Search Results

Search found 25999 results on 1040 pages for 'agile development'.

Page 2/1040 | < Previous Page | 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12  | Next Page >

  • 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!

    Read the article

  • 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?

    Read the article

  • Essential management tools for a small/medium software development shop

    - by mikera
    I've recently started work with an organisation that is rapidly expanding and is recruiting or growing several development teams (including two web-based products and a data warehouse/BI team). They are basically working to agile methodologies but haven't formalised a standard way of working yet. Despite the fact that it is early days, I've been surprised by the lack of tools being used to manage the development processes (e.g. no issue tracker, no tool to manage the product backlog etc.) Although it's not my primary responsibility, I'd like to help them out with some recommendations on the most important tools they should get in place. What are the 3-5 top priority tools to establish for management of a good development shop? Why are they necessary? How do they improve the software development process, and how do I justify them to my bosses?

    Read the article

  • 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?

    Read the article

  • 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?

    Read the article

  • 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  

    Read the article

  • Web application development over C++ development..

    - by learnerforever
    Hi, I am CS undergrad and CS grad. In college I used to program in C/C++/java and have pretty much stuck to the same skill set in industry with 3 years experience. I like thinking,reading,applying logic etc, designing data structures, but I have little patience with debugging large C++ code. And having to deal with low level stuff like memory fault,memory corruption,compilation/linking issues. My confidence in programming is getting down due to this, but I like being in technical field. Does web application development like LAMP suit (Linux,apache,mysql,php),CSS,scripting (AMONG OTHER WEB DEVELOPMENT RELATED SKILLS) etc need lesser patience with debugging,and understanding of low level stuff, but your analysis/logical skills also get used? Also opportunities in web application development look more. Things like scalability, most of the stuff that Google does fascinates me, but for patience needed for dealing with C++ debugging. I make blunders while coding. How does the field look like outside C++? I am beginning to wonder if as a female, by moving to web application development, I can better manage work life balance. I have seen relatively lesser females in C++ than in Java/.net. Not very sure about web related stuff though. Also, what are the other hot technologies being used in web application development? lamp,css is something I know vaguely. Not in touch with keywords going on in this area. Please help!!.

    Read the article

  • Mobile Development- Obtaining development hardware - best practices?

    - by Zoot
    I'm looking to get into smartphone development, but there a quite a few options out there for platforms right now. (iOS/Android/WebOS/Bada/Symbian/MeeGo/WindowsMobile/JavaME) I'd like to have development hardware to test my code and the overall functionality of the devices. What is the best way to obtain and/or borrow hardware for development and testing? Are there rules of thumb to follow which apply to all companies and platforms? In this situation, I'm a single developer. Does this process change for a startup? A hackerspace? A small business? A large business? Thanks.

    Read the article

  • 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

    Read the article

  • 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

    Read the article

  • 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.

    Read the article

  • Agile sysadmin and devops - How to accomplish?

    - by Marco Ramos
    Nowadays, agile systems adminitration and devops are some of the most trending topics regarding systems administration and operations. Both these concepts are mainly focused on bridging the gap between operations/sysadmins and the projects (developers, business, etc). Even if you never heard of the devops concept, I'm sure that this topic is your concern too. So, what tools and techniques do you use to accomplish devops in you companies? I'm particularly interested in topics like change management, continous integration and automatization, but not only. Please share your thoughts. I'm looking forward to read your answers/opinions :)

