you in advance.

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  • What Agile Model do you use at Work?

    - by Kyle Rozendo
    I am looking to start pushing for more Agile processes to be brought into play in the work place and do my best to outlaw cowboy coding as much as possible. I understand many of the different models and am just looking to see which model has the higher uptake (or which parts of the model as well), and in what industry it is being used. Extreme Programming (XP) Adaptive Software Development (ASD) Scrum Dynamic Systems Development Model (DSDM) Crystal Feature Driven Development (FDD) Lean Software Development (LSD) Agile Modelling (AM) Agile Unified Process (AUP) Kanban If you care to add to your answer with comments about what you don't like, do like or have tried and it hadn't worked, that would also be appreciated.

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  • when to use a scaled/enterprise agile software development framework and when to let agile processes 'emerge'?

    - by SHC
    There are quite a few enterprise agile software development frameworks available: Scott Ambler: Disciplined Agile Delivery Dean Leffingwell: Scaled Agile Framework Alan Shalloway: Enterprise Agile Book Craig Larman: Scaling Lean and Agile Barry Boehm: Balancing Agility and Discipline Brian Wernham: Agile Project Management in Government - DSDM I've also spoken with people that state that your enterprise agile processes should just 'emerge' and that you shouldn't need or use a framework because they constrain you. Question 1: When should one choose an enterprise agile software development framework, and when should one just let their agile processes 'emerge'. Question 2: If choosing an enterprise agile software development framework, how does one select the appropriate framework to use for their organisation? Please provide evidence of your experience or research when answering questions rather than just presenting opinions.

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  • New Agile PLM Customer Testimonial Videos on YouTube

    - by Kerrie Foy
    Have you visited the Oracle Agile PLM channel on YouTube recently? There are many new video testimonials, and even an overview of how Oracle Agile PLM helps companies drive powerful corporate performance by maximizing product profitability. Here are a few highlights... Oracle Agile PLM: Proven Results Watch an overview of the transformative success our customers have realized using Oracle Agile PLM applications to take their company to the next level. Alcatel-Lucent Ups Competitive Edge with Oracle Agile PLM and Oracle EBS Brad Magnani of Alcatel-Lucent Enterprise describes how the Oracle Agile PLM and Oracle EBS solutions help speed time to market, eliminate wasted cash, secure data, and ensure product quality, enabling innovation and success. Herbalife: an Oracle Agile PLM Customer Video Filmed at OpenWorld 2010 Listen to Gary Swanson of Herbalife describe how his organization realizes powerful new insight into product information with Agile PLM Business Intelligence (BI). Tyson: an Oracle Agile PLM for Process Customer Video Filmed at OpenWorld 2010, featuring Kim Glenn Tyson: an Oracle Agile PLM for Process Customer Video Filmed at OpenWorld 2010, featuring Amber Woods We are so proud to have two testimonials from Tyson Foods! Tune in to each to see the unique perspectives on Agile PLM for Process at Tyson from different organizational views, demonstrating Oracle's ability to enable enterprise-wide PLM implementations delivering superior results. Take a moment to view these interesting customer testimonials to learn how Oracle Agile PLM applications are helping companies succeed. Subscribe to our YouTube channel today!

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  • Agile development challenges

    - by Bob
    With Scrum / user story / agile development, how does one handle scheduling out-of-sync tasks that are part of a user story? We are a small gaming company working with a few remote consultants who do graphics and audio work. Typically, graphics work should be done at least a week (sometimes 2 weeks) in advance of the code so that it's ready for integration. However, since SCRUM is supposed to focus on user stories, how should I split the stories across iteration so that they still follow the user story model? Ideally, a user story should be completed by all the team members in the same iteration, I feel that splitting them in any way violates the core principle of user story driven development. Also, one front end developer can work at 2X pace of backend developers. However, that throws the scheduling out of sync as well because he is either constantly ahead of them or what we have done is to have him work on tasks that not specific to this iteration just to keep busy. Either way, it's the same issue as above, splitting up user story tasks. If someone can recommend an active Google agile development group that discusses these and other issues, that'll be great. Also, if you know of a free alternative to Pivotal Labs, let me know as well. I'm looking now at Agilo.

