Chapter on Agile added to What Drives Quality
A new chapter which explores how agile software development can be deployed to deliver high quality software has been added to my second book What Drives Quality.
Should you measure defects?
Regularly I get questions if you can measure defects and if you should measure them. The short answer is: You can measure them, and it can have value to do so, but only if you take action. Quality matters, and defects can provide you with valuable information about the quality of your product, but measuring alone doesn't improve quality. You need to dive deeper to have a good understanding and then act upon that.
Workshop Increasing Organizational Agility with Retrospectives in Sydney, Australia
In this workshop you will learn how to scale agile retrospectives, doing them with multiple teams from a project, product or organization, practice facilitation skills with different retrospective exercises, and learn how you can introduce and improve retrospectives. You will also learn to do agile self-assessments and readiness checks and to design and facilitate retrospectives that help organizations to increase their agility.
Increasing Software Quality with Visual Management
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.
What if we fail?
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!
Empower Teams to Increase Quality
When an organization is experiencing quality problems with their products, agile software development often isn't the first solution that comes up in people's minds. Often I see people trying to address them using classical waterfall based approaches, only to find out that it will make problems even worse. I recommend agile, not only to deliver working software faster but also with the right quality. This posts shows how empowering the team helps to increase the quality of product.
Success Factors for Root Cause Analysis in Software Development
Root Cause Analysis can be used in software development to build a shared understanding of a problem to determine the first or “root” causes. Knowing these causes helps to identify effective improvement actions to prevent similar problems in the future. You can also do Root Cause Analysis in agile to stop problems that have been bugging your team for too long.
Agile Veranderen door sterktes te gebruiken
De trend die ik in 2013 heb gezien van kleinere en snellere verbeteringen in organisaties zal zich doorzetten in 2014. Een Agile manier van veranderen, mbv Scrum, maakt het mogelijk om samen te verbeteren: medewerkers en managers. Het stimuleert zelf-organisatie en benut de kracht van de medewerkers om organisatiedoelen te bereiken. We gaan het gewoon doen in 2014: Sterktes gebruiken om op een Agile manier te veranderen!
Continu Verbeteren: Benut je Sterktes!
Agile projecten gebruiken vaak retrospectives, waarin ze vragen stellen zoals: 'wat gaat er goed', en 'wat kan beter'? Met het eerste gebeurd vaak niet zoveel. 'Leuk om te horen' is de reactie. Een gemiste kans! Want weten wat er goed gaat en begrijpen waarom, de onderliggende sterktes, kan je helpen om dingen te verbeteren die (nog) niet goed gaan.
Using Solution Focused in a Strengths Based Retrospective
How can you become an excellent team that is able to deliver and exceed customer expectations? By continuously becoming better in the things that you are doing great, using a strengths based retrospective. This technique helps teams to improve themselves by focusing on their personal and team strengths.
The Clean Coder: A Book on Professionalism and Attitude
The book The Clean Coder by Robert C. Martin is about attitude and discipline in software development. Robert explores how soft skills matter in IT, how people communicate and collaborate and develop their skills to become a professional programmer.
The Economics of Software Quality
The book Economics of Software Quality provides solutions to quantify Software Quality and manage software development and maintenance. It contains data usable to build a business case to improve quality, and decide upon improvements in your organization.