I work and interact with multiple software development teams. Some are just beginning their agile and DevOps journeys and others are well on their way, but they have many of the same questions or concerns: How do we get all team member roles on the same page? How do we communicate and collaborate more effectively […]
Adopting agile in your program comes with inherent benefits around transparency and delivery, but it also often requires changes to other business practices to align with a more iterative way of developing software. Threat modeling helps you determine where to focus your security testing efforts when building your app, so it’s a useful practice. But one […]
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 […]
Welcome changing requirements, even late in development. Agile processes harness change for the customer’s competitive advantage. In traditional development methodologies, like waterfall, a customer might try to specify how a system should look and behave completely upfront before they even start development. The problem with this is it assumes that it is possible to completely […]
I work with many organizations that are trying valiantly to transition to agile. While it is noble to try to just follow the agile principles and develop your own solution, most understandably find comfort and support in following a well-understood and documented agile framework. But which of the many frameworks do you choose? Scrum? Kanban? […]
More and more organizations are adopting agile software development processes and practices. But in many cases, these organizations have declared they are agile without actually changing how they develop software. Declaring that an apple is an orange doesn’t make it so. These six key indicators can help you determine whether your agile project isn’t really […]
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 […]
If you are currently applying agile principles and run into situations where the team’s outcome occasionally deviates from the business needs, you might consider applying Behavior-Driven-Development (BDD). BDD is a mechanism for fostering collaboration and discovery through examples. – Dan North BDD is a way to “shift left” the validation of the work, ensuring it […]
Simplicity—the art of maximizing the amount of work not done—is essential. When I first started in development, I tried to plan for every possible situation. I was given the requirements, but always asked “what if?” What happened more often than not was I’d build a feature and then never actually implement it because either the […]
Nine years ago, I started on a project that was going to prove that agile processes could work within the US Department of Defense (DoD). Our goal was to introduce agile development processes, like unit testing and continuous integration, into a tool that promoted agile practices for other DoD projects. We started by making incremental […]
