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• What is the best resource for learning Scrum?

  - by Jason

  What is the best resource for learning Scrum?

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• Project manager programming background

  - by Henryk Konsek

  Do you think that project manager should have programming background? Do you consider this role as a natural way of evolution for the skilled/leader programmers (as an alternative for architect role)? Or maybe you believe that PM should be just a good manager with a basic understanding of the programming concepts and a fundamental knowledge about the technology you use. What is your experience with working with both kinds of managers (ex-programmers or just managers).

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• Change Comes from Within

  - by John K. Hines

  I am in the midst of witnessing a variety of teams moving away from Scrum. Some of them are doing things like replacing Scrum terms with more commonly understood terminology. Mainly they have gone back to using industry standard terms and more traditional processes like the RAPID decision making process. For example: Scrum Master becomes Project Lead. Scrum Team becomes Project Team. Product Owner becomes Stakeholders. I'm actually quite sad to see this happening, but I understand that Scrum is a radical change for most organizations. Teams are slowly but surely moving away from Scrum to a process that non-software engineers can understand and follow. Some could never secure the education or personnel (like a Product Owner) to get the whole team engaged. And many people with decision-making authority do not see the value in Scrum besides task planning and tracking. You see, Scrum cannot be mandated. No one can force a team to be Agile, collaborate, continuously improve, and self-reflect. Agile adoptions must start from a position of mutual trust and willingness to change. And most software teams aren't like that. Here is my personal epiphany from over a year of attempting to promote Agile on a small development team: The desire to embrace Agile methodologies must come from each and every member of the team. If this desire does not exist - if the team is satisfied with its current process, if the team is not motivated to improve, or if the team is afraid of change - the actual demonstration of all the benefits prescribed by Agile and Scrum will take years. I've read some blog posts lately that criticise Scrum for demanding "Big Change Up Front." One's opinion of software methodologies boils down to one's perspective. If you see modern software development as successful, you will advocate for small, incremental changes to how it is done. If you see it as broken, you'll be much more motivated to take risks and try something different. So my question to you is this - is modern software development healthy or in need of dramatic improvement? I can tell you from personal experience that any project that requires exploration, planning, development, stabilisation, and deployment is hard. Trying to make that process better with only a slightly modified approach is a mistake. You will become completely dependent upon the skillset of your team (the only variable you can change). But the difficulty of planned work isn't one of skill. It isn't until you solve the fundamental challenges of communication, collaboration, quality, and efficiency that skill even comes into play. So I advocate for Big Change Up Front. And I advocate for it to happen often until those involved can say, from experience, that it is no longer needed. I hope every engineer has the opportunity to see the benefits of Agile and Scrum on a highly functional team. I'll close with more key learnings that can help with a Scrum adoption: Your leaders must understand Scrum. They must understand software development, its inherent difficulties, and how Scrum helps. If you attempt to adopt Scrum before the understanding is there, your leaders will apply traditional solutions to your problems - often creating more problems. Success should be measured by quality, not revenue. Namely, the value of software to an organization is the revenue it generates minus ongoing support costs. You should identify quality-based metrics that show the effect Agile techniques have on your software. Motivation is everything. I finally understand why so many Agile advocates say you that if you are not on a team using Agile, you should leave and find one. Scrum and especially Agile encompass many elegant solutions to a wide variety of problems. If you are working on a team that has not encountered these problems the the team may never see the value in the solutions.   Having said all that, I'm not giving up on Agile or Scrum. I am convinced it is a better approach for software development. But reality is saying that its adoption is not straightforward and highly subject to disruption. Unless, that is, everyone really, really wants it.

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• Think Before You Leap - Life is Dangerous for Change Agents

  - by technodrone

  So you want to introduce agile methods to your team... The following are some "lessons learned" when from someone who advocated agile/scrum to a group that was not ready for it. "Change agents, in my experience, face negative consequences. Sometimes, most of the time at the beginning, it's painful. This is the question you might have to ask yourself. Do you want to be a developer in scrum project or do you want be a scrum master managing the process? I think with proper mentoring/training, you can become good scrum master. But is that what you want? if yes, you can go ahead, take the training. if you want to be a developer, you may not need to be certified  as scrum master. You can just pick up from a book such as Mike Cohn new book Succeeding with Agile, I am reading it now. It's good. In my experience, I did waste my resources by trying to change the culture. It cost me lot. Instead, I should have focused on technical practices that are core to agile. Then look for teams that are good at agile. I would have saved lot of energy, and time. Try baby steps first yourself in the company, and next with the team, starting with technical practices like writing unit tests, SOLID principles, patterns, refactoring, continuous integration, pairing, and peer code reviews. These have inherent pull that can bring collaboration from a team.  Once you see team adaption in core practices, then you can introduce scrum concepts like user stories/task board etc.  This idea of Leading by example seems to be working for most of the agile folks. You can pitch core practices to the manager, and the team, and start showing them how you are doing.  You can put a road map for agile adaption and you can pitch to your manager. I would include need for scrum master training as part of the road map. " I thought about his advice for a couple of weeks and read about the pitfalls of technical debt and the team not having prior awareness of agile methods. The more I read and think about it the more I think he was right.  What do you think?

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• Best practices for QA / testing in an Agile (Scrum+XP) team?

  - by Srirangan

  Hey guys, We're getting a QA for the first time in our project. We're not sure how to best use him. We work in an Agile environment. Pair programming, user stories, short sprints (two weeks), daily stand-ups, retrospectives, planning meetings, quick releases etc. One obviously way to use a tester is to verify bugs fixes and user stories every sprint. Are there any better ways for an Agile team to utilize a tester. Thanks, Sri

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• CM and Agile validation process of merging to the Trunk?

