3 Must-Read Books for a Good Agile Foundation

If you are searching for agile knowledge, there are many books outside the current literature that may enlighten you. Some discuss the underpinnings of concepts we consider agile, while others are contemporary business books that present compelling ways to use agile effectively. Here are three Jeff Payne recommends.

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You Can’t Rush Agile Change

Too often, organizations try to rush agile change. It is usually because they want to see the business benefits of agile as quickly as possible. Unfortunately, change doesn’t work like that—you can’t rush it. In fact, trying to change too fast often results in no change at all. Here are some examples to avoid.

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Continuous Security in Agile Development
Padlock on a green door

The word continuous gets thrown around a lot when talking about agile and DevOps. One area that often doesn’t get enough attention is how to continuously build, test, and deliver secure applications.Just like for quality, you can’t test security in, so you need to have a plan for how to build it in from the ground up. Here are some tips on how to do that.

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Continuous Improvement Activities beyond the Retrospective

One of the principles behind the Agile Manifesto is “At regular intervals, the team reflects on how to become more effective, then tunes and adjusts its behavior accordingly.” Unfortunately, many associate that practice with performing team retrospectives at the end of a sprint, or periodically in kanban. But if you seek to build a high-performing team, there are more improvement activities you should consider adopting.

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Why Does Everyone Pick on Agile?

It seems like every other day, someone in the software development community feels the necessity to declare that agile is dead and they have something new and better. Sometimes it’s one of the founders of agile who now think the Agile Manifesto is dated and needs to be overhauled. Other times it’s ageless software veterans […]

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The Dangers of Underplanning in Your Agile Projects

Agile coaches often stress the importance of not overplanning. They talk about the dangers of planning work that is later changed or never done at all. When agile first emerged, there was a belief that upfront planning was unnecessary. Teams were encouraged to jump right into sprints and plan as they go. While not many […]

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Signs Your DevOps Initiative Is Off the Rails

There’s lots of confusion about what DevOps is. This has resulted in the emergence of DevOps “antipatterns”—DevOps patterns of behavior that will not result in success. Having worked with many organizations to successfully implement DevOps principles and practices, there are often clear signs that what you are doing isn’t going to work. Let’s delve into […]

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Creating a Company Culture Where Agile Will Thrive

When I teach classes on root causes of agile project failure, I’m often asked which of the causes is most difficult to overcome. From an enterprise perspective, that is an easy answer: bad culture. Sociologist Ron Westrum defines culture as “the patterned way that an organization responds to its challenges, whether these are explicit (for […]

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The Relationship between Agile and DevOps

Many are beating the drum that DevOps is something new and different—just like agile was new and different before it. Make no mistake, DevOps fixes an age-old conflict between software development and operational teams, but it’s not new. In fact, the DevOps philosophy is ingrained within the Agile Manifesto, and one could argue that DevOps […]

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Why Does Everyone Pick on Agile?
Women holding sticky notes at blackboard

It seems like every other day, someone in the software development community feels the necessity to declare that agile is dead and they have something new and better. Sometimes it’s one of the founders of agile who now think the Agile Manifesto is dated and needs to be overhauled. Other times it’s ageless software veterans […]

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