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  • Agile Awakenings and the Rules of Agile

    - by Robert May
    For those that care, you can read my history of management and technology to understand why I think I’m qualified to talk about this at all.  It’s boring, so feel free to skip it. Awakenings I first started to play around with the idea of “agile” in 2004 or 2005.  I found a book on the Rational Unified Process that I thought was good, and attempted to implement parts of it.  I thought I was agile, but really, it wasn’t.   I still didn’t understand the concept of a team.  I still wanted to tell the team what to do and how to get it done.  I still thought I was smarter than the team. After that job, I started work on another project and began helping that team.  The first few months were really rough.  We were implementing Scrum, which was relatively new to everyone on the team, and, quite frankly, I was doing a poor job of it.  I was trying to micro-manage every aspect of the teams work, and we were all miserable. The moment of change came when the senior architect bailed on the project.  His comment to me was: “This isn’t Agile.  Where are the stand-ups?  Where are the stories?”  He was dead on, and I finally woke up.  I finally realized that I was the problem!  I wasn’t trusting the team.  I wasn’t helping the team.  I was being a manager. Like many (most?), I was claiming to be Agile and use Scrum, but I wasn’t in fact following the rules Scrum.  Since then, I’ve done a lot of studying, hands on practice, coaching of many different teams, and other learning around Scrum, and I have discovered that Scrum has some rules that must be followed for success, even though the process is about continuous improvement. I’ve been practicing Scrum right for about 4 years now and have helped multiple teams implement it successfully, so what you’re about to get is based on experience, rather than just theory. The Rules of Scrum In my experience, what I’ve found is that most companies that claim to be doing Scrum or Agile are actually NOT doing either.  This stems largely because they think that they can “adopt the rules of Agile that fit their organization.”  Sadly, many of them think that this means they can adopt iterations (sprints) and not much else.  Either that, or they think they can do whatever they want, or were doing before, and call it Scrum.  This is simply not true. Here are some rules that must be followed for you to really be doing Scrum.  I’ll go into detail on each one of these posts in future blog posts and update links here.  My intent is that this will help other teams implementing scrum to see more success. Agile does not allow you to do whatever you want A Product Owner is required A ScrumMaster is required The team must function as a Team, and QA must be part of the team Support from upper management is required A prioritized product backlog is required A prioritized sprint backlog is required Release planning is required Complete spring planning is required Showcases are required Velocity must be measured Retrospectives are required Daily stand-ups are required Visibility is absolutely required For now, I think that’s enough, although I reserve the right to add more.  If you’re breaking any of these rules, you’re probably not doing Scrum.  There are exceptions to these rules, but until you have practiced Scrum for a while, you don’t know what those exceptions are. Breaking the Rules Many teams break these rules because they are the ones that expose the most pain.  Scrum is not Advil.  It’s not intended to mask the pain, its intended to cure it.  Let me explain that analogy a bit more.  Recently, my 7 year old son broke his arm, quite severely (see the X-Ray to the right).  That caused him a great deal of pain.  We went first to one doctor, and after viewing the X-Ray, they determined that there was no way that they’d cast the arm at their location.  It was simply too bad of a break for them to deal with.  They did, however, give him some Advil for the pain and put a splint on his arm to stabilize the broken bones.  Within minutes, he was feeling much better.  Had we been stupid, we could have gone home and he’d have been just as happy as ever . . . until the pain medication wore off or one of his siblings touched the splint.  Then, all of that pain would come right back to the top.  Sure, he could make it go away by just taking more Advil and moving the splint out of the way, but that wasn’t going to fix the problem permanently. We ended up in an emergency room with a doctor who could fix his arm.  However, we were warned that the fix was going to be VERY painful, and it was.  Even with heavy sedation (Propofol), my son was in enough pain that he squirmed and wiggled trying to get his arm away from the doctor.  He had to endure this pain in order to have a functional arm. But the setting wasn’t the end.  He had to have several casts, had to have it re-broken once, since the first setting didn’t take and finally was given a clean bill of health. Agile implementation is much like this story.  Agile was developed as a result of people recognizing that the development methodologies that were currently in place simply were ineffective.  However, the fix to the broken development that’s been festering for many years is not painless.  Many people start Agile thinking that things will be wonderful.  They won’t!  Agile is about visibility, and often, it brings great pain to surface.  It causes all of the missed deadlines, the cowboy coders, the coasters, the micro-managers, the lazy, and all of the other problems that are really part of your development process now to become painfully visible to EVERYONE.  Many people don’t like this exposure.  Agile will make the pain better, but not if you remove the cast (the rules above) prematurely and start breaking the rules that expose the most pain.  The healing will take time and is not instant (like Advil).  Figuring out what the true source of pain and fixing it is very valuable to you, your team, and your company.  Remember as you’re doing this that Agile isn’t the source of the pain, it’s really just exposing it.  Find the source. My recommendation is that ALL of these rules are followed for a minimum of six months, and preferably for an entire year, before you decide to break any of these rules.  Get a few good releases under your belt.  Figure out what your velocity is and start firing as a team.  Chances are, after you see agile really in action, you won’t want to break the rules because you’ll see their value. More Reading Jean Tabaka recently published a list of 78 Things I Have Learned in 6 Years of Agile Coaching.  Highly recommended. Technorati Tags: Agile,Scrum,Rules