    Read the article

  • Agile Executives

    - by Robert May
    Over the years, I have experienced many different styles of software development. In the early days, most of the development was Waterfall development. In the last few years, I’ve become an advocate of Scrum. As I talked about last month, many people have misconceptions about what Scrum really is. The reason why we do Scrum at Veracity is because of the difference it makes in the life of the team doing Scrum. Software is for people, and happy motivated people will build better software. However, not all executives understand Scrum and how to get the information from development teams that use Scrum. I think that these executives need a support system for managing Agile teams. Historical Software Management When Henry Ford pioneered the assembly line, I doubt he realized the impact he’d have on Management through the ages. Historically, management was about managing the process of building things. The people were just cogs in that process. Like all cogs, they were replaceable. Unfortunately, most of the software industry followed this same style of management. Many of today’s senior managers learned how to manage companies before software was a significant influence on how the company did business. Software development is a very creative process, but too many managers have treated it like an assembly line. Idea’s go in, working software comes out, and we just have to figure out how to make sure that the ideas going in are perfect, then the software will be perfect. Lean Manufacturing In the manufacturing industry, Lean manufacturing has revolutionized Henry Ford’s assembly line. Derived from the Toyota process, Lean places emphasis on always providing value for the customer. Anything the customer wouldn’t be willing to pay for is wasteful. Agile is based on similar principles. We’re building software for people, and anything that isn’t useful to them doesn’t add value. Waterfall development would have teams build reams and reams of documentation about how the software should work. Agile development dispenses with this work because excessive documentation doesn’t add value. Instead, teams focus on building documentation only when it truly adds value to the customer. Many other Agile principals are similar. Playing Catch-up Just like in the manufacturing industry, many managers in the software industry have yet to understand the value of the principles of Lean and Agile. They think they can wrap the uncertainties of software development up in a nice little package and then just execute, usually followed by failure. They spend a great deal of time and money trying to exactly predict the future. That expenditure of time and money doesn’t add value to the customer. Managers that understand that Agile know that there is a better way. They will instead focus on the priorities of the near term in detail, and leave the future to take care of itself. They have very detailed two week plans with less detailed quarterly plans. These plans are guided by a general corporate strategy that doesn’t focus on the exact implementation details. These managers also think in smaller features rather than large functionality. This adds a great deal of value to customers, since the features that matter most are the ones that the team focuses on in the near term and then are able to deliver to the customers that are paying for them. Agile managers also realize that stale software is very costly. They know that keeping the technology in their software current is much less expensive and risky than large rewrites that occur infrequently and schedule time in each release for refactoring of the existing software. Agile Executives Even though Agile is a better way, I’ve still seen failures using the Agile process. While some of these failures can be attributed to the team, most of them are caused by managers, not the team. Managers fail to understand what Agile is, how it works, and how to get the information that they need to make good business decisions. I think this is a shame. I’m very pleased that Veracity understands this problem and is trying to do something about it. Veracity is a key sponsor of Agile Executives. In fact, Galen is this year’s acting president for Agile Executives. The purpose of Agile Executives is to help managers better manage Agile teams and see better success. Agile Executives is trying to build a community of executives that range from managers interested in Agile to managers that have successfully adopted Agile. Together, these managers can form a community of support and ideas that will help make Agile teams more successful. Helping Your Team You can help too! Talk with your manager and get them involved in Agile Executives. Help Veracity build the community. If your manager understands Agile better, he’ll understand how to help his teams, which will result in software that adds more value for customers. If you have any questions about how you can be involved, please let me know. Technorati Tags: Agile,Agile Executives

    Read the article

  • What do you do if you reach a design dead-end in evolutionary methods like Agile or XP?

    - by Dipan Mehta
    As I was reading Martin Fowler's famous blog post Is Design Dead?, one of the striking impressions I got is that given the fact that in Agile Methodology and Extreme Programming, the design as well as programming is evolutionary, there are always points where things need to get refactored. It may be possible that when a programmer's level is good, and they understand design implications and don't make critical mistakes, the code continues to evolve. However, in a normal context, what is the ground reality in this context? In a normal day given some significant development goes into product, and when critical change occurs in requirement isn't it a constraint that how much ever we wish, fundamental design aspects cannot be modified? (without throwing away major part of the code). Is it not quite likely that one reaches dead-end on any further possible improvement on design and requirements? I am not advocating any non-Agile practice here, but I want to know from people who practice agile or iterative or evolutionary development methods, as for their real experiences. Have you ever reached such dead-ends? How have you managed to avoid it or escaped it? Or are there measures to ensure that design remains clean and flexible as it evolves?

    Read the article

  • Trade-offs of local vs remote development workflows for a web development team

    - by lamp_scaler
    We currently have SVN setup on a remote development server. Developers SSH into the server and develops on their sandbox environment on the server. Each one has a virtual host pointed to their sandbox so they can preview their changes via the web browser by connecting to developer-sandbox1.domain.com. This has worked well so far because the team is small and everyone uses computers with varying specs and OSs. I've heard some web shops are using a workflow that has the developers work off of a VM on their local machine and then finally push changes to the remote server that hosts SVN. The downside to this is that everyone will need to make sure their machine is powerful enough to run both the VM and all their development tools. This would also mean creating images that mirror the server environment (we use CentOS) and have them install it into their VMs. And this would mean creating new images every time there is an update to the server environment. What are some other trade-offs? Ultimately, why did you choose one workflow over the other?

    Read the article

  • Is there a viable alternative to the agile development methodology? [closed]

    - by Eric Wilson
    The two predominant software-development methodologies are waterfall and agile. When discussing these two, there is often much focus on the particular practices that distinguish them (pair programming, TDD, etc. vs. functional spec, big up-front design, etc.) But the real differences are far deeper, in that these practices come from a philosophy. Waterfall says: Change is costly, so it should be minimized. Agile says: Change is inevitable, so make change cheap. My question is, regardless of what you think of TDD or functional specs, is the waterfall development methodology really viable? Does anyone really think that minimizing change in software is a viable option for those that desire to deliver valuable software? Or is the question really about what sort of practices work best in our situations to manage the inevitable change?

