Posts
The last responsible moment is an idea that gets a great deal of play in the Agile community. One way that concept comes about is when figuring out how soon to do certain thin…
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Kent McDonald
Kent J McDonald writes about and practices software product management. He has IT and product development experience in a variety of industries including financial services, health insurance, nonprofit, and automotive. Kent currently practices his craft for a variety of organizations and provides just in time resources for product owners and business analysts at KBP.media and Product Collective. When not writing or product managing, Kent is his family’s #ubersherpa, listens to jazz and podcasts (but not necessarily podcasts about jazz), and collects national parks.
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Agile software development has become fairly common place, some people may even say that it is now mainstream.
The success of those moves to Agile have met with varying lev…
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The general guidance in the Principals Behind the Agile Manifesto is that you want self-organizing teams consisting of motivated individuals:
“Build projects around motivated…
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When organizations adopt Agile practices, there are a few roles that often get left out of the picture because they were not explicitly noted in the framework that the organiz…
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When I’ve helped organizations adopt Agile software development, there are three groups of people who seem to get the most concerned: development managers, project managers, a…
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When the topic turns to testing and Agile software development, I usually hear variations of the following two questions:
We usually take six weeks to do systems testing …
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This is part of a series of posts where I take a look at some commonly asked questions and provide my spin on them. The answers are all my own. So while my answers do not nec…
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I have the opportunity to talk to business analysts quite a bit, and the conversation usually turns to the topic of Agile.
More often than not, the question that comes up i…
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I recently received a question about the basic qualities Agile teams should have via the website. I replied with a reader’s digest version to the requester and promised a more…
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What activities do you suggest when starting a new team?
When forming a new team, you want to make sure you can get them started off on the right foot. There are several diff…
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At Agile Alliance, we pride ourselves on the wealth of high-quality, in-depth Agile-related resources we offer you.
But we also realize that sometimes too much of a good thin…
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If you work in an IT organization that seeks to operate in an Agile fashion, you may have run across the challenge of getting your stakeholders — those people who you’re build…
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Late last year we asked our individual and corporate members for some feedback on their Agile Alliance membership.
We received a lot of great information, and also remember…
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Just about everyone who has looked into Agile software development is familiar with the Manifesto for Agile Software Development (Agile Manifesto) and the Principles behind th…
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Ron Quartel recently put relative estimation to the test and shared the results in his recent post, Putting Relative Estimation to the Test. His main finding was that absolute…
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A few days ago, I added a glossary item for epic to the Agile Glossary.
As I started writing that entry I thought crafting a definition of epic should be really straight fo…
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Last week we added the term customer development to the Agile Glossary. Customer development is a framework originally named by Steve Blank but practiced by many entrepreneurs…
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There’s a concept core to Agile Software Development not mentioned explicitly in the Agile Manifesto or the 12 Principles behind it.
Context is very important.
You could…
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Joe Foley and I recently finished up some work on the Agile Alliance website with 352, our web development partner and we wanted to share some of the highlights.
These chan…
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Folks in the Agile community have long suggested that user stories are placeholders for a conversation. That pronouncement may leave you with some questions, such as who shoul…
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In my several years helping organizations adopt Agile, I’ve seen the label “Hybrid Agile” pop up frequently. It seems to be used most frequently in organizations whose IT depa…
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Have you ever been involved in a conversation about Agile and heard a term, for example information radiator” and you wondered what that term really meant?
Or maybe you’re th…
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A common question in organizations involves determining who should be the product owner of an initiative. Here are some general recommendations:
If the result of the effo…
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I’m writing this as I fly home from the Agile2015 conference, or what Jake Calabrese rightfully calls “summer camp.” I headed into the week planning to focus on sessions rela…
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The Agile20XX Conference thrives on community involvement. There are many ways that you can get involved in the conference. Of course, you can attend one of the nearly 250 ses…
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The Conference Archive is a small application, written in Ruby, running on "the Cloud". I hope people attending Agile2012 check it out often after the conference is over, and …
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The Agile2012 conference is drawing near - if you can be in Texas in mid-August, consider attending!
Just about everyone in the Agile community, I suppose, knows at least per…
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The lack of interest, the disdain for history is what makes computing not-quite-a-field.
— Alan Kay, inventor of Smalltalk, in a recent interview
One of my motivations for st…
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Welcome to the Agile Alliance's Archivist's blog.
The Agile Alliance Web site was created in early 2001 in the wake of the now famous Snowbird meeting and writing o…
Books
In Beyond Requirements, Kent J. McDonald shows how applying analysis techniques with an agile mindset can radically transform analysis from merely “gathering and documenting r…