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  • Agile Database Techniques: Effective Strategies for the Agile Software Developer – book review

    - by DigiMortal
       Agile development expects mind shift and developers are not the only ones who must be agile. Every chain is as strong as it’s weakest link and same goes also for development teams. Agile Database Techniques: Effective Strategies for the Agile Software Developer by Scott W. Ambler is book that calls also data professionals to be part of agile development. Often are DBA-s in situation where they are not part of application development and later they have to survive large set of applications that all use databases different way. Of course, only some of these applications are not problematic when looking what database server has to do to serve them. I have seen many applications that rape database servers because developers have no clue what is going on in database (~3K queries to database per web application request – have you seen something like this? I have…) Agile Database Techniques covers some object and database design technologies and gives suggestions to development teams about topics they need help or assistance by DBA-s. The book is also good reading for DBA-s who usually are not very strong in object technologies. You can take this book as bridge between these two worlds. I think teams that build object applications that use databases should buy this book and try at least one or two projects out with Ambler’s suggestions. Table of contents Foreword by Jon Kern. Foreword by Douglas K. Barry. Acknowledgments. Introduction. About the Author. Part One: Setting the Foundation. Chapter 1: The Agile Data Method. Chapter 2: From Use Cases to Databases — Real-World UML. Chapter 3: Data Modeling 101. Chapter 4: Data Normalization. Chapter 5: Class Normalization. Chapter 6: Relational Database Technology, Like It or Not. Chapter 7: The Object-Relational Impedance Mismatch. Chapter 8: Legacy Databases — Everything You Need to Know But Are Afraid to Deal With. Part Two: Evolutionary Database Development. Chapter 9: Vive L’ Évolution. Chapter 10: Agile Model-Driven Development (AMDD). Chapter 11: Test-Driven Development (TDD). Chapter 12: Database Refactoring. Chapter 13: Database Encapsulation Strategies. Chapter 14: Mapping Objects to Relational Databases. Chapter 15: Performance Tuning. Chapter 16: Tools for Evolutionary Database Development. Part Three: Practical Data-Oriented Development Techniques. Chapter 17: Implementing Concurrency Control. Chapter 18: Finding Objects in Relational Databases. Chapter 19: Implementing Referential Integrity and Shared Business Logic. Chapter 20: Implementing Security Access Control. Chapter 21: Implementing Reports. Chapter 22: Realistic XML. Part Four: Adopting Agile Database Techniques. Chapter 23: How You Can Become Agile. Chapter 24: Bringing Agility into Your Organization. Appendix: Database Refactoring Catalog. References and Suggested Reading. Index.

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  • design in agile process

    - by ying
    Recently I had an interview with dev team in a company. The team uses agile + TDD. The code exercise implements a video rental store which generates statement to calc total rental fee for each type of video (new release, children, etc) for a customer. The existing code use object like: Statement to generate statement and calc fee where big switch statement sits to use enum to determine how to calc rental fee customer holds a list of rentals movie base class and derived class for each type of movie (NEW, CHILDREN, ACTION, etc) The code originally doesn't compile as the owner was assumed to be hit by a bus. So here is what I did: outlined the improvement over object model to have better responsibility for each class. use strategy pattern to replace switch statement and weave them in config But the team says it's waste of time because there is no requirement for it and UAT test suite works and is the only guideline goes into architecture decision. The underlying story is just to get pricing feature out and not saying anything about how to do it. So the discussion is focused on why should time be spent on refactor the switch statement. In my understanding, agile methodology doesn't mean zero design upfront and such code smell should be avoided at the beginning. Also any unit/UAT test suite won't detect such code smell, otherwise sonar, findbugs won't exist. Here I want to ask: is there such a thing called agile design in the agile methodology? Just like agile documentation. how to define agile design upfront? how to know enough is enough? In my understanding, ballpark architecture and data contract among components should be defined before/when starting project, not the details. Am I right? anyone can explain what the team is really looking for in this kind of setup? is it design aspect or agile aspect? how to implement minimum viable product concept in the agile process in the real world project? Is it must that you feel embarrassed to be MVP?

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  • “Being Agile” Means No Documentation, Right?

