Absentee leaders are managers who are physically present but psychologically absent. They are incompetent and disengaged, to the extent that they don't support their teams adequately. If you have an absentee manager (and don’t have the luxury of seeking another position), here's how you can try to handle the situation.

There are many frameworks available to organizations that are maturing their agile process. However, some frameworks can help reinforce agile behaviors, while others can actually drive an organization to revert to waterfall habits. The right choice should be the methodology that allows teams to deliver their best work.

Ensuring that quality is advocated for at every step along the lifecycle can be tough. One easy response is, “Quality is everyone’s job”—after all, whole-team accountability is a key tenet of agile. But what does this really mean in practice? What approaches and roles help us embrace a culture of quality engineering?