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"If your team develops software through agile methodology, taking a whole-team approach is vital to getting the most out of agile practices. RelatedVendorContent Kanban for Agile Teams 3 Companies Share how they Implemented a more Collaborative Process to Deliver Software Quality Avoiding Mediocrity in Agile Adoption to Produce Tangible ROI Immediately Ten steps to better requirements management The Agile Tester Related Sponsor In today's hyper-competitive world, later may be too late to adopt Agile development and this Roadmap for Success will help you get started. Download "Agile Development: A Manager's Roadmap for Success" now! Whole-team approach - the agile practice in which the entire team works as a unit of generalizing specialists to share responsibility for producing high-quality software - is a kind of "glue" practice: It holds a lot of the other agile practices together. For example, whole-team approach is #1 on Lisa Crispin and Janet Gregory's list of "key success factors" for agile testing."

" Agile was once considered by project management professionals to be a fad. In the 10 years since the agile manifesto was written agile has matured; it has moved from being fringe to being a core methodology and from small software companies to the point where it is used, to some extent, in a majority of enterprise organizations today. Agile isn't a silver bullet though and agile methods need to adapt to the changed context of the enterprise. The purpose of this paper is to examine how project managers can successfully apply agile to their projects in an enterprise context."

"Agile development starts to build before the outcome is fully understood, ad­justs designs and plans as empirical knowledge is gained while building, trusts the judgment of those closest to the problem, and encourages continual col­laboration with the ultimate consumers. Architecture establishes a technol­ogy stack, creates design patterns, enhances quality attributes, and communicates to all interested parties. The combination of these two spaces is agile architecture - an approach that uses agile techniques to drive toward good architecture. Successful agile architecture requires an architect who understands agile de­velopment, interacts with the team at well-defined points, influences them using critical skills easily adapted from architectural experience with other approaches, and applies architectural functions that are independent of project methodology."

"Fixed price contracts are evil - this is what can often be heard from agilists. On the other hand those contracts are reality which many agile teams have to face. But what if we try to tame it instead of fighting against it? How can a company execute this kind of contract using agile practices to achieve better results with lower risk? This article will try to answer those questions."

"Agile development methods attempt to improve the software development process, so that we can deliver useful solutions more often, and more quickly. However, despite some successes larger organisations and projects have been very slow to adopt them. One of the reasons is that many agile methods are perceived as architecturally weak, disconnected from the realities of delivering large systems in complex enterprise environments."

" A number of commentators have been talking about the perceived dichotomy between Agile techniques and architectural thinking. In the Agile world architecture is often perceived as BDUF (Big Up Front Design) and as a result is frequently overlooked or delayed in the spirit of "YAGNI" (You ain't gonna need it)."

"Kanban represents a unique way of catalyzing the application of Lean product development principles to software development, maintenance and operations. Being a method for driving change Kanban does not prescribe specific roles, practices or ceremonies but instead offers a series of principles to optimize value and flow in your software delivery system. As such, Kanban's focus on context and adaptability has made it increasingly popular for teams working in contexts where traditional Agile methods are not an easy fit and mature Agile teams looking for ways to further optimize their development process."

Sounds like this guy is confuse between enterprise architecture and solutions architecture. Or I am. :)

I think both those roles are evolving quite quickly at the moment. The classic Enterprise Architect is having to find new ways to plan, communicate and check quality as more and more teams explore Agile methodologies. The Solution Architect is suddenly playing a more obvious role as a result of the above. My feeling is, it is not so much about people, but about function. The same person could operate as a Solutions Architect most of the day, but then could get together in some kind of Architect's forum and play the role of an Enterprise Architect. That forum then wrestles through the Enterprise Architect issues and establishes the back-bone on which the Agile Development is done. That's what is probably happening, formally or informally in a lot of dev teams at the moment.

" If you develop any serious software, I'm sure you're tired of manual steps required to collaborate among the various tools involved in the process of Agile software development. You need to take a hard look at IBM's Rational Team Concert (RTC) for its ability to facilitate collaboration among the multitude of tools development shops use for managing requirements, stories, code, builds, tests, deployments, issues, defects and all of the various threads that run through a large software development effort. Hint: RTC has legendary Eclipse pedigree."