    - by jesschadwick
    Ask most software professionals what Agile is and they’ll probably start talking about flexibility and delivering what the customer wants.  Some may even mention the word “iterations”.  But inevitably, they’ll say at some point that it means less or even no documentation.  After all, doesn’t creating, updating, and circulating painstakingly comprehensive documentation that everyone and their mother have officially signed off on go against the very core of Agile?  Of course it does!  But really, they’re missing the point! Read The Agile Manifesto. (No, seriously - read it now. It’s short. I’ll wait.)  It’s essentially a list of values.  More specifically, it’s a right-side/left-side weighted list of values:  “Value this over that”. Many people seem to get the impression that this is really a “good vs. bad” list and that those values on the right side are evil and should essentially be tossed on the floor.  This leads to the conclusion that in order to be Agile we must throw away our fancy expensive tools, document as little as possible, and scoff at the idea of a project plan.  This conclusion is quite convenient because it essentially means “less work, more productivity!” (particularly in regards to the documentation and project planning).  I couldn’t disagree with this conclusion more. My interpretation of the Manifesto targets “over” as the operative word.  It’s not just a list of right vs. wrong or good vs. bad.  It’s a list of priorities.  In other words, none of the concepts on the list should be removed from your development lifecycle – they are all important… just not equally important.  This is not a unique interpretation, in fact it says so right at the end of the manifesto! So, the next time your team sits down to tackle that big new project, don’t make the first order of business to outlaw all meetings, documentation, and project plans.  Instead, collaborate with both your team and the business members involved (you do have business members sitting in the room, directly involved in the project planning, right?) and determine the bare minimum that will allow all of you to work and communicate in the best way possible.  This often means that you can pick and choose which parts of the Agile methodologies and process work for your particular project and end up with an amalgamation of Waterfall, Agile, XP, SCRUM and whatever other methodologies the members of your team have been exposed to (my favorite is “SCRUMerfall”). The biggest implication of this is that there is no one way to implement Agile.  There is no checklist with which you can tick off boxes and confidently conclude that, “Yep, we’re Agile™!”  In fact, depending on your business and the members of your team, moving to Agile full-bore may actually be ill-advised.  Such a drastic change just ends up taking everyone out of their comfort zone which they inevitably fall back into by the end of the project.  This often results in frustration to the point that Agile is abandoned altogether because “we just need to ship something!”  Needless to say, this is far more devastating to a project. Instead, I offer this approach: keep it simple and take it slow.  If your business members or customers are only involved at the beginning phases and nowhere to be seen until the project is delivered, invite them to your daily meetings; encourage them to keep up to speed on what’s going on on a daily basis and provide feedback.  If your current process is heavy on the documentation, try to reduce it as opposed to eliminating it outright.  If you need a “TPS Change Request” signed in triplicate with a 5-day “cooling off period” before a change is implemented, try a simple bug tracking system!  Tighten the feedback loop! Finally, at the end of every “iteration” (whatever that means to you, as long as it’s relatively frequent), take as much time as you can spare (even if it’s an hour or so) and perform some kind of retrospective.  Learn from your mistakes.  Figure out what’s working for you and what’s not, then fix it.  Before you know it you’ve got a handful of iterations and/or projects under your belt and you sit down with your team to realize that, “Hey, this is working - we’re pretty Agile!”  After all, Agile is a Zen journey.  It’s a destination that you aim for, not force, and even if you never reach true “enlightenment” that doesn’t mean your team can’t be exponentially better off from merely taking the journey.

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  • Security Talk Webcast: Agile Security - Develop Code Rapidly and Securely with SDL-Agile

    Find out how SDL and Agile can be made to work well together - and in many ways actually work better together than separately. Get an in-depth look at the new MSF-Agile+SDL process template for Visual Studio Team System that can help development teams integrate SDL-Agile tasks directly into their Visual Studio development environments....Did you know that DotNetSlackers also publishes .net articles written by top known .net Authors? We already have over 80 articles in several categories including Silverlight. Take a look: here.