    Read the article

  • How should I pitch moving to an agile/iterative development cycle with mandated 3-week deployments?

    - by Wayne M
    I'm part of a small team of four, and I'm the unofficial team lead (I'm lead in all but title, basically). We've largely been a "cowboy" environment, with no architecture or structure and everyone doing their own thing. Previously, our production deployments would be every few months without being on a set schedule, as things were added/removed to the task list of each developer. Recently, our CIO (semi-technical but not really a programmer) decided we will do deployments every three weeks; because of this I instantly thought that adopting an iterative development process (not necessarily full-blown Agile/XP, which would be a huge thing to convince everyone else to do) would go a long way towards helping manage expectations properly so there isn't this far-fetched idea that any new feature will be done in three weeks. IMO the biggest hurdle is that we don't have ANY kind of development approach in place right now (among other things like no CI or automated tests whatsoever). We don't even use Waterfall, we use "Tell Developer X to do a task, expect him to do everything and get it done". Are there any pointers that would help me start to ease us towards an iterative approach and A) Get the other developers on board with it and B) Get management to understand how iterative works? So far my idea involves trying to set up a CI server and get our build process automated (it takes about 10-20 minutes right now to simply build the application to put it on our development server), since pushing tests and/or TDD will be met with a LOT of resistance at this point, and constantly force us to break larger projects into smaller chunks that could be done iteratively in a three-week cycle; my only concern is that, unless I'm misunderstanding, an agile/iterative process may or may not release the software (depending on the project scope you might have "working" software after three weeks, but there isn't enough of it that works to let users make use of it), while I think the expectation here from management is that there will always be something "ready to go" in three weeks, and that disconnect could cause problems. On that note, is there any literature or references that explains the agile/iterative approach from a business standpoint? Everything I've seen only focuses on the developers, how to do it, but nothing seems to describe it from the perspective of actually getting the buy-in from the businesspeople.

    Read the article

  • Web versus desktop development - is web development worse?

    - by Josh Kelley
    As a longtime desktop developer looking at doing our first large-scale web application, what are the pros and cons of doing web development? Is developing a web application much worse than developing a desktop app? E.g., is it more tedious or annoying? Is the time to market much worse? Is the web platform excessively limiting? If the answer to any of these is yes, then why? (And how does developing a Flash or Silverlight app compare?)

    Read the article

  • How to sell Agile development to clients [on hold]

    - by Sander Marechal
    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, how can you get your sales force to successfully sell a project that uses agile development methods, or a product that is developed using such methods? All the information I found seems to focus on project management and developers.

    Read the article

  • How to sell Agile development to (waterfall) clients

    - by Sander Marechal
    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, how can you get your sales force to successfully sell a project that uses agile development methods, or a product that is developed using such methods? All the information I found seems to focus on project management and developers.

    Read the article

  • Evolutions in Agile development field

    - by Samuel
    I recently pull up from under ten inches of dust one of my agile book. The book is now six years old; published in 2008. I prefer to keep it anonymous preventing to create a guerrilla of which one will yielded the best book about this subject. For that, I'm totally able to do a simple search from Amazon or Gooble to find the best book. I seen a couple of books about agile released in the last 2-3 years and I'm wondering if it will be a good investment to buy a more recent book than my old one. I mean, is there any great advancements in the last few years in the world of agile that worth to buy a more recent book? Thank you.

    Read the article

  • Rewriting software using Agile methodologies

    - by Asier
    Suppose you have to rewrite an entire application using Agile methodologies, how would you do it? I guess you could write a big bunch of user stories based in the behavior of your current system. And then implement them in small iterations. But this wouldn't mean that we have the requirements UP FRONT?? Also, when would you start releasing? Agile says we should release early and often, but it doesn't make much sense to release before the complete rewrite has been completed. Anybody has used Agile before to rewrite software? How did you do it?

    Read the article

  • What is Agile Modeling and why do I need it?

