agile

Caution tape stretching across a construction site 5 Pitfalls Agile Coaches Must Avoid

Successful agile teams often have a coach driving continuous improvement. While some coaches are effective initially, many eventually succumb to pitfalls that inhibit their team’s growth and fail to compel any lasting changes. Here are five common pitfalls of agile coaches in most projects that fail to improve.

Alan Crouch's picture
Alan Crouch
A two-lane road heading toward a mountain, photo by Jamison McAndie The Importance of Goal Alignment in Agile and DevOps

For agile and DevOps teams to succeed, there must be a common vision that strives for detailed customer-focused outcomes. There’s never a magic bullet to address goal misalignment, as the challenges are context-specific, but here are some approaches that help move organizations and teams toward better alignment.

Michael Sowers's picture
Michael Sowers
Giant man who grew too quickly 3 Telltale Signs You’re Scaling Agile Too Quickly

When an organization grows quickly, it puts stress on people, processes, and customers. Burnout happens, things fall through the cracks, and defects creep in. Unfortunately, many organizations try to scale agile too quickly, and that often leads to failure. Here are three of the telltale signs you're scaling too fast.

Jeffery Payne's picture
Jeffery Payne
Five coworkers fist-bumping in a culture of continuous improvement Building a Culture of Continuous Improvement

A culture of continuous improvement means you are open to improving how you build and deliver. You don't accept the status quo; you choose how to work and feel empowered to change it if it no longer makes sense. Kevin Goldsmith gives some ideas for frameworks to adopt in order to move toward this people-first culture.

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Kevin Goldsmith
Roadblock sign reading "Road closed" 4 Impediments to Nurturing a Feedback-Rich Culture

Being able to have open, candid conversations that fuel learning, growth, and improvement is critical to a team’s success, so it is important to look out for impediments that can get in the way of having a feedback-rich culture. Here are four common impediments to watch for, as well as behaviors you should nurture.

Joanna Vahlsing's picture
Joanna Vahlsing
facets The Changing Facets of Integration Testing

In the current dynamics of product development and confirming quality in the agile world, the definition (both narrow and broad), significance, and scope of integration testing have increased manifold. Rajini Padmanaban highlights the changing facets of integration testing that teams need to make note of.

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Rajini Padmanaban
Two men sitting opposite each other, working on their laptops Is Your Agile Team Taking Every Opportunity for Communication?

Scrum events are well-defined points where team members communicate, but they shouldn't be the only times. If you’re not considering coding, tests, and the delivery process as opportunities for a conversation, you are missing an important chance to leverage individuals and interactions, as the Agile Manifesto states.

Steve Berczuk's picture
Steve Berczuk
Pipelines, photo by Bernard Hermant Testing Your DevOps Is Just as Important as Testing Your Software

Many DevOps engineers fail to test their automation code in the same way they test the software they deploy. It's crucial for software to have tests, and this should apply to infrastructure-as-code software too, if we plan to change and improve this code with no worries about breaking automation in our DevOps pipeline.

Alan Crouch's picture
Alan Crouch