Fixed Price: Is it Agile?

If I am remodeling a house, I need to know how much to budget. I also need to know when the drywall contractor will be complete so I can schedule the painter.   Similarly with product development, I need to budget and I need to know when features will be complete so that stakeholders can prepare. So, it’s natural to want to know up front what is coming, how much will it cost, and when...
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How Agile Do You Need to Be?

by Jim Highsmith, 19 December 2012
The Agile Blogosphere

In The Upside of Turbulence Donald Sull makes an insightful statement, “companies do not pass through life cycles, opportunities do.” Turbulence causes opportunities and companies...
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A Corporate Agile 10-point Checklist

I'm pretty sure my few remaining friends in the "small, collocated team agile" community are going to desert me after this, but I actually have a checklist of 10 things to think about...
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Your Team Is New To Scrum

by Derek Huether, 11 December 2012
The Agile Blogosphere

If your team is new to Scrum, they don’t have the advantage of looking at their previous velocity before making commitments to the business A while ago, I published a post titled: Simple...
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Multi-Release Burnup

In my experience, Agile projects almost never have a single milestone at the end. The business wants to see multiple milestones along the way, taking internal releases from the development...
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Agile at the Speed of Trust – Organizational Trust

This post is part of a series focusing on the synergies between Agile and trust.  The book The Speed of Trust forms the definition of trust and the framework for this series.  The...
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Effective Collaboration: Discussion, Decision Making, Commitment

by Jim Highsmith, 28 November 2012
The Agile Blogosphere

The Agile community promotes the value of collaboration in teams, although promotes may too weak a verb for our fascination with collaboration. And while collaboration can have many...
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Is release planning worth it?

by Joe Little, 28 November 2012
The Agile Blogosphere

In a word: Yes, if done professionally. How is release planning, and release plan refactoring…how are they useful? A few ideas: It enables the Team to share ideas It allows the...
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Standard Agile Process

by Manfred Lange, 21 November 2012
The Agile Blogosphere

A few days ago a friend described to me how in their company they were introducing a new development process. To go with the flow they decided to introduce agile methodologies at the...
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Einstein’s Sailboat: 3 Ways To Speed Learning for Agile Newbies

Albert Einstein turns out to have been both an awesomely brilliant physicist and an enthusiastic but comically bad sailor.  Apparently, he spent whole summers amusing his neighbors...
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How to Calculate Budgets For Agile Teams

by Jesse Fewell, 2 November 2012
The Agile Blogosphere

A common concern I get from Agile newbies is “how do I calculate the cost of my agile project, if I don’t do all up front planning?” Actually, it turns out that when...
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Avoiding Mini-Waterfalls

A lot of people and organizations, when transitioning from a serial software development lifecycle toward an Agile one, fall into the pattern of mini-waterfalls. They start doing iterations,...
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Linking Agile to HR Theory

To many people, agile is the opposite of sound theory. Instead of proceeding in a structured, well-planned manner, teams “self organize” and iterate through prototypes to try...
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Joe’s Agile Release Planning

by Joe Little, 31 October 2012
The Agile Blogosphere

I have written a new booklet that I want you to have (I think you will find it useful) and also to comment on. It is about Agile Release Planning. It proposes that agile release planning...
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Two words for Agile Business Analysts: Pan and Zoom

Do you have trouble wrapping your arms around the question "what do Agile Business Analysts do?"  I figured it out today!  And I will tell you!  And as a special bonus, I figured...
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New ThoughtWorks Technology Radar

The ThoughtWorks TAB has released the latest edition of our technology radar. As usual this provides our current view on what technologies are interesting, generated by a mix of our...
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Early Feedback Reduces Anger and Frustration

by Mark Levison, 22 October 2012
The Agile Blogosphere

Have you seen a developer react after they’ve spent three days writing a feature, only to have the tester say, “Um,..N o that’s not right.” after 5 minutes?...
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