To deliver high-quality products to customers, Agile teams and product owners have to jointly ensure the quality of the requirements and manage them effectively. Agile quality practices have to be ingrained in the team’s daily work.
Since the manifesto for agile software development hasn't changed since it's publication in 2001, the question arises if the Agile Manifesto needs an update. I think it should be updated to reflect what has been accomplished with agile and to state what the software industry needs now.
Agile methoden zoals Scrum leggen de nadruk op functionaliteit. Klanten verwachten echter naast functionaliteit dat ook de kwaliteit van het product in orde is. Waar agile voornamelijk aandacht geeft aan het software team en de interactie met de omgeving, kijkt Lean naar de gehele keten: van klantbehoefte tot waarde voor de klant. Een van de aspecten van Lean Software Ontwikkeling is het integreren van kwaliteit.
In one of my workshops I explored how to use agile and Scrum beyond software development, for example in marketing, sales, support and in management. I gave this workshop in-house for a client to an audience which was not directly involved in software development. Many good ideas came up when preparing and giving this workshop, in this post I'm sharing them with the agile community.
The practices in the workshop Getting More out of Agile and Lean will help you to develop the right products for your business and customers, reduce your delivery time, increase the quality of your software, and create happy high performing teams.
Als een organisatie besluit om agile in te voeren dan wordt er vaak ook gesproken over doelen. Mijn ervaring is dat agile als doel stellen niet werkt, agile is een middel dat kan helpen om effectiever te worden en daarmee dichter bij je doel te komen. Goed omgaan met doelen speelt wel een belangrijke rol bij het behalen van succes en resultaten met agile. Doelen en agile, hoe werkt dat? Hier zijn mijn tips.
In 1980 Philip Crosby wrote the book Quality is Free. In the book he explained how investing time and energy in building the right products with good quality will save money and time. Many agile teams know how important software quality is, but they need to convince their managers and other stakeholders to get there. It will help them to self-organize and do their work in a good way. Let's explore how you can sell that "quality is free" and build a business case for quality.
When a client asks for a training session, most often the full content of the training is discussed and defined up front. With one client that wanted a week of training I took a different approach. The client an I used a backlog to prioritize training sessions and workshops. We only planned the first days, and reflected and adjusted the training every day of the week. This is a story of how I collaborated with a client in an agile way to ensure that they would get the biggest possible benefit out of a training week that I delivered to them.
One of the principles from agile and lean software development is transparency. Making things visible helps teams to decide what to do and to collaborate effectively with their stakeholders. It can also help to increase the quality of software. This post provides ideas how you can do that.
I gave a well received keynote at the QCon Beijing conference, in which I explained why continuous improvement is essential to deliver value with agile. QCon Beijing was the largest QCon conference so far with over 1600 attendants.
People are often afraid to make mistakes. They do things to prevent that something might go wrong and avoid doing things that might fail. And if it does go wrong then they don't talk about it. Is it really bad if once in a while something goes wrong? If something can go wrong, let arrange for it to happen as soon as possible, because then you can quickly learn from it. Create a culture where failure is allowed so that we can all learn from it and find ways to make fewer mistakes!
2014 was a great year for me. I've helped organization to effectively deploy Agile and Lean and improve their ways of working, my first book became a bestseller and I've inspired professionals all around the world by sharing useful knowledge and experience on my blog and via InfoQ. Let's reflect on what 2014 has brought and do a futurespective to visualize the opportunities of 2015.