Running Agile

A Practitioner's View To Lean & Agile

Archive for December, 2007

Agile 2008 submissions

Posted by Christophe on December 23, 2007

The agile 2008 submissions are now open and will close on February 25, 2008.
This year, submissions are handled through a new web site.

Per the program selection system:

We are applying the core agile principles of iterative development and feedback to our review process. All proposals will be open to review by the agile community and expert reviewers. The review can begin as soon as your submission is received. This will enable you to respond to review feedback and adjust your session proposal before final acceptance decisions are made.

Posted in Agile2008 | Tagged: | Leave a Comment »

Signs of a high performing team

Posted by Christophe on December 23, 2007

I’m often asked how to measure the performance of a team. People want usually to hear a list of metrics. I instead point them to 6 principles that, when demonstrated, are strong signs of a high performing team:

  • a high service level and availability of their product/system
  • a high throughput of effective change
  • a low amount of unplanned work
  • a culture of change management
  • a culture of continual improvement
  • a culture of root-cause analysis

Building specific metrics around those principles shouldn’t be hard. They would just need to support those principles and not go against them.

Posted in Metrics, Team Performance | Tagged: , | Leave a Comment »

Flying Logic – a ToC Visualization tool

Posted by Christophe on December 17, 2007

I just came across FlyinLogic, a new tool for graphing ToC trees. It helps people focusing on the thinking process (entity relationships) rather than the formatting. As a java application, it runs on both Mac and Windows.

The tool came out in September 07, and was reviews on Tidbits.

Check out the overview and presentation screencasts here.

Screenshots:

st-trees.jpg

conceptmap.jpg

transition-tree.jpg

Posted in Software, Theory of Constraints | Tagged: , | Leave a Comment »

The Value of Agile Leadership to the Enterprise

Posted by Christophe on December 4, 2007

InfoQ presents a one hour video from the APLN Leadership Summit at Agile2006, where a panel of business leaders spoke about their experiences

Posted in Agile2006, Leadership | Tagged: , | Leave a Comment »

Scrum in 100 words

Posted by Christophe on December 2, 2007

Scrum is an agile process to manage and control software development. Scrum embraces change, empowers the team and provides transparency to stakeholders. The Product Owner engages in ongoing dialogs with the team to build the most valuable features. The Team demonstrates these running, tested features to stakeholders in regular, short increments. Scrum follows a simple set of rules and places responsibility on the whole team to deliver. The Facilitator coaches the team to self-organize and optimize their output. The Facilitator shields the team from external distractions by working with the Product Owner to insure that stakeholders understand the value of a prioritized and emergent product backlog of features.  Scrum ruthlessly exposes problems and impediments within the Team and in the organization as a whole, and requires commitment at all levels to succeed.

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