The question of “what’s the right iteration length” may not be as interesting as any of the questions found here (gum really doesn’t stay in you for 7 years. Who knew?), but it is a common question from organizations moving to agile development. You can certainly get a lot of different opinions on this from a Google search, but since you’re reading this now, I’ll give you mine, based on personal experience. A number of years ago, one of the projects I was PM on decided to try out Scrum. I had attended some Product
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Over the past few years I’ve talked to a number of customers in the embedded software and medical devices industries, and I continue to see a significant number of these organizations either moving to, or planning on moving to agile development processes. With all of the inherent challenges for agile in these organizations such as standards/regulatory compliance, hardware changes and integration, security issues, etc. I must say that I’m a little shocked that customers are moving away from their current processes towards something like agile. Add to this the fact that the Agile Manifesto specifically
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Last week I toured the West coast with our friends from VersionOne, Perforce, and Electric Cloud on our Agile roadshow hitting the cities of Seattle, Santa Clara, and San Diego. In one of the after meeting discussions, one of the attendees asked me what the differences were between Agile and Lean. Having only been involved with Lean from an outside perspective, I didn’t really think there were huge differences and that they shared many of the same beliefs. Luckily, it looks like others believe this to be the case too. So rather than me trying
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What comes first—the process or the tool? Yes. Any tool worth its salt should integrate into existing processes and tools. What’s interesting and informative is seeing the similarities and differences in how the same tool is applied in different organizations, across continents and oceans. The emphasis on quality unites everyone, but the level to which agile is adopted is what makes static analysis markets different. No one knows this more than Mark Grice, Klocwork Director and Manager of the International Reseller/Partner Network, and Steve Howard, head of Partner Support in Europe. Trying to talk to
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Time’s a precious resource, so the saying goes. Don’t waste it. That’s particularly true for developers, who live in the critical path lane. And if there’s someone who knows a lot about time management, it’s Russ Sherk, an intermediate developer here at Klocwork, and the father of three young ‘uns. Russ works on our Klocwork Review and Klocwork Inspect products and handles licensing. For Russ, these are lessons learned over his six-year tenure at Klocwork. “These are things you need to think about or you won’t progress as a developer,” he says. Here’s what to
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There has been lots of discussion on this blog (and others for that matter) on the importance of early defect detection, refactoring, and code reviews, but what does it all mean to a team of developers trying to maximize their velocity in a 2 week iteration? Based on a number of studies, and some real-world customer feedback we have put together the following ROI…but note that this ROI is not measured in dollars, but rather in hours saved, because a development team can more easily relate to a 20 hour time savings per iteration rather than
Read More »Just returned from my second stint on the Agile in Action roadshow with our friends from Electric Cloud, Perforce, and VersionOne, this time visiting the cities of Toronto, Philadelphia and Chicago. Rather than going into minute detail (and the fact it is a Friday afternoon before a long weekend), I thought I would share a few random observations from this trip: Organizations (and individuals) are begging for as much information and guidance as they can get on Agile and tools for Agile, and are willing to give up a days in the office and brave
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There has been a start to bring the concepts of lean manufacturing into agile development. Recently, Mike Cottmeyer in How to Build a Large Agile Organization proposes that Agile on its own is not enough for a large organization. In his view, Agile falls short and needs to be supplemented by additional methodologies like Lean or Kanban when coordinating outside the development team. If adoption of Agile is impeded by its very nature in large organizations and Kanban is the proposed answer, then the Agile solution is insufficient. Agile needs to expand its scope to be relevant and useful
Read More »In my previous post I discussed where I thought Agile really falls flat. The problem I have is working remotely. Several times now I’ve misinterpreted what exactly we covered in remote meetings. These have been mostly minor things but they do add up. But here is where there is just a massive difference between Waterfall versus Agile. By far the biggest lesson for me and why I love Agile is all based on visibility. Having a working product in one simple iteration means the world. So even though I was ranting in my previous post,
Read More »Unlike Todd who is this blog’s main Agile expert, I’m pretty new to agile. I’ve gone through the typical training (CSPO) and all the other good stuff, so I’m drinking the Kool-aid. But I thought I would provide my perspective, now that I’ve been working in an Agile shop for a while and tell you what I think really sucks. I’ve read lots of warnings why Agile can fail and I’ve tried to stay focused on overcoming the hurdles. Being a product manager, one of the things that is really ringing true to me is where
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