  - by LoneCM

  Hello All, We are a new Agile shop and we are encountering an issue that I hope others have seen. In our process, the Trunk is considered an integration branch; it does not have to be releasable, but it does have to be stable and functional for others to branch off of. We create Feature branches of the Trunk for new development. All work and testing occurs in these branches. An individual branch pulls up as needed to stay integrated with the Trunk as other features that are accepted and are committed. But now we have numerous feature branches. Each are focused, have a short life cycle, and are pushed to the trunk as they are completed, so we not debating the need for the branches and trying very much to be Agile. My issue comes in here: I require that the branches pull up from the Trunk at the end of their life cycle and complete the validation, regression testing and handle all configuration issues before pushing to the trunk. Once reintegrated into the Trunk, I ask for at least a build and an automated smoke test. However, I am now getting push back on the Trunk validation. The argument is that the developers can merge the code and not need the QA validation steps because they already complete the work in the feature branch. Therefore, the extra testing is not needed. I have attempted to remind management of the numerous times "brainless" merges have failed. Thier solution is to instead of build and regression testing to have the developer diff the Feature branch and the newly merged Trunk. That process in thier mind would replace the regression testing I asked for. So what do you require when you reintegrate back to the Trunk? What are the issues that we will encounter if we remove this step and replace with the diff? Is the cost of staying Agile the additional work of the intergration of the branches? Thanks for any input. LoneCM

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• How do you QA and release software quickly (some call it agile) with a large team?

  - by sadadasd

  My work used to be a smaller team. We had less than 13 devs for a while. We are now growing rapidly, and are over 20 with plans to be over 30 in a few months (triple dev size!!!) Our process for QA'ing and releasing each build is no longer working. We currently have everyone develop the new code, and stick it onto a staging environment. A few days before our weekly release, we would freeze the staging environement and QA everything new / old. By our normal release time everything was usually deemed acceptable and pushed out the door to the main site. We reached a point where our code got too big so we could no longer regress the entire site each week in QA. We were ok with that, we jsut made a list of everything important and only covered that and the new stuff. Now we are reaching a point where all the new stuff each week is becoming too big and too unstable. Our staging environment is really buggy week after week, and we are usually 1-2 hrs behind the normal release time. As the team is growing further, we are going to drown with this same process. We are re-evaluating everything, and I personally am looking for suggestions / success stories. Many companies have been where before and progressed beyond, we need to do the same

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• What is the best agile project management technique for developing innovative software systems?

  - by user654019

  I am involved with the development of innovative software. The development is innovative since we don't know how to develop it and what algorithm should we use to implement and nobody else did it before. The process consists of several stages of studying books/papers, suggesting algorithms, writing prototypes and comparing the result with actual data. We hope that after some iteration, we converge to a valid software system. What is the best project management approach that we can use? Is there any project management software for these types of projects?

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• Scaling Scrum within a group of 100s of programmers

  - by blunders

  Most Scrum teams lean toward 7-15 people **, though it's not clear how to scale Scrum among 100s of people, or how the effectiveness of a given team might be compared to another team within the group; meaning beyond just breaking the group into Scrum teams of 7-15 people, it's unclear how efforts between the teams are managed, compared, etc. Any suggestions related to either of these topics, or additional related topics that might be of more importance to account for in planning a large scale SCRUM grouping? ** In reviewing research related to the suggested size of software development teams, which appears to be the basis for the suggested Scrum team size, I found what appears to be an error in the research which oddly appears to show that bigger teams (15+ ppl), not smaller teams (7 ppl) are better. UPDATE, "Re: Scrum doesn't scale": Made huge amounts of progress on personally researching the topic, but thought I'd respond to the general belief of some that Scrum doesn't scale by citing a quote from Succeeding with Agile by Mike Cohn : Scrum Does Scale: You have to admire the intellectual honesty of the earliest agile authors. They were all very careful to say that agile methodolgies like Scrum were for small projects. This conservatism wasn’t because agile or Scrum turned out to be unsuited for large projects but because they hadn’t used these processes on large projects and so were reluctant to advise their readers to do so. But, in the years since the Agile Manifesto and the books that came shortly before and after it, we have learned that the principles and practices of agile development can be scaled up and applied on large projects, albeit it with a considerable amount of overhead. Fortunately, if large organizations use the techniques described regarding the role of the product owner, working with a shared product backlog, being mindful of dependencies, coordinating work among teams, and cultivating communities of practice, they can successfully scale a Scrum project. SOURCE: (ran across the book thanks to Ladislav Mrnka answer)

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• MIA

  - by Robert May

  So, I’ve been missing in action on this blog for quite some time.  I need to rectify that. Part of the reason I’ve been absent is because I haven’t be able to talk about what I’m working on.  A former client watches my blog rather closely, and although we accomplished many good things together, their culture is such that they really don’t like people to freely express their thoughts (you’ll note my blog posts stopped rather abruptly).  I learned some really important lessons about Agile in the last 3 years, and I think its worthwhile to talk about them.  Sometimes things worked really well, sometimes, they failed failed.  Sometimes that failure was me, sometimes it wasn’t. I understand Agile better now, and hopefully, what I have to say will guide others through this process and help others understand Agile better. One thing that I’ve learned is that MANY companies that say they are doing Agile are NOT really doing Agile.  To often, they pick the things they like and don’t follow the process long enough to know what rules they can break, and which ones they shouldn’t.  This is probably the primary reason why Agile fails. So, expect more posts, especially as I’m flying coast to coast. :)

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• London User Group Meetings this week (19th/20th May); 26th May-Agile Data Warehousing; 17th June-Kim