"We've all seen the statistics[1], and likely experienced first-hand, the reality of project failure. The majority of software projects continue to be classified as failures. In thinking about this situation we can see that there are a few different ways in which a project can fail (clearly this is not an exhaustive list!):"

"As a change agent, you constantly need to reassure people that the path we follow is worthwhile traveling. This need is often expressed in the form of critique and difficult questions. When I coach Agile teams, this is often the case. The same thing happens when introducing Kanban. However, I noticed that Kanban raises much harder questions on a management and leadership level, once people are introduced to the basics and start to explore the subject on their own. For instance: "How can we plan if we measure instead of estimate?""

"Just Enough Software Architecture book, by author George Fairbanks, focuses on a risk-driven approach to software architecture development. RelatedVendorContent Got fires in production? Find root cause in minutes. FREE Java performance tool The Agile Business Analyst Experience Java EE! 600 page Redbook Testing Platforms Analyst Comparison: IBM, Microsoft, Coverity, MKS, and more Transform IT Complexity to Achieve IT System Vitality George explains the Architecture Modeling process from different perspectives such as Engineering Use Models, Conceptual Model, Domain Model, Design Model and the Code Model. He also discusses the various architecture styles including Big ball of mud, Pipe-and-filter, Batch-sequential, Map-Reduce and talks about the distinction between architectural patterns and architectural styles. The discussion also includes topics like evolutionary design, architecture refactoring and how to analyze, test and validate the architecture models."

"The results of software estimation are important for stakeholders to take care of team allocation and budgeting. A widely prevalent technique to estimate in Agile has been Planning Poker, which is a consensus based. Does this way of estimating take too much time? Are there other methods which can be employed by experienced practitioners?"

"Join us for a Scrum Safari in South Africa this September. It will be a unique opportunity to be exposed to like mindedScrum and Agile practitioners. Come along and spend some time with the big 5."

"User Story is suitable for describing what user needs, but not what user does and how system reacts to user actions within different contexts. It basically gives product team a way to quantify their output and let their boss know that they are doing their job. As a developer, you can't write code from user stories because you have no clue on what is the sequence of user actions and system reactions, what are the validations, what APIs to call and so on. As a QA, you can't test the software from user stories because it does not capture the context, the sequence of events, all possible system reactions. User stories add little value to dev lifecycle. It only helps product team understand how much work they have to do eventually and it helps finance team get a view on how much money people are talking about. But to UI designers, solution designers, developers, they are nothing but blobs of highly imprecise statements that leave room for hundreds of questions to be answered. The absence of "Context" and "Cause and Effect", and the imprecise way of saying "As a...I want... so that..." leaves room for so many misinterpretations that there's no way development team can produce software from just user stories without spending significant time all over again analysing the user stories. Software, and the universe eventually, is all about Cause and Effect. The Cause and Effect is not described in a user story. "

"I'll let you in on a secret: I don't care what letter you put in front of "DD." I don't care so much about how code is written or the ins-and-outs of software development. It's not because I don't realize how incredibly important it is - it's because what I care most about is the value delivered. How can what you do save me time, money and/or frustration? I'm smart enough to know that without you - the incredibly talented member of the development team - my life will go into a tailspin. Nothing will work. I realize and appreciate that what you develop creates value for me."

"2 Want to build a successful web app? Then it's time to Get Real. Getting Real is a smaller, faster, better way to build software. Getting Real is about skipping all the stuff that represents real (charts, graphs, boxes, arrows, schematics, wireframes, etc.) and actually building the real thing."

"Traditional contract models were designed for commoditized products and services. They are brittle and do not readily embrace change. This is because the products and services are defined upfront, and any change to this definition requires an amendment to the contract, which is usually governed by the change control mechanism. Instead of the change control mechanism embracing change, it is generally regarded as fettering and inhibiting change."