Yesterday Brian Marick tweeted that he had “Realized one reason I’m suspicious of current trend toward visionary leaders guiding Agile adoption: it’s a single point of failure.” This was the one reason my attempt to introduce Agile at my previous job ultimately failed in spite of being really quite successful at quickly and cheaply delivering [...]
Entries Tagged as 'Agile'
Making Agile Stick
December 17th, 2008 · 2 Comments
Tags: Agile
Collaborative Software Initiative and Utah Taking Open Source Vertical
May 20th, 2008 · 5 Comments
The vast majority of open source projects are horizontals – they solve a general type of problem rather than a specific problem itself. There are open source document management systems, open source content management systems, open source office productivity systems. Hopefully you get the idea. But how many open source insurance policy systems are there? [...]
Tags: Agile · Information Technology Trends
The IT Desktop – How the Mighty Have Fallen
April 14th, 2008 · 4 Comments
Eleven years ago I sat behind my first post-college desk. On it sat a Sun SPARC 20 workstation, a powerful Unix machine, with a 21″ CRT monitor above it and a 3D input device beside it. I don’t remember what the input device was called – it was a round ball you could push, pull, [...]
Tags: Agile · Uncategorized
State of Indiana Makes Using Waterfall SDLC’s a Criminal Offense
April 1st, 2008 · 11 Comments
“Waterfall software development lifecycles have terrorized technology projects in this state for too long,” Governor Mitch Daniels said at a simple signing ceremony held at a meeting of the Central Indiana chapter of the Project Management Institute (PMI). “This bill will end the tyranny of big upfront planning, big upfront design, and litigation style change [...]
Tags: Agile
Exploratory Testing in Practice Starts Today
March 19th, 2008 · 1 Comment
Today is the first day of a two-day workshop on exploratory testing that Mike Kelly and I put together. I’m really excited about it because the course itself has a very unique presentation approach, inspired by Matt Heusser, and because it has a very heavy emphasis on hands-on practice. Participants will be testing and creating [...]
Tags: Agile
Code Reviews in Scrum
February 17th, 2008 · 2 Comments
Here’s another recent email question: Hello David, I am just checking with you to find out what your perspective is on “code reviews” in a Scrum environment? Generally it seems that I see that the discussion on this leans toward paired programming and test driven development to meet this need. But I would be very [...]
Tags: Agile
Using Exploratory Testing in User Acceptance Testing
January 18th, 2008 · No Comments
I recently got involved in an email list discussion about exploratory testing. I thought I’d post one of my comments here: I think it’s worth noting that for most terms there is a difference between practice and theory in the way they are used. So, while I call the part of my projects (I’m a [...]
Tags: Agile
COAST: The Business/IT Love-Hate Measurement
December 17th, 2007 · No Comments
I have great sympathy for the business organizations that utilize services from corporate IT groups. It’s not easy to make an IT project successful just because of the complex nature of software systems. Specialization and centralization of resources, which are practically IT “best practices” these days according to the popular literature, only makes things works. [...]
Tags: Agile
Interesting Post about the Demise of Gantt Charts
December 4th, 2007 · No Comments
Alexey over at OneYoxel has a couple of interesting posts following up on Tate’s post “The Demise of Gantt Charts in Agile Projects”. I recommend you check it out. Here’s a quote I enjoyed. In its traditional sense as a static master plan of your project I would agree, there is not much value in [...]
Tags: Agile
The Procurement Problem and Agile Methods
December 4th, 2007 · 1 Comment
OK, I’ve had enough; it’s time for another rant. Once again I find myself bewildered and befuddled by the sound and fury of the Agilistas as they seek to dethrone the PiMPs. Tell me something all you clever people out there, if Agile is sooo good, why has it not taken over the entire industry [...]
Tags: Agile

