Agile Manifesto

An Obsession with Labels

Having spent the last 5 years working in retail, and specifically high end fashion, I’ve seen a lot of obsessing over labels. You might expect that of the retail fashion industry, but it seems this obsession with labels has made its way into the software development community too. Using a framework like Scrum is… Read More »An Obsession with Labels

Is Father Christmas agile?

I recently met the head of one of the world’s oldest organisations. Despite being incredibly high profile and serving millions of customers each year, their delivery process is far from perfect. As we sat chatting over a glass of sherry and a mince pie (apparently he never tires of them), the… Read More »Is Father Christmas agile?

Advice for newbies

Question 1: If someone with no agile knowledge asked you where to start in learning about agile (in order to get a job in our industry), what one recommendation would you give them? Question 2: If someone with a basic knowledge and some experience of agile asked you how to… Read More »Advice for newbies

DevOps

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I was recently involved in a release planning discussion where someone referred to an action that needed to be “handed over to the DevOps” team. I was slightly confused by what this meant. When I questioned this, I was told that what was meant by DevOps in this instance was… Read More »DevOps

Alignment a.k.a Collaboration

The principles behind the agile manifesto are clear in their message on collaboration: “Business people and developers must work together daily throughout the project.” Yet, there are still companies out there where the visions of the development teams and business teams do not align. They either have different targets or they simply haven’t taken… Read More »Alignment a.k.a Collaboration

Cost of Delay

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“Our highest priority is to satisfy the customer through early and continuous delivery of valuable software” As we all know this is the first principle behind the Agile Manifesto. But how do we understand the value of the things we are working on and delivering? And why would we want… Read More »Cost of Delay

The Cobra Effect

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I have worked in lots of organisations where ‘management’ has tried to measure and monitor development teams with the aim of seeing how the teams are performing and then using that information to drive through improvements in performance. This desire to measure and control things can often have some unintended… Read More »The Cobra Effect

Fixed Everything Projects

To most of us, the problems with fixing cost, scope and time are obvious. How do we know we can deliver all of the scope, in the time we’ve been given, with the people we have to do it? The short answer, is that in most cases you can’t especially… Read More »Fixed Everything Projects