Sunday, March 25, 2007

Agile in March RationalEdge & April CrossTalk

The March issue of The Rational Edge and the April issue of Crosstalk are both devoted to the the theme of Agile Software Development this month!

Wednesday, March 21, 2007

Lean-based Metrics for Agile CM Environments

My paper in this month's issue of The CM Journal is about Lean-based Metrics for Agile CM Environments.
    This month we take an "Agile" slant on metrics for CM, including the CM process itself. Agility is supposed to be people-centric and value-driven. So any metrics related to agility should, at least in theory, provide some indication of the performance & effectiveness of the value-delivery system, and how well it supports the people collaborating to produce that value. We borrow heavily from the concepts of Lean Production (and a little from the Theory of Constraints, a.k.a. TOC). Let's see where it takes us ....
Some readers will recognize some of the content from earlier blog-postings of mine on Codeline Flow, Availability and Throughput, Nested Synchronization and Harmonic Cadences and Feedback, Flow and Friction, but there is also a lot more content there too!

Saturday, March 17, 2007

Elements of Agile Style

Joe Little has authored a nice little booklet on The Elements of Agile Style

Wednesday, March 14, 2007

Top-down Agile Adoption in March Agile Journal

The March issue of the Agile Journal is about scaling-agility and agile adoption in the enterprise.

Sunday, March 11, 2007

Scaling Agility - new book & blog

Dean Leffingwell, previously known for his book Managing Software Requirements: a Use-case driven approach has just published a new book entitled Scaling Software Agility: Best-Practices for Large Enterprises. He also has a corresponding Scaling Software Agility blog. See the forthcoming reviews on amazon.com.

So how did Dean go from being a requirements-management guru to being a large-scale agile guru? It's not too big of a leap if you think about it! Dean is at Rally Software Development these days (the noted Agile consulting services & tool vendor) and has also authored a few Agile Whitepapers, an essay on The Essence of Agile (now an excerpt from the book), and a few articles for The Agile Journal, most notably Agile at Scale: 7+7 Practices for Enterprise Agility.

Wednesday, March 07, 2007

SEI Reflections on Agility: Challenges, Dillemas, & the Way Ahead

Interesting paper from Linda Levine and the SEI about Reflections on Software Agility and Agile Methods: Challenges, Dillemmas & the Way Ahead (see the corresponding presentation slides)

Some other related documents from the SEI are:

See! Not everything from the SEI is about CMM or CMMI ;-) They also a have a wealth of resources on Software Architecture and Software Product-Lines and other areas of Software Engineering!

Sunday, March 04, 2007

Practical Guide to Seven Agile Methodologies

In October of last year over at DevX.com, Rod Coffin and Derek Lane wrote a darn good article (in two parts) that gives a nice, concise overview of seven agile methodologies:
Check out some of the other articles at the DevX.com Architecture Zone.