  - by tonyrogerson

  Got two user group meetings in London for you, we've also started the Cuppa Corner sessions - the first 3 are up on the site - A trip to First Normal Form, Lookup and Cache Transform in SSIS and Pipeline Limiter in SSIS - we are aiming for at least one per week. WhereScape are doing a breakfast meeting on Agile techniques to Data Warehousing and Kimberly Tripp and Paul Randal are over in June for a 1 day master class. Finally a 3 day performance and monitoring workshop on 22- 24th June in London...(read more)

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• Java Generics, JPA 2, J2EE, JSF 2, GWT, Ajax, Oracle's Java Strategies, Flex, iPhone, Agile ALM, Gra

  - by Kim Won

  Great Indian Developer Summit 2010 – India's Biggest Polyglot Conference and Workshops for IT Software Professionals Bangalore, April 9, 2010: The GIDS.Java Conference and Workshops has announced the complete program of over 50 sessions on the present and future of the Java language and VM, how they are evolving to meet the community's ever-changing needs, and some of the cutting-edge tools, technologies & techniques used for building robust enterprise Java applications today. The GIDs.Java track at Great Indian Developer Summit takes place 22 and 23 April 2010, at the Indian Institute of Science in Bangalore. As one of the longest running independent developer conferences in India, GIDS.Java at the Great Indian Developer Summit 2010 is uniquely positioned to provide a blend of practical, pragmatic and immediately applicable knowledge and a glimpse of the future of technology. During 22 and 23 April 2010, GIDS.Java offers a multi-track conference, workshops, expo show floor, and networking opportunities. The first keynote at GIDS.Java "Pointy Haired Bosses and Pragmatic Programmers" is led by Dr. Venkat Subramaniam. He speaks about how each of us has a professional responsibility to be objective and make decisions that will help us and our teams be productive and deliver results. Venkat will pick on some fallacies, lay down facts, and discuss how to stay professional and objective in our daily efforts. The second keynote of the day explains the practical features that make the Cloud so interesting, and why everyone should start using it in their everyday life. Simone Brunozzi, Amazon Web Services Technology Evangelist, will detail technical examples, business details all mixed with a lot of Italian humor to ensure audience enjoy this talk without a single line of code. The third keynote of the day gives an exciting overview of directions in the Java space for Oracle, featuring concrete signs of Oracles heavy investment, a clear concise strategy overview, and deep dives into some of the most interesting pieces of technology being developed in the Java Platform Group today; such as JavaEE, JDK7, JavaFX, and our exciting new visual tools. Featuring demos by a Java evangelism team star, Simon Ritter, this talk takes you top to bottom in Java Technology. Featured talks at GID.Web include: Good, Bad, and Ugly of Java Generics, Venkat Subramaniam Pure Java Ajax: An Overview of GWT 2.0, Marty Hall How JPA 2.0 Makes a Good Thing Even Better, Mike Keith Building Enterprise RIAs with Adobe Flex and Java, Sujit Reddy G Integrated Ajax Support in JSF 2.0, Marty Hall Design Patterns in Java and Groovy, Venkat Subramaniam A Gentle Introduction to iPhone and Obj-C for Java Developers, Matthew McCullough Cloud Computing: Azure for Java Developers, Janakiram MSV Ajax Support in the Prototype JavaScript Library, Marty Hall First steps to IT Heaven Through the Cloud. Part III: .Java, Simone Brunozi Building Web 2.0 User Interfaces for Web Service Models using JSF, Frank Nimphius and Jobinesh P Acceptance Test Driven Development, John Tobin and Mohammed Mohsinali Architecting Your Java Applications for the Cloud, Praveen Srivatsa Effective Java, Venkat Subramaniam The Amazing Groovy Weight-loss Plan, Scott Davis Enterprise Modeling - from Conceptual Planning to Technical Blueprints, J Sripad Java Collections Renaissance, Donald Raab and Vlad Zakharov Power 7 and IBM J9VM, Himanshu Goyal A Whistle-stop Tour of Maven 3.0, Matthew McCullough Mass Volume Opportunities for Java Developers, Jouko Nuottila Emerging Technology Complex Event Processing, Duvvuri Srinivas Agile ALM for Distributed Development, Karthi Swaminathan Dim Sum Grails - A Sampler of Practical Non Database-Driven Grails Applications, Scott Davis Diagnosing Performance Bottlenecks in J2EE, Deepak Kaul Business Driven Identity Management, Suneet Agera Combining Java EE with OSGi using Eclipse Gemini, Mike Keith Workshop: Essence of Functional Programming, Venkat Subramaniam Workshop: Agile Development, Tools, and Teams and Scrum Certification, Stephen Forte Workshop: Cloud Computing Boot Camp on the Google App Engine, Matthew McCullough Workshop: Building Your First Amazon App, Simone Brunozzi Workshop: The 180-min AJAX and JSON Spike Class, Scott Davis Workshop: PHP + Adobe Flex = Killer RIA, Shyamprasad P Workshop: User Expereince Evaluation Model Walkthrough, Sanna Häiväläinen Workshop: Building Data Centric Applications using Adobe Flex and Java, Prashant Singh Workshop: Monetizing your Apps with PayPal X Payments Platform, Khurram Khan, Praveen Alavilli Sponsors of Great Indian Developer Summit 2010 include: Platinum sponsors Microsoft, Oracle Forum Nokia and Adobe; Gold sponsors Intel and SAP; Silver sponsors Quest Software, PayPal, Telerik and AMT. About Great Indian Developer Summit Great Indian Developer Summit is the gold standard for India's software developer ecosystem for gaining exposure to and evaluating new projects, tools, services, platforms, languages, software and standards. Packed with premium knowledge, action plans and advise from been-there-done-it veterans, creators, and visionaries, the 2010 edition of Great Indian Developer Summit features focused sessions, case studies, workshops and power panels that will transform you into a force to reckon with. Featuring 3 co-located conferences: GIDS.NET, GIDS.Web, GIDS.Java and an exclusive day of in-depth tutorials - GIDS.Workshops, from 20 April to 24 April at the IISc campus in Bangalore. At GIDS you'll participate in hundreds of sessions encompassing the full range of Microsoft computing, Java, Agile, RIA, Rich Web, open source/standards, languages, frameworks and platforms, practical tutorials that deep dive into technical skill and best practices, inspirational keynote presentations, an Expo Hall featuring dozens of the latest projects and products activities, engaging networking events, and the interact with the best and brightest of speakers from around the world. For further information on GIDS 2010, please visit the summit on the web http://www.developersummit.com/ A Saltmarch Media Press Release E: [email protected] Ph: +91 80 4005 1000

