Publications

Key to realizing benefits from agile is strong customer representation through empowered Product Ownership – to guide the team in delivering a solution that maximizes end-user value. But this is also often the hardest agile practice to get working effectively, because of its novelty for many stepping into the role, and because of the challenges in balancing time commitments with existing business responsibilities, and combining incisive decision-making with broad-based stakeholder representation and negotiation. Download the infographic and post it on your wall as a daily reminder of what's needed or better yet, download our Product Ownership Health Check Guide.

We must work as a team! Teamwork is critical! There’s no ‘I’ in team! These mantras are plentiful and many Agilists believe that success at the team level is the foundation to success at the organizational level. But what does it really mean to work as team and is there a common recipe to build and grow a successful agile team? Agile believes in principles before practices and in multi-disciplined, self-organizing teams. All teams need direction and guidance, but with an agile approach no one should be telling the team how to do their job. Teams need to be empowered to make choices rather than be told exactly what to do. But sometimes things can start to unravel and too much time and energy can be wasted arguing about the basics. You can forget about scaling agile if your team is unable to clearly demonstrate the value of agile at the team level. But, get the basics right at the team level and engaged, highly motivated, cross-functional teams of teams can follow.

Presentation & Speaking Notes - Ed Seymour, Cloud Domain Architect from Red Hat looks at how SEMAT helps Red Hat manage an assortment of approaches when working with varied and disparate clients; how it provides a consistent view across all projects irrespective of the approach taken, even if SEMAT was not considered during project initiation. Furthermore, he looks at how SEMAT is helping Red Hat patch the holes in existing approaches, and providing a framework for developing new practices to support evolving techniques, and emerging technologies.

Industrial-scale agile means that agile at any-and-every scale is business-as-usual for an organization, across its entire portfolio, and that this capability is continuously sustained and strengthened. This paper examines two leading frameworks that provide guidance on how to achieve success within this kind of “complexity at scale” challenge space - David Snowden’s Cynefin framework and Max Boisot’s I-Space framework.

This instructional guide provides a brief introduction to the Alphas and presents seven different games that can be played with the Alpha State Cards by software development teams.

SEMAT (Software Engineering Methods and Theory) is an international initiative designed to identify a common ground, or universal standard, for software engineering. It is supported by some of the most distinguished contributors to the field. Creating a simple language to describe methods and practices, the SEMAT team expresses this common ground as a kernel–or framework–of elements essential to all software development. The Essence of Software Engineering introduces this kernel and shows how to apply it when developing software and communicating among teams and team members. It is a book for software professionals, not methodologists. Its usefulness to developers, who need to evaluate and choose the best practices for their particular projects, goes well beyond the description or application of any single methodology.

Agile rightly puts great store on the critical importance of transparency in all things at all times. To build trust and enable predictability, we need it to be transparently clear to all stakeholders what we are doing, how we are doing it, why we are doing it that way, and how well it is going - i.e. what progress are we making towards achieving the required outcomes. The Agile Essentials puts a toolkit of productive process tools literally into the hands of software development professionals, where it can deliver value every day in prompting and guiding the team and supporting team communication and collaboration.

Essence is a super-light foundation of software engineering including elements we always have, always produce and always do. Its application allows team to work in a super agile way and it turns software development to become more of an engineering discipline than just a craft. On top of Essence organizations are now developing practices and at the OMG Technical Meeting Special Event on June 18, 2015 in Berlin, Germany, speakers from companies such as MunichRe, Fujitsu, RedHat and Ivar Jacobson International shared their experiences in using Essence.