Publications

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.

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.

As with any new initiative people are struggling to see how it fits into the world and how it relates to all the other things going on. For example does it improve or replace their current ways of working. Is it something like lean that supports and furthers the aims of the Agile Movement, or is it something like waterfall planning that is in opposition to an agile approach? The good news is that both Agile and SEMAT promote non-prescriptive value-based philosophies that encourage software development teams to select and use whatever practices best fit their context and, most importantly, continuously inspect, adapt and improve their way of working. In this keynote we will look at how these two initiatives complement one another, providing the perfect foundation for teams that want to master the art of software development.

Combining agile and SEMAT yields more advantages than either one alone. This paper discusses how two current popular movements complement one another to provide a powerful basis for software development.

The Agile Architecture Essentials practice provides guidance for achieving just-in-time architecture preparation and continuous and emergent evolution of the software system.

A modularized set of interchangeable practices that enable organizations to scale agile smoothly as part of a tailored transformation program that delivers value early and often, and builds a flexible and long-lasting library of practices, able to flex and grow over time in response to changing technology and business challenges.

As Agile Software Development practices become more and more popular both customers and suppliers are looking to find ways to have more agile contracts. Contracts that reflect and exploit the benefits of an agile way-of-working on both sides of the relationship. This hands-on workshop introduces and applies a number of simple but powerful tools to enable customers and suppliers to establish effective contracts that reflect their level of agility without constraining or compromising that of their partners.

The Agile Essentials practices provide a basic starter kit toolbox that covers all the common and critical aspects of team-based development. Each practice contains a small number of cards that provide useful, structured advice on how to successfully adopt and apply each practice.

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.