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• Oracle AutoVue Key Highlights from Oracle OpenWorld 2012

  - by Celine Beck

  We closed another successful Oracle Open World for AutoVue. Thanks to everyone who joined us this year. As usual, from customer presentations to evening networking activities, there was enough to keep us busy during the entire event. Here is a summary of some of the key highlights of the conference: Sessions:We had two AutoVue-specific sessions during Oracle Open World this year. The first session was part of the Product Lifecycle Management track and covered how AutoVue can be used to help drive effective decision making and streamline design for manufacturing processes. Attendees had the opportunity to learn from customer speaker GLOBALFOUNDRIES how they have been leveraging Oracle AutoVue within Agile PLM to enable high degree of collaboration during the exceptionally creative phases of their product development processes, securely, without risking valuable intellectual property. If you are interested, you can actually download the presentation by visiting launch.oracle.com/?plmopenworld2012.AutoVue was also featured as part of the Utilities track. This session focused on how visualization solutions play a critical role in effective plant optimization and configuration strategies defined by owners and operators of power generation facilities. Attendees learnt how integrated with document management systems, and enterprise applications like Oracle Primavera and Asset Lifecycle Management, AutoVue improves change management processes; minimizes risks by providing access to accurate engineering drawings which capture and reflect the as-maintained status of assets; and allows customers to drive complex maintenance projects to successful completion.Augmented Business Visualization for Agile PLMDuring Oracle Open World, we also showcased an Augmented Business Visualization-based solution for Oracle Agile PLM. An Augmented Business Visualization (ABV) solution is one where your structured data (from Oracle Agile PLM for instance) and your unstructured data (documents, designs, 3D models, etc) come together to allow you to make better decisions (check out our blog posts on the topic: Augment the Value of Your Data (or Time to replace the “attach” button) and Context is Everything ). As part of the Agile PLM, the idea is to support more effective decision-making by turning 3D assemblies into color-coded reports, and streamlining business processes like Engineering Change Management by enabling the automatic creation of engineering change requests in Agile PLM directly from documents being viewed in AutoVue. More on this coming soon...probably during the Oracle Value Chain Summit to be held in San Francisco, from Feb. 4-6, 2013 in San Francisco! Mark your calendars and stay tuned for more information! And thanks again for joining us at Oracle OpenWorld!

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• O the Agony - Merging Scrum and Waterfall

  - by John K. Hines

  If there's nothing else to know about Scrum (and Agile in general), it's this: You can't force a team to adopt Agile methods.  In all cases, the team must want to change. Well, sure, you could force a team.  But it's going to be a horrible, painful process with a huge learning curve made even steeper by the lack of training and motivation on behalf of the team.  On a completely unrelated note, I've spent the past three months working on a team that was formed by merging three separate teams.  One of these teams has been adopting and using Agile practices like Scrum since 2007, the other was in continuous bug fix mode, releasing on average one new piece of software per year using semi-Waterfall methods.  In particular, one senior developer on the Waterfall team didn't see anything in Agile but overhead. Fast forward through three months of tension, passive resistance, process pushback, and you have seven people who want to change and one who explicitly doesn't.  It took two things to make Scrum happen: The team manager took a class called "Agile Software Development using Scrum". The team lead explained the point of Agile was to reduce the workload of the senior developer, with another senior developer and the manager present. It's incredible to me how a single person can strongly influence the direction of an entire team.  Let alone if Scrum comes down as some managerial decree onto a functioning team who have no idea what it is.  Pity the fool. On the bright side, I am now an expert at drawing Visio process flows.  And I have some gentle advice for any first-level managers: If you preside over a team process change, it's beneficial to start the discussion on how the team will work as early as possible.  You should have a vision for this and guide the discussion, even if decisions are weeks away.  Don't always root for the underdog.  It's been my experience that managers who see themselves as compassionate and caring spend a great deal of time understanding and advocating for the one person on the team who feels left out.  Remember that by focusing on this one person you risk alienating the rest of the team, allow tension to build, and delay the resolution of the problem. My way would have been to decree Scrum, force all of my processes on everyone else, and use the past three months ironing out the kinks.  Which takes us all the way back to point number one. Technorati tags: Scrum Scrum Process Scrum and Waterfall

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• #altnetseattle &ndash; Collaboration, Why is it so hard!

  - by GeekAgilistMercenary

  The session convened and we began a discussion about why collaboration is so hard. To work together in software better us engineers have to overcome traditional software approaches (silos of work) and the human element of tending to go off in a corner to work through an issue. It was agreed upon that software engineers are jack asses of jack assery. Breaking down the stoic & silent types by presenting a continuous enthusiasm until the stoic and silent types break down and open up to the group.  Knowing it is ok to ask the dumb question or work through basic things once in a while. Non-work interactions are pivotal to work related collaboration. Collaboration is mostly autonomous of process (i.e. Agile or Waterfall) Latency time should be minimal in the feedback loop for software development. Collaboration is enhanced by Agile Ideals, and things like Scrum or Lean Process. Agile is not a process, Lean and Scrum are process.  Agile is an ideal. Lean, Agile, Scrum, Waterfall, Six Sigma, CMMI, oh dear. . . Great session.  Off to the next session and more brain crunching. . . weeeeeeee!

