Publications

An agile way of working spread to 5,000 practitioners within two years by using an Essence-based Practice Architecture A sustainable path to agility was created - teams could incrementally improve their way of working and growing Practices provided standardization which helped practitioners share and learn best practices

Industrial-­scale agile requires much more than just being able to scale agile. It also means taking a disciplined approach to ensuring that our IT investments are resulting in sustainable benefits for both the producing organization and its customers. This involves adopting a different approach to many aspects of agility. We need to look beyond small-­scale agile, beyond independent competitive islands of agile excellence, beyond individual craftsmanship and heroic teams, and beyond the short-­term, instant gratification that seems to be the focus of many well-­intentioned but self-­centered agile teams. It is this adoption of a more holistic approach that we call moving from craft to engineering. This paper is published at acm.org.

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.

Use cases have been around for almost 30 years as a requirements approach and have been part of the inspiration for more-recent techniques such as user stories. Now the inspiration has flown in the other direction. Use-Case 2.0 is the new generation of use-case-driven development—light, agile, and lean—inspired by user stories and the agile methodologies Scrum and Kanban. Use-Case 2.0 has all the popular values from the past—not just supporting requirements, but also architecture, design, test, and user experience—and it is instrumental in business modeling and software reuse.

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.

Use the Alpha State Cards and games to understand where you are and what needs to be addressed, track progress and health, keep projects in balance and avoid catastrophic failures, form good sprint goals and other objectives and define practice independent checkpoints, milestones and life-cycles.

The challenges for many organizations when adopting DSDM (Dynamic System Development Method) are around mind set change, awareness and communication. The Essence standard helps teams navigate through many of the complex challenges common in software development delivery from helping teams identify and engage with the right stakeholders at the right time in the right way, to making health and progress visible to all in a language that everyone can understand. The Essence standard is presented in a number of tools such as a deck of Alpha State Cards, which are a simple, easy way to track status of a software project and help plan next steps. Applying Alpha State Cards with the DSDM Framework helps portray the aforementioned and enable communication between team members.

Since their inception some 30 years ago, use cases have been used to identify, organize, synthesize and clarify system requirements for organizations across the globe. In most recent years, they have been used in techniques such as user stories. Use-Case 2.0 is the new generation of use-case driven development – light, agile and lean – inspired by user stories, Scrum and Kanban. Although they are much more agile and lean, they still embody the same popular values from the past while expanding to architecture, design, test, user experience, and also instrumental in business modeling and software reuse. But, for the adoption of use cases to be seamless, there should be a balance of principles applied.

In this episode, Ivar Jacobson shares with listeners the birth of Use Cases, how to apply Use Cases in agile environments, and what lies beyond Use Cases. After listening to the podcast, listeners will understand: how the concept of a Use Case was first developed, how to use Use Cases in an agile environment and why Use Cases can be a powerful tool in agile development.

Change. This simple word has been used to create communities, build businesses, and promote adoption within a myriad of other actionable objectives. It is as common as the air we breathe and as revolutionary as any invention. Yet in all of its grandeur, it has incessantly stumped many businesses and individuals along the way. Software has taken a front seat in several organizations. It has become the core to any business, and change initiatives have sprouted and evolved to provide better solutions, be they faster, smarter or more affordable. Furthermore, for those organizations that adapt to change well and continue to sustain said changes and evolve over time, the rewards are exponential and in many cases, lasting. As new companies emerge in markets offering innovative solutions that can ultimately disrupt the market, those organization that cannot and or will not adapt and change, and perhaps more importantly, sustain change will lose. As a result, software development teams are adopting agile development techniques to shorten development times, decrease risk, all whilst developing solutions to become more responsive to the needs of the business.