Artem's blog
Last week I was giving a presentation on Agile in my Alma Mater in Ukraine. That was a very interesting event and I was positively surprised to see many 3rd year students interested much in the ways for effective software development. Here are the presentation slides published via slideshare (I changed two photos just in case they were a bit too sensitive for the corporate security):
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Year 2007 was a year of explosive growth on our site. In 2007 it was a purely private blog, in 2008 the site became a collective work of several highly creative contributors: Jurgen, Przemyslaw, Peter, Mike, Matt, Janusz and yours truly (you can become a contributor too). January to December we rocked from 12000 to well over 70000 pageviews a month.
Top stuff
According to Google Analytics ten most popular writings of the years are:
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Due to its exterior simplicity lately Scrum has become the most popular Agile method. What can be simpler, than few artifacts roles and procedure? The unfortunate consequence of this exterior simplicity is that often people try adopting the method without a deep thought and proper guidance. Some coaches consider it so big problem, that declare the fall of agile (I don’t think so).
One of the particularly interesting aspects that is missing from the simple method description is that Scrum is a powerful experimentation framework. The cadence of short iterations and mandatory reflection moments allows a team to try significant amount of improvements in a rather short period of time. You think making acceptance tests a mandatory part of all the requirements is useful? – Try it for a sprint or two and see if it works for you. Arguments about the effectiveness and social aspects of pair programming and colocation seem to be going forever? – Move the tables together and try pairing for a sprint. Some practices such as Test Driven Development might need some more time for a real try, but even in these cases them it is usually possible to figure out the required experiment length in advance. Scrum applied with a decent amount of rigor forces participants to focus on the goals and evaluation criteria of the potential improvements and arms the team with the regularly applied improvement cycle.
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Hamid Shojaee from Axosoft published an excellent and funny video on the basics of Scrum. In under 8 minutes of animation Hamid describes most of the basic concepts. I don’t agree with everything (in particular I I would like to see the release burndown chart described), but you can only explain so much in under 10 minutes and every Scrum installation is different anyway. Have a look and enjoy! High definition version is available here.
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English summary below.
“Scrum и XP: заметки с передовой" – это книга подробно рассказывающая о том, как одна конкретная компания использует Scrum и XP в своей работе. Хенрик Книберг, шведский консультант по Agile и Java, делится опытом применения Agile в своей компании, описывает подход к планированию, тестированию, координации нескольких команд в рамках одного проекта и многое другое.
В течение последних четырёх месяцев группа украинских энтузиастов организованная Алексеем Солнцевым переводила и перевела книгу на русский язык. Ваша покорный слуга принимал минимальное участвие в редактуре, однако тоже был удостоен упоминания в предисловии к русской версии. Скачать книгу можно здесь (ссылка на pdf).
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Our web-site is publishing advices on Agile software development for over 3 years and there is a large set of useful articles that are not very easy to find. This weekend I digged through our archive and gathered the best of the best articles to the new pages focused on managing people and things in Agile. Enjoy!
Also it would be very kind of you to take a moment and tell (in the comments) what you think about the usefulness of these link collections.
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Dear readers
We just got a new regular contributor for AgileSoftwareDevelopment.com – Janusz Gorycki
Janusz Gorycki is a developer and team manager with over fourteen years of experience. He has spent most of that time at Intel Corporation, working in many areas, from telecommunications and embedded systems, to internal IT software development. While working for there, he was working together with our other regular contributor – Przemyslaw Bielicki. Janusz has left Intel with a group of colleagues to start a software development and consulting company Spartez where he works to this day. Janusz and his team have been using agile development methods for the last three years and you can find basic details about his company in the recently published interview.
Please, welcome Janusz and comment on his writing.
Artem, Editor-in-Chief
P.S.
If you are thinking about becoming a regular contributor to this site, shoot me an e-mail. We are particularly interested in joining forces with people with testing and UI-related experience.
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Lately the
agile blogosphere buzzed with responses to the James Shore's
article on decline and fall of Agile.
The article discusses the qualitative change in the way people apply Agile methods nowadays comparing to the past. Earlier people were asking coaches for learning Agile from scratch, were taking the complete XP or real Scrum package and were happy. Nowadays they install the basics of Scrum themselves usually taking into use just backlogs and stories, fail to get on the engineering practices, shared workspaces and the all important Deming’s Plan-Do-Check-Act (PDCA) cycle, struggle and, well, sometimes blame Agile for their pain. So is such contemporary Agile bad?
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Here is the top writing that caught my attention this week. Quite much based on Google Testing blog this time - they happened to have a number of excellent articles in a row.
You might like having a look at the previous link packs as well.
»
Leading Agile: Evolution of a Project Schedule Typically I don't include the articles by our permanent contributors to the weekly link set, but this article that describes agile methods to project managers is excellent. I'll probably base on it when speaking to project managers myself.
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Tips and facts after from the company wide adoption of Scrum at Yahoo! Captured during the Gabrielle Benefield's keynote on Scan-Agile. During the adoption period, Gabrielle Benefield was Senior Director of Agile Development at Yahoo!, co-leading the company’s large-scale corporate adoption of Scrum, which now encompasses more than 200 teams projects and over 1,500 employees in the US, Europe, and India. Tips should be mostly applicable for similarly sized enterprises, though generally useful for smaller companies as well.
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