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• Evaluating Solutions to Manage Product Compliance? Don't Wait Much Longer

  - by Kerrie Foy

  Depending on severity, product compliance issues can cause all sorts of problems from run-away budgets to business closures. But effective policies and safeguards can create a strong foundation for innovation, productivity, market penetration and competitive advantage. If you’ve been putting off a systematic approach to product compliance, it is time to reconsider that decision, or indecision. Why now?  No matter what industry, companies face a litany of worldwide and regional regulations that require proof of product compliance and environmental friendliness for market access.  For example, Restriction of Hazardous Substances (RoHS) is a regulation that restricts the use of six dangerous materials used in the manufacture of electronic and electrical equipment.  ROHS was originally adopted by the European Union in 2003 for implementation in 2006, and it has evolved over time through various regional versions for North America, China, Japan, Korea, Norway and Turkey.  In addition, the RoHS directive allowed for material exemptions used in Medical Devices, but that exemption ends in 2014.   Additional regulations worth watching are the Battery Directive, Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment (WEEE), and Registration, Evaluation, Authorization and Restriction of Chemicals (REACH) directives.  Additional evolving regulations are coming from governing bodies like the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and the International Organization for Standardization (ISO). Corporate sustainability initiatives are also gaining urgency and influencing product design. In a survey of 405 corporations in the Global 500 by Carbon Disclosure Project, co-written by PwC (CDP Global 500 Climate Change Report 2012 entitled Business Resilience in an Uncertain, Resource-Constrained World), 48% of the respondents indicated they saw potential to create new products and business services as a response to climate change. Just 21% reported a dedicated budget for the research. However, the report goes on to explain that those few companies are winning over new customers and driving additional profits by exploiting their abilities to adapt to environmental needs. The article cites Dell as an example – Dell has invested in research to develop new products designed to reduce its customers’ emissions by more than 10 million metric tons of CO2e per year. This reduction in emissions should save Dell’s customers over $1billion per year as a result! Over time we expect to see many additional companies prove that eco-design provides marketplace benefits through differentiation and direct customer value. How do you meet compliance requirements and also successfully invest in eco-friendly designs? No doubt companies struggle to answer this question. After all, the journey to get there may involve transforming business models, go-to-market strategies, supply networks, quality assurance policies and compliance processes per the rapidly evolving global and regional directives. There may be limited executive focus on the initiative, inability to quantify noncompliance, or not enough resources to justify investment. To make things even more difficult to address, compliance responsibility can be a passionate topic within an organization, making the prospect of change on an enterprise scale problematic and time-consuming. Without a single source of truth for product data and without proper processes in place, ensuring product compliance burgeons into a crushing task that is cost-prohibitive and overwhelming to an organization. With all the overhead, certain markets or demographics become simply inaccessible. Therefore, the risk to consumer goodwill and satisfaction, revenue, business continuity, and market potential is too great not to solve the compliance challenge. Companies are beginning to adapt and even thrive in today’s highly regulated and transparent environment by implementing systematic approaches to product compliance that are more than functional bandages but revenue-generating engines. Consider partnering with Oracle to help you address your compliance needs. Many of the world’s most innovative leaders and pioneers are leveraging Oracle’s Agile Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) portfolio of enterprise applications to manage the product value chain, centralize product data, automate processes, and launch more eco-friendly products to market faster.   Particularly, the Agile Product Governance & Compliance (PG&C) solution provides out-of-the-box functionality to integrate actionable regulatory information into the enterprise product record from the ideation to the disposal/recycling phase. Agile PG&C makes it possible to efficiently manage compliance per corporate green initiatives as well as regional and global directives. Options are critical, but so is ease-of-use. Anyone who’s grappled with compliance policy knows legal interpretation plays a major role in determining how an organization responds to regulation. Agile PG&C gives you the freedom to configure product compliance per your needs, while maintaining rigorous control over the product record in an easy-to-use interface that facilitates adoption efforts. It allows you to assign regulations as specifications for a part or BOM roll-up. Each specification has a threshold value that alerts you to a non-compliance issue if the threshold value is exceeded. Set however many regulations as specifications you need to make sure a product can be sold in your target countries. Another option is to implement like one of our leading consumer electronics customers and define your own “catch-all” specification to ensure compliance in all markets. You can give your suppliers secure access to enter their component data or integrate a third party’s data. With Agile PG&C you are able to design compliance earlier into your products to reduce cost and improve quality downstream when stakes are higher. Agile PG&C is a comprehensive solution that makes product compliance more reliable and efficient. Throughout product lifecycles, use the solution to support full material disclosures, efficiently manage declarations with your suppliers, feed compliance data into a corrective action if a product must be changed, and swiftly satisfy audits by showing all due diligence tracked in one solution. Given the compounding regulation and consumer focus on urgent environmental issues, now is the time to act. Implementing an enterprise, systematic approach to product compliance is a competitive investment. From the start, Agile Product Governance & Compliance enables companies to confidently design for compliance and sustainability, reduce the cost of compliance, minimize the risk of business interruption, deliver responsible products, and inspire new innovation.  Don’t wait any longer! To find out more about Agile Product Governance & Compliance download the data sheet, contact your sales representative, or call Oracle at 1-800-633-0738. Many thanks to Shane Goodwin, Senior Manager, Oracle Agile PLM Product Management, for contributions to this article. 