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  • Agile PLM on Developing Agile PLM: Software Lifecycle Management

    - by Kerrie Foy
    Change is constant.  That saying couldn’t be truer when applied to software development.   And with all that change comes extensive product complexity.  How do you manage it all?  As software developers ourselves, we can certainly empathize with the challenge. On April 3, 2012 Stephen Van Lare, VP of PLM Product Development, hosted a webcast to share how Oracle uses Agile to develop Agile – a PLM solution for managing a PLM solution!   Stephen passionately shared his unique insight based on 10 years of using Agile PLM to manage the development process, as well as customer use cases.  He shared our time-proven view of the software’s relationship to the product record, while pointing out that PLM is not source control.  He began with the challenges of software development, which boiled down to the deduction that “despite many great tools in the software development industry, it takes a lot more than good source control, more than good bug tracking, to get to an on-time, on-budget and quality release in your marketplace.   It requires defining the right things you want to do, managing the scope, managing your schedule, and, most importantly, managing the change to all those things over the lifecycle of the process. And this is the definition of PLM.”   Stephen then defined the relationship of PLM to the software development process by detailing the two main use cases –  Product Lifecycle and Mechatronics – which can be used simultaneously and in fact are already used in most industries today.  The Product Lifecycle use case is used to manage artifacts and change throughout product development, while the Mechatronics use case involves the software, hardware and electrical design in the BOM.  In essence, PLM is just as relevant to software as the rest of the BOM when trying to maximize profits during any phase of the lifecycle. Please take the opportunity to watch Stephen Van Lare as he details how and why based on his own experience developing Agile with Agile, as well as a lively Q&A session, in the Software PLM Webcast Replay.

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  • Agile Development Requires Agile Support

    - by Matt Watson
    Agile developmentAgile development has become the standard methodology for application development. The days of long term planning with giant Gantt waterfall charts and detailed requirements is fading away. For years the product planning process frustrated product owners and businesses because no matter the plan, nothing ever went to plan. Agile development throws the detailed planning out the window and instead focuses on giving developers some basic requirements and pointing them in the right direction. Constant collaboration via quick iterations with the end users, product owners, and the development team helps ensure the project is done correctly.  The various agile development methodologies have helped greatly with creating products faster, but not without causing new problems. Complicated application deployments now occur weekly or monthly. Most of the products are web-based and deployed as a software service model. System performance and availability of these apps becomes mission critical. This is all much different from the old process of mailing new releases of client-server apps on CD once per quarter or year.The steady stream of new products and product enhancements puts a lot of pressure on IT operations to keep up with the software deployments and adding infrastructure capacity. The problem is most operations teams still move slowly thanks to change orders, documentation, procedures, testing and other processes. Operations can slow the process down and push back on the development team in some organizations. The DevOps movement is trying to solve some of these problems by integrating the development and operations teams more together. Rapid change introduces new problemsThe rapid product change ultimately creates some application problems along the way. Higher rates of change increase the likelihood of new application defects. Delivering applications as a software service also means that scalability of applications is critical. Development teams struggle to keep up with application defects and scalability concerns in their applications. Fixing application problems is a never ending job for agile development teams. Fixing problems before your customers do and fixing them quickly is critical. Most companies really struggle with this due to the divide between the development and operations groups. Fixing application problems typically requires querying databases, looking at log files, reviewing config files, reviewing error logs and other similar tasks. It becomes difficult to work on new features when your lead developers are working on defects from the last product version. Developers need more visibilityThe problem is most developers are not given access to see server and application information in the production environments. The operations team doesn’t trust giving all the developers the keys to the kingdom to log in to production and poke around the servers. The challenge is either give them no access, or potentially too much access. Those with access can still waste time figuring out the location of the application and how to connect to it over VPN. In addition, reproducing problems in test environments takes too much time and isn't always possible. System administrators spend a lot of time helping developers track down server information. Most companies give key developers access to all of the production resources so they can help resolve application defects. The problem is only those key people have access and they become a bottleneck. They end up spending 25-50% of their time on a daily basis trying to solve application issues because they are the only ones with access. These key employees’ time is best spent on strategic new projects, not addressing application defects. This job should fall to entry level developers, provided they have access to all the information they need to troubleshoot the problems.The solution to agile application support is giving all the developers limited access to the production environment and all the server information they need to see. Some companies create their own solutions internally to collect log files, centralize errors or other things to address the problem. Some developers even have access to server monitoring or other tools. But they key is giving them access to everything they need so they can see the full picture and giving access to the whole team. Giving access to everyone scales up the application support team and creates collaboration around providing improved application support.Stackify enables agile application supportStackify has created a solution that can give all developers a secure and read only view of the entire production server environment without console or remote desktop access.They provide a web application that provides real time visibility to the important information that developers need to see. An application centric view enables them to see all of their apps across multiple datacenters and environments. They don’t need to know where the application is deployed, just the name of the application to find it and dig in to see more. All your developers can see server health, application health, log files, config files, windows event viewer, deployment history, application notes, and much more. They can receive email and text alerts when problems arise and even safely query your production databases.Stackify enables companies that do agile development to scale up their application support team by getting more team members involved. The lead developers can spend more time on new projects. Application issues can be fixed quicker than ever. Operations can spend less time helping developers collect server information. Agile application support starts with Stackify. Visit Stackify.com to learn more.

