Category: adoption

If you're not moving you're not agile

September 8, 2009 by Mendelt Siebenga

Lately I've seen a couple of doom scenario's scetched out for agile. It seems agile is dead or at least dying at the hand of the PMI. I don't want to bash the authors of these articles. I respect them and agree with most of their arguments but not with their conclusions. Agile is changing, sure, but it's not dying, we're all about embracing change right?

At it's core agile isn't a process or a methodology, it's a set of principles with a framework of practices to support them. One of the most important principles is about change, not just in our requirements but in our process, our organization and even in change itself. Agile is about improving your process, trying out new things checking them against our principles and core values and keeping what works.

Agile Success Story: interview on how Agile movement helps company to grow and succeed

October 23, 2008 by Przemysław Bielicki

Picture courtesy of M. Keefe@flickr

Last week I had a great fun and honour to interview Janusz Gorycki who is a partner and a team manager in an Agile Software Development company - Spartez. Janusz is also the author of the open-source screen capture and painting utility for Windows named Mazio.

In this interview I'm asking Janusz about how they founded their company and how agile movement helped them achieve success. I'm also asking how they see their agility, what problems they have and how they deal with them. Janusz also answers why you can be CMMI-compliant using agile methodologies and recommends steps by which you can start applying Agile practices in your company.

Is this interview about yet another agile company? Not really - Spartez is an extraordinary company composed of ordinary engineers who were not afraid of making their dreams come true. Their determination, team work, a bit of luck and an extreme agile spirit helped them be and work together and become successful. This is a real-life example how cross-functional team, where each member is an expert in some areas, is able to deliver any software to any customer. And how do I know this? I used to be a part of this team at Intel and know this team as well as each member pretty well, however I'm not affiliated with them anymore in any way.

If you are interested in getting to know how they started, what and how they do now, this article is for you. Maybe you will follow their dreams and ideas - I think it's worth.

Third Annual State of Agile Survey Data Available

August 29, 2008 by martinig

This survey was conducted and sponsored by VersionOne in June and July 2008. It received answers from 3061 participants in 80 countries; most of them (70%) were participating to the survey for the first time. The majority of the respondents were agile team leaders, coach or consultants. This could lead to a bias towards a perhaps slightly more optimistic vision of the reality of agile projects. Whether they are agile or not, managers stay managers ;o)

Scaling agile success

May 29, 2008 by cspag

I recently had someone pose a question to me that got me thinking about the scalability of agile success. Here was the question: "I'm part of large organization of over 1,000 people. Our small team of 40 has been using agile with a great deal of success. Now our company wants to me to extrapolate the successes we've enjoyed from agile (efficiency, value, profitability) to the rest of the company. Do you think the agile success of 40 people can be extrapolated to over 1,000 people?”

It's a great question and I don't think there is an easy answer to it. Speaking from my own personal experience, it's been difficult extrapolating the success our small team of five developers had in the past to our larger organization of about 35 people. There are many challenges as you scale agile up. Agile practices depend heavily on collocated teams that are cross-functional in nature. When you start scaling agile up, you need to consider geographic dispersion of much larger project teams that may not be as cross-functional as you'd like them to be. This is just the nature of large organizations.

Agile adoption: Why isn't this stuff working?

May 28, 2008 by cspag

Lately I've been hearing feedback from lots of different people that they've "adopted" agile and it's just not working for them. This always causes me to pause, step back and ask a few questions. Here's the list that usually runs through my head: How did your company adopt agile: top down mandate or grown organically? Was your adoption done in stealth mode or full fledged "Hello world, we're going agile"? Do you have real executive support for your agile adoption? What kind of projects have you implemented agile on: fixed price, fixed scope, fixed schedule? Has your staff received any kind of agile training? How many projects have you run in an agile manner? How long ago did you start doing agile?

I run through these questions because I think each one represents a potential failure point for agile adoptions. Let's take a look at each one.

What are CIO's thinking? (or are they thinking)

March 7, 2008 by cspag

OK, maybe it's just me that finds this funny, but a recent survey by Stelligent of CIO's found the following:

- 72% of CIO's said that NO, they did not have a solid understanding of Agile Development Methodologies.

- 72% of CIO's said YES, they are open to adopting agile methods.

Baby steps into agile

January 28, 2008 by cspag

I was watching an old movie last night that I think is hysterical called "What About Bob?" starring Richard Dreyfus and Bill Murray. Bill Murray plays a guy with tons of phobias. Richard Dreyfus plays his doctor who is teaching him about taking baby steps to overcome his fears. Bill Murray has one particular phobia about riding in elevators. At one point in the movie, he decides to finally try getting on an elevator and says "Baby steps onto the elevator...baby steps into the elevator...I'm in the elevator" (the doors close) "HELLLLLLLLLLP!!!!!".

Running to chasm

June 10, 2007 by Artem Marchenko

Working really hard on low priority items can be useless to the point of killing the company

Efficient Resource Utilization

Many teams start using agile methods while being highly specialized, that is team members are typically responsible for a particular component or area, that other people don't really understand. Developers often "own" their components and all the fixes go through them.