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• New Responsibilities

  - by Robert May

  With the start of the new year, I’m starting new responsibilities at Veracity. One responsibility that is staying constant is my love and evangelism of Agile.  In fact, I’ll be spending more time ensuring that all Veracity teams are performing agile, Scrum specifically, in a consistent manner so that all of our clients and consultants have a similar experience. Imagine, if you will, working for a consulting company on a project.  On that project, the project management style is Waterfall in iterations.  Now you move to another project and in that project, you’re doing real Scrum, but in both cases, you were told that what you were doing was Scrum.  Rather confusing.  I’ve found, however, that this happens on many teams and many projects.  Most companies simply aren’t disciplined enough to do Scrum.  Some think that being Agile means not being disciplined.  The opposite is true! So, my goals for Veracity are to make sure that all of our consultants have a consistent feel for Scrum and what it is and how it works and then to make sure that on the projects they’re assigned to, Scrum is appropriately applied for their situation.  This will help keep them happier, but also make switching to other projects easier and more consistent.  If we aren’t doing the project management on the project, we’ll help them know what good Agile practices should look like so that they can give good advice to the client, and so that if they move to another project, they have a consistent feel. I’m really looking forward to these new duties. Technorati Tags: Agile,Scrum

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• Dadaism and Agility

  - by alexhildyard

  We all have our little bugbears, and something that has given me particular pause over the years is the place of Agility in the software development life cycle. While I have seen it used successfully on both small and Enterprise-level projects, I have also seen many instances in which long-standing technical debt has also originated under its watch. Ironically the problem in such cases seems to me not that the practitioners in question have failed to follow due process (Test, Develop, Refactor -- a common "what" of Agile), but basically that they have missed the point (the "why" of Agile). It's probably a sign of my age that I'm much more interested in the "why" than the "what", since I feel that the latter falls out naturally from the former, but that this is not a reciprocal relationship.Consider Dadaism, precursor to the Surrealist movement in the early part of the twentieth century. Anyone could stand up and proclaim he or she was Dada; anyone could write cut-ups, or pull words out a hat, or produce gibberish on duelling typewriters under the inspiration of Dada. And all that took place at such performances was a manifestation of Dada, and all the artefacts that resulted were also Dada. Hence one commentator's engimatic observation that 'when one speaks of Dada, then one speaks of Dada. But when one does not speak of Dada, one still speaks of Dada.'What is Dada? Literally, Dada is what you say it is. But that's also missing the point. Dada is about erecting a framework within which utterances like this are valid; Dada is about preparing a stage for itself. Dadaism exemplifies the purity of a process-driven ideology -- in fact an ideology that is almost pure process, with nothing extraneous in the way of formal method, and while perhaps Agile delivery should not embrace the liberties of Dadaism too literally, some of the similarities nevertheless are salutary.Agile -- like Dada -- is an attitude; it is about *being* agile; it is not really about doing a specific set of things that are somehow *part* of being Agile. It is an abstract base rather than an implementation, a characteristic rather than a factor. It is the pragmatic response to the need for change in the face of partial information, ephemeral requirements and a healthy dose of systematic uncertainty. In practice this will usually mean repeatedly making the smallest useful changes to a system, recognising that systems evolve, and that all change carries risk. It will usually mean that instead of investing effort in future-proofing a system against a known technology roadmap, one instead invests one's energies in the daily repetition and incremental development of processes best designed to accommodate change quickly. But though it may mean these things in practice, it isn't actually *about* either of these things; it's about the mindset, the attitude that conceives of such responses as sensible solutions given the larger and ultimately unclassifiable thing that constitutes the development lifecycle of a specific project.

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• What are they buying &ndash; work or value?

  - by Jamie Kurtz

  When was the last time you ordered a pizza like this: “I want the high school kid in the back to do the following… make a big circle with some dough, curl up the edges, then put some sauce on it using a small ladle, then I want him to take a handful of shredded cheese from the metal container and spread it over the circle and sauce, then finally I want the kid to place 36 pieces of pepperoni over the top of the cheese” ?? Probably never. My typical pizza order usually goes more like this: “I want a large pepperoni pizza”. In the world of software development, we try so hard to be all things agile. We: Write lots of unit tests We refactor our code, then refactor it some more We avoid writing lengthy requirements documents We try to keep processes to a minimum, and give developers freedom And we are proud of our constantly shifting focus (i.e. we’re “responding to change”) Yet, after all this, we fail to really lean and capitalize on one of agile’s main differentiators (from the twelve principles behind the Agile Manifesto): “Working software is the primary measure of progress.” That is, we foolishly commit to delivering tasks instead of features and bug fixes. Like my pizza example above, we fall into the trap of signing contracts that bind us to doing tasks – rather than delivering working software. And the biggest problem here… by far the most troubling outcome… is that we don’t let working software be a major force in all the work we do. When teams manage to ruthlessly focus on the end product, it puts them on the path of true agile. It doesn’t let them accidentally write too much documentation, or spend lots of time and money on processes and fancy tools. It forces early testing that reveals problems in the feature or bug fix. And it forces lots and lots of customer interaction.  Without that focus on the end product as your deliverable… by committing to a list of tasks instead of a list features and bug fixes… you are doomed to NOT be agile. You will end up just doing stuff, spending time on the keyboard, burning time on timesheets. Doing tasks doesn’t force you to minimize documentation. It makes it much harder to respond to change. And it will eventually force you and the client into contract haggling. Because the customer isn’t really paying you to do stuff. He’s ultimately paying for features and bug fixes. And when the customer doesn’t get what they want, responding with “well, look at the contract - we did all the tasks we committed to” doesn’t typically generate referrals or callbacks. In short, if you’re trying to deliver real value to the customer by going agile, you will most certainly fail if all you commit to is a list of things you’re going to do. Give agile what it needs by committing to features and bug fixes – not a list of ToDo items. So the next time you are writing up a contract, remember that the customer should be buying this: Not this:

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• Revive Old Programs on Windows 7

  Upgrading to Windows 7 has its perks but you may be apprehensive to do so. After all you are used to programs and features on older operating systems and losing such functionality could break your routine. There s no need to fear the upgrade however here are some tips you can employ to make old programs run on Windows 7.... Rolling out Agile Development? Try now! Explore Agile on an integrated platform for Agile and traditional development

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• The Business of Winning Innovation: An Exclusive Blog Series

  - by Kerrie Foy

  "The Business of Winning Innovation” is a series of articles authored by Oracle Agile PLM experts on what it takes to make innovation a successful and lucrative competitive advantage. Our customers have proven Agile PLM applications to be enormously flexible and comprehensive, so we’ve launched this article series to showcase some of the most fascinating, value-packed use cases. In this article by Keith Colonna, we kick-off the series by taking a look at the science side of innovation within the Consumer Products industry and how PLM can help companies innovate faster, cheaper, smarter. This article will review how innovation has become the lifeline for growth within consumer products companies and how certain companies are “winning” by creating a competitive advantage for themselves by taking a more enterprise-wide,systematic approach to “innovation”.   Managing the Science of Innovation within the Consumer Products Industry By: Keith Colonna, Value Chain Solution Manager, Oracle The consumer products (CP) industry is very mature and competitive. Most companies within this industry have saturated North America (NA) with their products thus maximizing their NA growth potential. Future growth is expected to come from either expansion outside of North America and/or by way of new ideas and products. Innovation plays an integral role in both of these strategies, whether you’re innovating business processes or the products themselves, and may cause several challenges for the typical CP company, Becoming more innovative is both an art and a science. Most CP companies are very good at the art of coming up with new innovative ideas, but many struggle with perfecting the science aspect that involves the best practice processes that help companies quickly turn ideas into sellable products and services. Symptoms and Causes of Business Pain Struggles associated with the science of innovation show up in a variety of ways, like: · Establishing and storing innovative product ideas and data · Funneling these ideas to the chosen few · Time to market cycle time and on-time launch rates · Success rates, or how often the best idea gets chosen · Imperfect decision making (i.e. the ability to kill projects that are not projected to be winners) · Achieving financial goals · Return on R&D investment · Communicating internally and externally as more outsource partners are added globally · Knowing your new product pipeline and project status These challenges (and others) can be consolidated into three root causes: A lack of visibility Poor data with limited access The inability to truly collaborate enterprise-wide throughout your extended value chain Choose the Right Remedy Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) solutions are uniquely designed to help companies solve these types challenges and their root causes. However, PLM solutions can vary widely in terms of configurability, functionality, time-to-value, etc. Business leaders should evaluate PLM solution in terms of their own business drivers and long-term vision to determine the right fit. Many of these solutions are point solutions that can help you cure only one or two business pains in the short term. Others have been designed to serve other industries with different needs. Then there are those solutions that demo well but are owned by companies that are either unable or unwilling to continuously improve their solution to stay abreast of the ever changing needs of the CP industry to grow through innovation. What the Right PLM Solution Should Do for You Based on more than twenty years working in the CP industry, I recommend investing in a single solution that can help you solve all of the issues associated with the science of innovation in a totally integrated fashion. By integration I mean the (1) integration of the all of the processes associated with the development, maintenance and delivery of your product data, and (2) the integration, or harmonization of this product data with other downstream sources, like ERP, product catalogues and the GS1 Global Data Synchronization Network (or GDSN, which is now a CP industry requirement for doing business with most retailers). The right PLM solution should help you: Increase Revenue. A best practice PLM solution should help a company grow its revenues by consolidating product development cycle-time and helping companies get new and improved products to market sooner. PLM should also eliminate many of the root causes for a product being returned, refused and/or reclaimed (which takes away from top-line growth) by creating an enterprise-wide, collaborative, workflow-driven environment. Reduce Costs. A strong PLM solution should help shave many unnecessary costs that companies typically take for granted. Rationalizing SKU’s, components (ingredients and packaging) and suppliers is a major opportunity at most companies that PLM should help address. A natural outcome of this rationalization is lower direct material spend and a reduction of inventory. Another cost cutting opportunity comes with PLM when it helps companies avoid certain costs associated with process inefficiencies that lead to scrap, rework, excess and obsolete inventory, poor end of life administration, higher cost of quality and regulatory and increased expediting. Mitigate Risk. Risks are the hardest to quantify but can be the most costly to a company. Food safety, recalls, line shutdowns, customer dissatisfaction and, worst of all, the potential tarnishing of your brands are a few of the debilitating risks that CP companies deal with on a daily basis. These risks are so uniquely severe that they require an enterprise PLM solution specifically designed for the CP industry that safeguards product information and processes while still allowing the art of innovation to flourish. Many CP companies have already created a winning advantage by leveraging a single, best practice PLM solution to establish an enterprise-wide, systematic approach to innovation. Oracle’s Answer for the Consumer Products Industry Oracle is dedicated to solving the growth and innovation challenges facing the CP industry. Oracle’s Agile Product Lifecycle Management for Process solution was originally developed with and for CP companies and is driven by a specialized development staff solely focused on maintaining and continuously improving the solution per the latest industry requirements. Agile PLM for Process helps CP companies handle all of the processes associated with managing the science of the innovation process, including: specification management, new product development/project and portfolio management, formulation optimization, supplier management, and quality and regulatory compliance to name a few. And as I mentioned earlier, integration is absolutely critical. Many Oracle CP customers, both with Oracle ERP systems and non-Oracle ERP systems, report benefits from Oracle’s Agile PLM for Process. In future articles we will explain in greater detail how both existing Oracle customers (like Gallo, Smuckers, Land-O-Lakes and Starbucks) and new Oracle customers (like ConAgra, Tyson, McDonalds and Heinz) have all realized the benefits of Agile PLM for Process and its integration to their ERP systems. More to Come Stay tuned for more articles in our blog series “The Business of Winning Innovation.” While we will also feature articles focused on other industries, look forward to more on how Agile PLM for Process addresses innovation challenges facing the CP industry. Additional topics include: Innovation Data Management (IDM), New Product Development (NPD), Product Quality Management (PQM), Menu Management,Private Label Management, and more! . Watch this video for more info about Agile PLM for Process