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  • agile as our first project management methodology [closed]

    - by Hasan Khan
    we are a small web development company that has till now been working on client projects. we employed little to no project management and that has cost us a lot. we've used only the barest of tools (wireframing, prototyping etc) but no formal project management process has been put into place. we've learnt from our mistakes and want to prevent them from happening in the future. also, we are looking to develop our own products and we understand that putting in a proper project management paradigm will help. after a lot of research, we've sort of settled on agile for a few reasons: agile seems to scale well with team size. our team is small right now and we hope to grow and agile seems to be a process that we can put in place now and grow with. agile will help us with customers who just can't seem to make up their minds and keep changing requirements. we'd appreciate the community's thoughts on this. is this a correct way to think? will agile be a good system to put into place, where there has been none till now? are there any resources that may help us in our position? pretty much all of the resources that we've found start by comparing agile to x (where x = any management methodology) and why its better than x and how agile can be implemented in place of x. we're looking for resources that can help us out in our particular situation. thanks for all your help!

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  • How to represent an agile project to people focused on waterfall [closed]

    - by ahsteele
    Our team has been asked to represent our development efforts in a project plan. No one is unhappy with our work or questioning our ability to deliver, we are just participating in an IT cattle call for project plans. Trouble is we are an agile team and haven't thought about our work in terms of a formal project plan. While we have a general idea of what we are working on next we aren't 100% sure until we plan an iteration. Until now our team has largely operated in a vacuum and has not been required to present our methodology or metrics to outside parties. We follow most of the practices espoused in Extreme Programming. We hold quarterly planning meetings to have a general idea of the stories we are going to work on for a quarter. That said, our stories are documented on 3x5 cards and are only estimated at the beginning of the iteration in which they are going to be worked. After estimation we document the story in Team Foundation Sever. During an iteration, we attach code to stories and mark stories as completed once finished. From this data we are able to generate burn down and velocity charts. Most importantly we know our average velocity for an iteration keeping us from biting off more than we can chew. I am not looking to modify the way we do development but want to present our development activities in a report that someone only familiar with waterfall will understand. In What Does an Agile Project Plan Look Like, Kent McDonald does a good job laying out the differences between agile and waterfall project plans. He specifies the differences in consumable bullets: An agile project plan is feature based An Agile Project Plan is organized into iterations An Agile Project Plan has different levels of detail depending on the time frame An Agile Project Plan is owned by the Team Being able to explain the differences is great, but how best to present the data?

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  • How do you balance documentation requirements with Agile developments

    - by Jeremy
    In our development group there is currently discussions around agile and waterfal methodology. No-one has any practical experience with agile, but we are doing some reading. The agile manifesto lists 4 values: Individuals and interactions over processes and tools Working software over comprehensive documentation Customer collaboration over contract negotiation Responding to change over following a plan We are an internal development group developing applications for the consumption of other units in our enterprise. A team of 10 developers builds and releases multiple projects simultanously, typically with 1 - maybe 2 (rarely) developer on each project. It seems to be that from a supportability perspective the organization needs to put some real value on documentation - as without it, there are serious risks with resourcing changes. With agile favouring interactions, and software deliverables over processes and documentation, how do you balance that with the requirements of supportable systems and maintaining knowledge and understanding of how those systems work? With a waterfall approach which favours documentation (requirements before design, design specs before construction) it is easy to build a process that meets some of the organizational requirements - how do we do this with an agile approach?

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  • Is agile about development or management?

    - by ashy_32bit
    On a debate over what Scrum is all about, I found that perhaps I totally misunderstood the agile thing. It appears to me that Scrum (which is certainly considered an Agile process) is all about managing features and sprints and roles and stuff with nothing to do with TDD, pair programming, CI, refactoring and other developer centric techniques and practices that I though (until now) are the heart of agile. Now I am facing a difficulty ! 1) Is Scrum agnostic to whether developers do agile practices? 2) Can you implement Scrum in a team that does not utilize automated tests? does not perform refactoring or does not adhere to the agile programming practices?

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  • Agile Testing Days 2012 – Day 3 – Agile or agile?

