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Bright light bulb 2 Good Practices Agile Says You Don’t Need

There are lots of good practices that people will tell you aren’t agile. Usually this comes from people who read a book on Scrum or Extreme Programming and took it literally. But agile is not methods and tools associated with a particular methodology; as long as you follow the agile principles, anything is fair game.

Jeffery Payne's picture
Jeffery Payne
Person estimating an agile story with planning points A Musical Metaphor for Agile Estimation

Many explanations of relative sizing in agile estimation fail to capture the mix of knowledge, skill, and effort involved in completing a task. Learning to play a song seems to capture the core ideas of estimation. With a metaphor, it is easier to come up with baselines to estimate against for your own agile sizing.

Steve Berczuk's picture
Steve Berczuk
Woman working remotely at a computer Agile Collaboration on Remote Teams

The first value in the Agile Manifesto is “Individuals and interactions over processes and tools,” and for many teams, being located in the same place facilitates these interactions. However, being part of an effective, collaborative team is less about location than it is about motivation and good practices.

Steve Berczuk's picture
Steve Berczuk
Apple cut open to reveal an orange inside 6 Signs Your Agile Project Isn’t Really Agile

There's a trend of organizations declaring they are agile without actually changing how they develop software. Declaring that an apple is an orange doesn’t make it so. These six key indicators can help you determine whether your agile project isn’t really agile after all—and give you some solutions to help.

Alan Crouch's picture
Alan Crouch
Test pyramid 5 Reasons You Should Have More Unit Tests

The test pyramid is a valuable visual in agile. In particular, it argues that unit tests should make up the majority of tests, and while agile teams recite this principle, it is often not clear why it is so important. Here are five reasons unit tests should make up the majority of tests written for an application.

Jeffery Payne's picture
Jeffery Payne
A feature branching strategy Feature Branching Is Not Evil

Some people believe branching and pull requests are inherently bad. True, branching done poorly can slow down a team, but advocating for avoiding branching altogether can lead you to ignore the more important goal of an agile process: rapid integration of changes. First, make sure you're considering the right metrics.

Steve Berczuk's picture
Steve Berczuk
Microphone on stage at a software conference 4 Takeaways from Agile + DevOps East 2018

With a week full of sessions, tutorials, training classes, and events, the Agile + DevOps East software conference had plenty of takeaways. Here are four highlights, including discussions about agile estimation, finding your ideal job, some challenges to advancing test automation, and leading self-organizing teams.

Owen Gotimer's picture
Owen Gotimer
Hand holding a camera lens focusing on faraway mountains Agile and DevOps Bring the Focus Back on Quality

As companies move to agile and DevOps, silos are coming down and there is more interaction and collaboration among teams. Quality is also becoming everyone's responsibility for the entire software development lifecycle. Quality is more than just testing: Consider a quality value stream along the overall value chain.

Michael Sowers's picture
Michael Sowers