The velocity metric is often misunderstood, poorly measured, and misused by both management and development. Managers want to know how to increase this number. Developers worry they're being evaluated based on it. If velocity is not measured-and used-correctly, planning efforts quickly unravel, often sabatoging the team's efforts. Through simple analogies that make it more understandable, Rob Myers clarifies velocity-its definition and proper use within agile teams. Explore velocity as a realistic release planning tool as you learn about different ways to measure and report. For teams exploring Kanban, Rob shows how to convert velocity to lean's cycle time. He also describes approaches to bootstrap estimation using the Team Estimation Game and rapidly obtain relative estimates with Planning Poker®.

Strategic software development successes-and failures-happen every day, sometimes delighting customers and other times having devastating consequences. At the same time, many development organizations are taking on agile methods-a major paradigm shift from traditional development processes. So, what's working and what's not? Drawing from recent industry data and statistics, Michael Mah answers vital questions about agile's effectiveness. Until now, organizations have observed predictable relationships among the development triangle, "Among schedule, staffing, and quality, choose any two and the third suffers." However, current industry data indicates agile may be changing all this-and turning the "law of software physics" upside down. Michael shares productivity findings-including time-to-market, productivity, and quality-at five agile companies.

The hardest part of big projects is that they are BIG. Of course “big” means different things to different people. What some measure in cash, others measure in technology. Little value flows when we focus on the number of people “doing agile.” Big value is more likely to flourish when agility is a tool for overcoming complexity. Instead of a talk about “doing agile in the large”, David Hussman speaks to agility as a tool instead of a mandate. Drawing on experiences helping big projects build big products and systems, David describes ways to successfully introduce large-scale agility, foster and measure success in the early iterations, and take on the coaching challenges and other complexities involved in building and sustaining competitive and healthy agility. Agility that spans teams, time, and features begins with finding a process that helps you learn instead of following a process “from the book”.

The islands that many development and test teams live on seem far apart at times. Developers become frustrated by defect reports with insufficient data to reproduce a problem; testers are constantly retesting the same application and having to reopen "fixed" defects. Chris Menegay focuses on two areas for improvement that will help both teams: a better build process to deliver a more testable application to the test team and a defect reporting process that delivers better defect data back to the developers. From the build perspective, he explores ways for the development team to identify which requirements are completed, which defects were fixed, and how to guide testers on which test cases to execute. Chris details the components of a good defect report, illustrating ways for testers to provide accurate reproduction steps, demonstrating video capture tools, examining valuable log files, and discussing test environment issues.