    - by Chris George
    Another early start for my last Lean Coffee of the conference, and again it was not wasted. We had some really interesting discussions around how to determine what test automation is useful, if agile is not faster, why do it? and a rather existential discussion on whether unicorns exist! First keynote of the day was entitled “Fast Feedback Teams” by Ola Ellnestam. Again this relates nicely to the releasing faster talk on day 2, and something that we are looking at and some teams are actively trying. Introducing the notion of feedback, Ola describes a game he wrote for his eldest child. It was a simple game where every time he clicked a button, it displayed “You’ve Won!”. He then changed it to be a Win-Lose-Win-Lose pattern and watched the feedback from his son who then twigged the pattern and got his younger brother to play, alternating turns… genius! (must do that with my children). The idea behind this was that you need that feedback loop to learn and progress. If you are not getting the feedback you need to close that loop. An interesting point Ola made was to solve problems BEFORE writing software. It may be that you don’t have to write anything at all, perhaps it’s a communication/training issue? Perhaps the problem can be solved another way. Writing software, although it’s the business we are in, is expensive, and this should be taken into account. He again mentions frequent releases, and how they should be made as soon as stuff is ready to be released, don’t leave stuff on the shelf cause it’s not earning you anything, money or data. I totally agree with this and it’s something that we will be aiming for moving forwards. “Exceptions, Assumptions and Ambiguity: Finding the truth behind the story” by David Evans started off very promising by making references to ‘Grim up North’ referring to the north of England. Not sure it was appreciated by most of the audience, but it made me laugh! David explained how there are always risks associated with exceptions, giving the example of a one-way road near where he lives, with an exception sign giving rights to coaches to go the wrong way. Therefore you could merrily swing around the corner of the one way road straight into a coach! David showed the danger in making assumptions with lyrical quotes from Lola by The Kinks “I’m glad I’m a man, and so is Lola” and with a picture of a toilet flush that needed instructions to operate the full and half flush. With this particular flush, you pulled the handle all the way down to half flush, and half way down to full flush! hmmm, a bit of a crappy user experience methinks! Then through a clever use of a passage from the Jabberwocky, David then went onto show how mis-translation/ambiguity is the can completely distort the original meaning of something, and this is a real enemy of software development. This was all helping to demonstrate that the term Story is often heavily overloaded in the Agile world, and should really be stripped back to what it is really for, stating a business problem, and offering a technical solution. Therefore a story could be worded as “In order to {make some improvement}, we will { do something}”. The first ‘in order to’ statement is stakeholder neutral, and states the problem through requesting an improvement to the software/process etc. The second part of the story is the verb, the doing bit. So to achieve the ‘improvement’ which is not currently true, we will do something to make this true in the future. My PM is very interested in this, and he’s observed some of the problems of overloading stories so I’m hoping between us we can use some of David’s suggestions to help clarify our stories better. The second keynote of the day (and our last) proved to be the most entertaining and exhausting of the conference for me. “The ongoing evolution of testing in agile development” by Scott Barber. I’ve never had the pleasure of seeing Scott before… OMG I would love to have even half of the energy he has! What struck me during this presentation was Scott’s explanation of how testing has become the role/job that it is (largely) today, and how this has led to the need for ‘methodologies’ to make dev and test work! The argument that we should be trying to converge the roles again is a very valid one, and one that a couple of the teams at work are actively doing with great results. Making developers as responsible for quality as testers is something that has been lost over the years, but something that we are now striving to achieve. The idea that we (testers) should be testing experts/specialists, not testing ‘union members’, supports this idea so the entire team works on all aspects of a feature/product, with the ‘specialists’ taking the lead and advising/coaching the others. This leads to better propagation of information around the team, a greater holistic understanding of the project and it allows the team to continue functioning if some of it’s members are off sick, for example. Feeling somewhat drained from Scott’s keynote (but at the same time excited that alot of the points he raised supported actions we are taking at work), I headed into my last presentation for Agile Testing Days 2012 before having to make my way to Tegel to catch the flight home. “Thinking and working agile in an unbending world” with Pete Walen was a talk I was not going to miss! Having spoken to Pete several times during the past few days, I was looking forward to hearing what he was going to say, and I was not disappointed. Pete started off by trying to separate the definitions of ‘Agile’ as in the methodology, and ‘agile’ as in the adjective by pronouncing them the ‘english’ and ‘american’ ways. So Agile pronounced (Ajyle) and agile pronounced (ajul). There was much confusion around what the hell he was talking about, although I thought it was quite clear. Agile – Software development methodology agile – Marked by ready ability to move with quick easy grace; Having a quick resourceful and adaptable character. Anyway, that aside (although it provided a few laughs during the presentation), the point was that many teams that claim to be ‘Agile’ but are not, in fact, ‘agile’ by nature. Implementing ‘Agile’ methodologies that are so prescriptive actually goes against the very nature of Agile development where a team should anticipate, adapt and explore. Pete made a valid point that very few companies intentionally put up roadblocks to impede work, so if work is being blocked/delayed, why? This is where being agile as a team pays off because the team can inspect what’s going on, explore options and adapt their processes. It is through experimentation (and that means trying and failing as well as trying and succeeding) that a team will improve and grow leading to focussing on what really needs to be done to achieve X. So, that was it, the last talk of our conference. I was gutted that we had to miss the closing keynote from Matt Heusser, as Matt was another person I had spoken too a few times during the conference, but the flight would not wait, and just as well we left when we did because the traffic was a nightmare! My Takeaway Triple from Day 3: Release often and release small – don’t leave stuff on the shelf Keep the meaning of the word ‘agile’ in mind when working in ‘Agile Look at testing as more of a skill than a role  

