Managing Consultant Brian Hicks explains how to avoid ineffective retrospectives with four tips for creating and managing action items.
Managing Consultant Brian Hicks explains how to avoid ineffective retrospectives with four tips for creating and managing action items.
When everything is agile, it can be difficult to stay productive. Changing requirements and priorities often necessitate task switching, which takes a toll on your concentration, accuracy, and efficiency. This gets more complicated when your schedule is also agile. The usual productivity tips apply best to those working in a typical office with typical hours. What […]
Managing Consultant Brian Hicks shares some dos and don’ts of technical and process assessments for both formal and internal uses.
Application security, or AppSec, is hard. For development teams, it often comes into development late in a release cycle and demands changes to the software that seem unreasonable. For the AppSec team, being introduced to a project after the application has been designed and much of the code has been written means there will be […]
One of the key conversations organizations and teams forget about in their transition to agile and DevOps is updating their measurement and metrics plan. Many companies are still using measurements and metrics from the traditional waterfall software development lifecycle. While some of these remain useful, many may not provide value to the team or organization—and […]
When an organization grows quickly, it puts stress on people, processes, and customers. Burnout happens, things fall through the cracks, and defects creep in. Unfortunately, many organizations try to scale agile too quickly, and that often leads to failure. Here are three of the telltale signs you’re scaling too fast.
Organizations struggling to see tangible benefits after adopting DevOps practices often have only slapped together a few tools instead of making the required changes. Many aren’t really embracing DevOps at all. Here are three signs to help you determine if your organization isn’t quite ready yet to practice DevOps.
Successful agile coaching requires a combination of experience, knowledge, and soft skills to help organizations build competence, sustainability, performance, and maturity in their agile practices. And when it comes to coaching, there is a vast difference between knowing and doing. That means not all coaches are created equal. There are a few things you can […]
Most of the organizations I work with are embracing agile or some variant of lean development and delivery. While agile has been around for a while, there are still several organizations that are just beginning their agile transformation journey or are continuing to refine their agile practices. In the Scrum implementation of agile, we have […]
One of my favorite agile principles is “Working software is the primary measure of progress.” Unfortunately, many agile teams ignore this principle, instead focusing on collaboration, organizing self-directed teams, and performing agile ceremonies. While all the agile principles are important, without producing working software on a regular basis, the others won’t matter. Traditional software development […]
