Our piece on enterprise Agile was picked up by Agile Connection today. Read more

Here is a riddle for you: who (or what) is both so strong and solid that it is very hard to move, and yet can move easily at the same time?

The answer: champion sumo wrestler. The other answer: well thought out application architecture.

Why are we talking about 400+ lb Japanese athletes in the context of Agile software development? Let me explain. Read more

Here is a quick video we put together of our management team being interviewed on various topics…. and congratulating the company on New Year’s Eve. Have fun! Read more

(Continued from Part I and Part II)

When the client program managers first saw the template-driven reports, they immediately recognized the qualitatively different degree of visibility and transparency all this information gave them. First Line was asked to make a special presentation to the Program Steering Group, and very soon the template was officially introduced as the standard reporting device on all First Line teams participating in the program.

Another thing that became clear pretty quickly was that the customer PM role has become unnecessary. The “tracking” and “control” functions were essentially already being carried out by the First Line teams themselves and evidenced by the template. In the spirit of Lean and Agile, the client eliminated the role of the PM, effectively folding its function into First Line’s Scrum Masters, who were now to report directly to the Steering Group. Read more

(Continued from Part I)

On the client side, the Business Unit formulated business requirements, which were finalized and managed for the supplier’s development team by the Product Owner (PO). Additionally, a business analyst on the supplier side filled the role of Proxy Product Owner (PPO), whose job was to be the sole source of clarifications of requirements for the team.

This additional role was set up in order to mitigate the fact that because of the distance, it would be logistically challenging to make the client’s PO available to the entire team all the time. So the PO and the PPO set up a knowledge management process whereby the PPO was extensively educated by the PO on the business requirements over time and was able to provide explanations for the team. Read more

This is the first in a series of posts discussing how Scrum improves chances of outsourcing success and cuts costs through discipline, transparency and tighter integration between customer and provider.

It is no secret that many outsourcing projects fail. In our daily practice, we encounter many customers who have had very negative experiences with outsourced development, and many times the negativity tends to focus on the customer’s lack of visibility into the real status of the project, or on the lack of understanding between the in-house organization and the offshore team, or both. Simply put, the customer and the provider are not on the same page. Read more

This post originally appeared on ZDNet.com. Read the original here. 

Yes, you read that right. I work for a software development outsourcing firm, and I am telling you not to outsource.

But why not? Everyone’s doing it, and everyone can’t be mistaken, right? The common perception is that outsourcing saves money based on labor arbitrage. There may be other factors, but mainly companies do it in order to get more software, probably faster, for less money. Read more

Is Scrum too rigid with its timeboxing, estimations, and other procedures? Would it perhaps be better to let go of at least some of its structure and just develop software as fast as we can?

An overview of similar remarks makes some assertions to the effect that some of Scrum’s practices, far from helping boost productivity, are in fact stifling it. For example, there is this claim that giving up timeboxed iterations and iteration planning meetings has led to marked improvements in delivery.

The first thought that comes to mind here is: how do they know that? Read more