Month: January 2012

Hiring Agile People

January 17, 2012 0

You company is transitioning to Agile and you need to hire people that will bring this type of expertise to you teams. This article propose 10 questions that you could ask to assess the vision of Agile by the prospective employees. The questions are only the first step and the article also provides guidelines on how to interpret the answers. It asks for instance “Did your iterations overlap? For instance, were the testers still testing Iteration 6 while Iteration 5 was being designed/developed?” and then discussed the status of multidisciplinary teams. Even if the material is more geared towards large organizations, every agile manager will find valuable content in it.

Agile Fixed Price Contracts

January 12, 2012 0

The problem is not fixed price contracts. The problem is fixed scope contracts. This is what Mary Poppendieck thinks of agile fixed price contracts. Instead of a scope, we need is a short list of problems to be solved, not a bad amateur design of their solutions. Agile contracts leave solution design to software engineers and control projects through the regular delivery of measurable value.

How Scrum Blends Lean and Agile

January 9, 2012 0

Gunther Verheyen presents the the majors aspects of the distinct views of Lean and Agile, indicating the similarities. He elaborates on his statement that the houses of Lean and Scrum are similar houses, just built with different materials. His conclusion is that the open framework of Scrum aligns and blends the underlying thinking of Agile and Lean.

Product Owner or Ownership

January 3, 2012 0

In this blog post, Pawel Brodzinski discusses the problem of the Product Role in Scrum teams. It is not always possible of having a client representative working closely with a project team. So the team should sometimes find other ways to get answer questions about the product and fill the product ownership activity. His conclusion is that knowing what is important to build is the essence of product ownership. A good Product Owner is only one way to achieve this objective.

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