Month: March 2012

Managing Technical Debt in Large Software Development Projects

March 29, 2012 1

The nice metaphor of technical debt introduced some 18 years ago by Ward Cunningham has slowly taken roots in our collective conceptual toolbox, as a nice way to express some of the pains that software projects suffer from. Most software developers who have had some experience with significant, long-lived projects can feel it, sometimes point to it, but more than often can’t do much about it. In most cases, technical debt is seen as something very negative, burdening projects forever under increasing amount of interests. But some technical debt can be deliberate, more akin to borrowing to make an strategic investment, and this is especially the case for architectural-level debt.

Agile Support and Maintenance

March 27, 2012 0

As Agile approaches are gaining acceptance in software development organization, this article discusses how Agile could impact the support and maintenance processes of existing mature products.

Agile Project Management Office

March 12, 2012 0

The adoption of Agile approaches has introduced new ways of thinking about Project Management, which impact Project Management Organizations in various ways. This paper divides the range of practices commonly found in Project Management Office (PMO) into Project Management, Program Management and Portfolio Management. It identifies how the introduction of Agile processes such as Scrum impacts the PMO.

Scrum Burnup and Burndown Charts

March 7, 2012 0

Burn charts are a simple method to monitor work progress in Scrum. This article discusses the details of burn down and burn up charts: which units to measure, how to adapt to scope variations. He gives some guidelines on how to interpret burndown charts. He reminds that the chart should be objective and visible.

Does Pair Programming Have to Suck?

March 7, 2012 2

Pair programming is sometimes the norm, and some developers really enjoy the collaboration, experiencing enhanced productivity. In other teams, pairing is shunned, avoided, or… faked. Angela Harms did a short survey about pairing attitudes and compared successful and unsuccessful pairing experiences.

An Agile Team “Reset”

March 6, 2012 0

An Agile team reset occurs when an Agile team take a step back to review and relearn the foundation principles and practices of Scrum. Justin Hennessy presents in this article how he did it when a team he was coaching had successfully implemented the practices for Scrum but didn’t really understand the values or principles behind it.

Core Practices for Continuous Delivery

March 1, 2012 0

Continuous delivery allows teams to reduce dramatically the transaction cost of releasing high-quality software, so you can do it much more frequently, providing a much richer and faster feedback cycle from users back to product teams. But, in turn, you need to change the way you think about managing the flow of work through the software delivery process.