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This post is from mountaingoatsoftware.com by Mike Cohn.

My new eBook, Adaptive Leadership: Accelerating Enterprise Agility is out!

We are at a tipping point. Technology—cloud, big data, mobility, social media—tops CEO’s list of concerns per a recent IBM study. “There has been no other point in history when so many aspects of disruptive change have collided and conspired to wreak havoc,” writes retail prophet Doug Stephens. Companies that emerge successfully from this havoc will need to build agility into the very fabric of their organizations and develop the technological savvy to enable that agility. Adaptive Leadership provides a framework for such a transformation.

Over the past couple of years, I’ve been thinking, writing, and speaking about issues of adaptive/agile leadership and organizational transformations. The agile movement has greatly impacted software development over the last decade since the Agile Manifesto was signed. The two underlying themes of the agile movement have been reasonably successful (there’s always progress to be made)—namely, building better software and increasing satisfaction (and fun) at work. In a growing number of companies, agile/Lean values and practices have been infused throughout the organization, although there remain too few of these pioneers.

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This post is from leadingagile.com by Mike Cottmeyer.

What I find incredibly interesting is why defining value is so hard. Agile proponents have been beating the value drum since the very beginning. Put the customer in the room… understand their needs… build what ever they want… deliver software in small increments… get constant feedback… converge on the optimal solution… deliver value early and often. Agile is all about delivering value. Why wouldn’t a management team embrace a set of methodologies so focused on giving them what they need the most?

Here is my take…

Agile is (in large part) a reaction to misapplied waterfall development and naive application of project management principles in ways that are inconsistent with how software actually gets built. It was is a reaction to dehumanizing, process and artifact driven management approaches… processes that assumed with enough procedures, we could somehow commoditize the practice of software engineering. We wanted to take the uncertainty out of a craft that is really a blend of engineering and art. Our desire was to make everything predictable and repeatable

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This post is from allaboutagile.com by Kelly Waters.

For decades, delivering on time has been the holy grail of software development.

I’ve been doing agile software development for quite a few years now. I’ve seen many benefits, but one of the most remarkable things of all, is how so many teams can quickly get good at delivering on time.

It’s the art – and/or science – of predicting what can be delivered in a given timeframe, even if the same team was hopeless at estimating before!

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This post is from allaboutagile.com by Kelly Waters.

Lean software development shares many of the key principles of agile software development.

Although one of the key aspects of lean development is all about identifying and eliminating waste from the development process…

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This post is from allaboutagile.com by Kelly Waters.

This post is from allaboutagile.com by Kelly Waters.

I was very interested to read this blog post from Ron Jeffries about burning down user stories rather than tasks. Excuse the pun, but this is a hot topic for me at the moment :-)If it’s possible to avoid the time spent in Sprint Planning, breaking user stories into tasks and estimating them in hours, this would reduce the overhead of planning iterations in too much detail. This is something I am sure any development team would probably welcome.

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This post is from allaboutagile.com by Kelly Waters.