    What is Agile Modeling and why do I need it? Agile Modeling is an add-on to existing agile methodologies like Extreme programming (XP) and Rational Unified Process (RUP). Agile Modeling enables developers to develop a customized software development process that actually meets their current development needs and is flexible enough to adjust in the future. According to Scott Ambler, Agile Modeling consists of five core values that enable this methodology to be effective and light weight Agile Modeling Core Values: Communication Simplicity Feedback Courage Humility Communication is a key component to any successful project. Open communication between stakeholder and the development team is essential when developing new applications or maintaining legacy systems. Agile models promote communication amongst software development teams and stakeholders. Furthermore, Agile Models provide a common understanding of an application for members of a software development team allowing them to have a universal common point of reference. The use of simplicity in Agile Models enables the exploration of new ideas and concepts through the use of basic diagrams instead of investing the time in writing tens or hundreds of lines of code. Feedback in regards to application development is essential. Feedback allows a development team to confirm that the development path is on track. Agile Models allow for quick feedback from shareholders because minimal to no technical expertise is required to understand basic models. Courage is important because you need to make important decisions and be able to change direction by either discarding or refactoring your work when some of your decisions prove inadequate, according to Scott Ambler. As a member of a development team, we must admit that we do not know everything even though some of us think we do. This is where humility comes in to play. Everyone is a knowledge expert in their own specific domain. If you need help with your finances then you would consult an accountant. If you have a problem or are in need of help with a topic why would someone not consult with a subject expert? An effective approach is to assume that everyone involved with your project has equal value and therefore should be treated with respect. Agile Model Characteristics: Purposeful Understandable Sufficiently Accurate Sufficiently Consistent Sufficiently Detailed Provide Positive Value Simple as Possible Just Fulfill Basic Requirements According to Scott Ambler, Agile models are the most effective possible because the time that is invested in the model is just enough effort to complete the job. Furthermore, if a model isn’t good enough yet then additional effort can be invested to get more value out of the model. However if a model is good enough, for the current needs, or surpass the current needs, then any additional work done on the model would be a waste. It is important to remember that good enough is in the eye of the beholder, so this can be tough. In order for Agile Models to work effectively Active Stakeholder need to participation in the modeling process. Finally it is also very important to model with others, this allows for additionally input ensuring that all the shareholders needs are reflected in the models. How can Agile Models be incorporated in to our projects? Agile Models can be incorporated in to our project during the requirement gathering and design phases. As requirements are gathered the models should be updated to incorporate the new project details as they are defined and updated. Additionally, the Agile Models created during the requirement phase can be the bases for the models created during the design phase.  It is important to only add to the model when the changes fit within the agile model characteristics and they do not over complicate the design.

    Read the article

  • Business/Development Liaison Wanting To Enhance Understanding In Programming

    - by James Alexander
    I lead software development for a team of of about 20 devs and we're primarily a .net/sql server shop. We've recently created a new role in our organization for a more business like role to assist in prioritization of development and this business liaison has asked me if there are any books or resources he could use to better understand software concepts in a meaningful way. Any suggestions or advice would be greatly appreciated.

    Read the article

  • Introducing Agile development after traditional project inception

    - by Riggy
    About a year and a half ago, I entered a workplace that claimed to do Agile development. What I learned was that this place has adopted several agile practices (such as daily standups, sprint plannings and sprint reviews) but none of the principles (just in time / just good enough mentality, exposing failure early, rich communication). I've now been tasked with making the team more agile and I've been assured that I have complete buy-in from the devs and the business team. As a pilot program, they've given me a project that just completed 15 months of requirements gathering, has a 110 page Analysis & Design document (to be considered as "written in stone"), and where I have no access to the end users (only to the committee made up of the users' managers who won't actually be using the product). I started small, giving them a list of expected deliverables for the first 5 sprints (leaving the future sprints undefined), a list of goals for the first sprint, and I dissected the A&D doc to get enough user stories to meet the first sprint's goals. Since then, they've asked why we don't have all the requirements for all the sprints, why I haven't started working on stuff for the third sprint (which they consider more important but is based off of the deliverables of the first 2 sprints) and are pressing for even more documentation that my entire IT team considers busy-work or un-related to us (such as writing the user manual up-front, documenting all the data fields from all the sprints up front, and more "up-front" work). This has been pretty rough for me as a new project manager, but there are improvements I have effectively implemented such as scrumban for story management, pair programming, and having the business give us customer acceptance tests up front (as part of the requirements documentation). So my questions are: What can I do to more effectively introduce change to a resistant business? Are there other practices that I can introduce on the IT side to help show the business the benefits of agile? The burden of documentation is strangling us - the business still sees it as a risk management strategy instead of as a risk. What can we do to alleviate their documentation concerns and demands (specifically the quantity of documentation and their need for all of it up front)? We are in a separate building from our business, about 3 blocks away and they refuse to have their people on the project co-habitate b/c that person "won't be able to work on their other projects while they're at our building." They expect us to always go over there and to bundle our questions so that we can ask them all at once and not waste that person's time with "constant interruptions." What can we do to get richer communication from them? Any additional advice would also be appreciated. Thanks!

    Read the article

< Previous Page | 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12  | Next Page >