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• I'm doing hobby programming; what programming methodologies (e.g. XP, Agile...) do you recommend me to read up on?

  - by Anto

  Most of you would probably just call me a kid (I'm 15). I'm doing hobby programming (I started fiddling around with ActionScript 2.0 in Flash 8 when I was 11, now I do mostly C, Python and Java). As I'm 15, I won't get a job for a long period of time (I'm going to spend years in academia before that) and thus this question is not about which programming methodologies you recommend me to read up on for a software engineering job, but instead which methodologies should a hobby programmer read about? What will a hobby developer learn from reading about your recommendation(s)?

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• Learn Lean Software Development and Kanban Systems

  - by Ben Griswold

  I did an in-house presentation on Lean Software Development (LSD) and Kanban Systems this week.  Beyond what I had previously learned from various podcasts, I knew little about either topic prior to compiling my slide deck.  In the process of building my presentation, I learned a ton.  I found the concepts weren’t very difficult to grok; however, I found little detailed information was available online. Hence this post which is merely a list of valuable resources. Principles of Lean Thinking, Mary Poppendieck Lean Software Development, May Poppendieck Lean Programming, Mary Poppendieck Lean Software Development, Wikipedia Implementing Lean Software Thinking: From Concept to Cash, Poppendieck Lean Software Development Overview, Darrell Norton Lean Thinking: Banish Waste and Create Wealth in Your Corporation The Goal: A Process of Ongoing Improvement The Toyota Way Extreme Toyota: Radical Contradictions That Drive Success at the World’s Best Manufacturer Elegant Code Cast 17 – David Laribee on Lean / Kanban Herding Code Episode 42: Scott Bellware on BDD and Lean Development Seven Principles of Lean Software Development, Przemys?aw Bielicki Kanban Boards for Agile Project Management with Zen Author Nate Kohari Herding Code 55: Nate Kohari brings Your Moment of Zen James Shore on Kanban Systems Agile Zen Product Site A Leaner Form of Agile, David Laribee Kanban as Alternative Agile Implementation, Mark Levison Lean Software Development, Dr. Christoph Steindl Glossary of Lean Manufacturing Terms Why Pull? Why Kanban?, Corey Ladas

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• SonicAgile 2.0 with a Real-Time Backlog and Kanban

  - by Stephen.Walther

  I’m excited to announce the launch of SonicAgile 2.0 which is a free Agile Project Management tool.  You can start using it right now (for free) by visiting the following address: http://sonicagile.com/ What’s special about SonicAgile?  SonicAgile supports a real-time backlog and kanban. When you make changes to the backlog or kanban then those changes appear on every browser in real-time. For example, if multiple people open the Kanban in their browser, and you move a card on the backlog from the To Do column to the Done column then the card moves in every browser in real-time. This makes SonicAgile a great tool to use with distributed teams. SonicAgile has all of the features that you need in an Agile Project Management tool including: Real-time Backlog – Prioritize all of your stories using drag-and-drop. Real-time Kanban – Move stories from To Do, In Progress, to Done Burndown Charts – Track the progress of your team as your work burns down over time. Iterations – Group work into iterations (sprints). Tasks – Break long stories into tasks. Acceptance Criteria – Create a checklist of requirements for a story to be done. Agile Estimation – Estimate the amount of work required to complete a story using Points, Shirt Sizes, or Coffee Cup sizes. Time-Tracking – Track how long it takes to complete each story and task. Roadmap – Do release planning by creating epics and organizing the epics into releases. Discussions – Discuss each story or epic by email. Watch the following video for a quick 3 minute introduction: http://sonicagile.com/ Read the following guide for a more in-depth overview of the features included in SonicAgile: http://sonicagile.com/guide-agile-project-management-using-sonicagile/ I’d love to hear your feedback!  Let me know what you think by posting a comment.

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• What is the role of traditional issue tracker when Scrum / Kanban board is used?

  - by Borek

  From a very high level view, to me it seems there are generally 2 types of Project Management tools: Traditional issue trackers like Fogbugz, JIRA, BugZilla, Trac, Redmine etc. Virtual card boards / agile project management tools like Pivotal Tracker, GreenHopper, AgileZen, Trello etc. Sure, they overlap in one way or another, e.g. Pivotal Tracker tasks can be imported to JIRA, GreenHopper itself is implemented on top of JIRA issue base etc. but I think one can still see the difference in orientation between those two types of tools. Traditional issue tracker seems to be used even in companies otherwise doing agile project management. My question is, why do they do that? I also feel that we should use an issue tracker in my company but when I'm thinking about it, I'm not actually sure why should we need it. For example, Trello development seems to be managed by using Trello itself (see this virtual wall) even though they have access to Fogbugz, one of the best issue trackers around. So maybe we don't need traditional issue tracker when we'll be doing 100% of our work in an agile manner using one of the agile PM tools?

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