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  • Agile isn’t always Agile

    - by BuckWoody
    I want to make a disclaimer before I dive into this topic – At Microsoft we use all kinds of development methodologies, and I’ve worked in lots of other shops using lots of methodologies. This is one of those “religious” topics like which programming language or database is best, and is bound to generate some heat. But this isn’t pointed towards one particular event or company. But I really don’t like Agile. In particular, I really don’t like Scrum. Let me explain. Agile is a methodology for developing software that emphasizes adapting to change more so than the traditional “waterfall” method of developing software. Within Agile is a process called a “scrum” meeting. The pitch goes that in this quick, stand-up meeting the people involved in the development project (which should include the DBA, but very often doesn’t) go around the room stating what they are working on, when that will be finished and what is keeping them from getting finished (“blockers”, these are called). Sounds all very non-threatening – we’re just “enabling” the developers to work more efficiently. And that’s what we all want, isn’t it? Except it doesn’t work. In my experience (and yours might be VERY different) this just turns into a micro-management environment, where devs have to defend their daily work. Of all the work environments I hate the most, micro-management environments are THE worst. I don’t like workign in them, and I don’t like creating them. The other issue I have with Scrum is that it makes your whole team task-focused. Everyone wants to make sure that they are not the “long pole” in the meeting (meaning that they aren’t the one that gets all the attention) so they only focus on safe, quick tasks. And although you have all of the boxes checked, the project does not go well at all – even when it does finish. Before you comment (and please do comment) I fully realize that Agile <> Scrum. But in my experience, it sometimes turns into that. Share this post: email it! | bookmark it! | digg it! | reddit! | kick it! | live it!

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  • How can I become more agile?

    - by dough
    The definition of an agile approach I've adopted is: working to reduce feedback loops, everywhere. I'd describe my Personal Development Process (PDP) as "not very agile" or "not agile enough"! I've adopted TDD, automated building, and time-boxing (using the Pomodoro Technique) as part of my PDP. I find these practices really help me get feedback, review my direction, and catch yak shaving earlier! However, what still escapes me is the ability to reduce feedback time in the ultimate feedback loop; regularly getting working software in front of the end user. Aside from team-oriented practices, what can I do to personally become more agile?

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  • How to choose an agile methodology?

    - by Christophe Debove
    I'm working in a little firm about 10 developpers, we are working a kind of agile way but knowledgeless and without formalism. I think be aware of what are agile method, what can they afford to us, may render more productive our products. However there is a lot of agile method, which could be the simplest to "learn"? Rapid Application Development Dynamic systems development method Scrum Feature Driven Development Extreme programming Adaptive software development Test Driven Development Crystal clear

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  • how can we have a person to allot and track tasks in agile development

    - by vignesh
    I understand that Agile team should be self organized and self driven, but is there a provision that I can have someone who will allot tasks to developers and ensure that all user stories will be completed on time?? For example if there are two persons in an agile team who are not self motivated to take up tasks and they will work only when task is assigned to them with a deadline, how can we deal this in Agile? The problem I face is that no one is fixing the deadlines for the tasks and the team is under delivering for the last two sprints. It will be better if we can have someone who can fix deadlines. IS there a provision for this in Agile

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  • Agile books for sales people? [on hold]

    - by Sander Marechal
    Are there any good books or other resources on how to sell agile to your clients? Our development shop would really like to do more agile projects but we have a problem getting clients on board. Many clients want a budget and a deadline. It's hard to sell a client on an agile project when our competitors do come up with waterfall-based fixed deadlines and fixed prices. We know their fixed numbers are bad, but the client doesn't know that. So, we end up looking bad to the client because we can't fix the price or a deadline but our competitors can. So, are there any sales-oriented agile resources that cover this? All the books I read focus on project management and developers.

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