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The Checklist as Empowerment tool[article]

Checklists help teams make better decisions by making it easier to distribute decision making. A team of empowered cross functional people, working together to decide how to get work done sounds a lot like the model of an agile team.

Steve Berczuk's picture Steve Berczuk
My Manager Thinks I'm Holding Her Hostage[article]

You don't need to look any further than to your coworkers to see how many different personalities and work styles are in effect. Despite the differences, certain predictable behaviors occur between staff and management when personalities clash. Jonathan Kohl defines a few managerial behavioral anti-patterns that could undermine your project. He also sets the ground work for ways to improve the relationship between staff and management.

Jonathan Kohl's picture Jonathan Kohl
How Testers Can Help Drive Agile Development[article]

Although some experts say that testers are not needed in an agile development environment, Lisa Crispin knows differently. Testers want to make sure customers get what they need; they look at the "big picture" and work to ensure the best experience for the user. Unfortunately, even in the agile development world, business needs and the users' experience often are disconnected from the delivered software. Professional testers can help agile developers deliver what stakeholders want-the first time. Lisa describes how she uses tests cases to create a common language that business customers, users, and developers all understand. She explains the techniques for eliciting examples to define features and describes how to turn examples into executable tests. These tests define the scope of a feature, making it easier for everyone to envision how the feature should look, feel, and work.

Lisa Crispin's picture Lisa Crispin
Repaying the Happiness Debt—with Interest[article]

The pace of production depends on the capability of those at work. When an increase in profit is desired, production is sped up. Yet those forced to work faster aren't necessarily more productive. Unhappily experienced at being forced to work harder and faster resulting in less productivity, Clarke Ching found a way to slow down expectations and increase productivity.

Clarke Ching's picture Clarke Ching
Which Obstacle Should You Tackle Today?[magazine]

As a lead and manager, your job to remove obstacles that impede work is most important. But of all the obstacles you find, whether they be people's perceptions, bottlenecks in the work flow, or an ill-fitted chair or desk, which do you tackle first? Johanna Rothman explains how to remove the obstacles that slow, impede, or halt project work.

Johanna Rothman's picture Johanna Rothman
How Workers' Personalities Can Affect How They Approach Projects and Products[article]

Personality accounts for a lot. You can tell a great deal about how someone is going to handle a situation by understanding their personality. In fact, if you get really good at this game you can sometimes predict what they are going to do. Some people just can’t manage to the see the big picture, and that is often evident in how they approach their work, whether tactical project or a strategic product. If you want to be able to work with different personalities then you need to understand what motivates them to act, or in some cases, fail to act.

Leslie  Sachs's picture Leslie Sachs
Configuration Management is Lika a Race Track—Really![article]

A race track is built as a permanent facility designed with materials and formation to ensure the track is easily maintainable, and to enable that class of race car to travel in a reliable manner. So what does this have to do with configuration management (CM)? The race track is a lot like a CM infrastructure needed by product team to support the building of product. The race car is a lot like the CM tasks that are executed to help the project race to the release finish line.

Mario  Moreira's picture Mario Moreira
Product vs. Project CM: Straddle the Fence[article]

Configuration Management can be applied at the product level, or the project level, depending on the needs and requirements of an organization. In this article, Angela Moore takes a look at when to apply CM at the short-term level, and when to have the bigger, longer picture in mind.

TechWell Contributor's picture TechWell Contributor
Product Owners Should Care About Quality[magazine]

Product owners often view quality as an ugly duckling—necessary to ship software, but nerdy and a drag. Instead, they should be guardians of quality. Only when quality meets functionality is lasting value created.

Roman Pichler
Hearing ''No''[magazine]

"No" can be disappointing. Sometimes we have difficulty hearing or dealing with No. Can we learn how to cope with No with less pain and angst? Can we learn how to prevent No at least some of the time? Yes and yes!

Rick Brenner's picture Rick Brenner
Copeland on Weinberg[magazine]

Lee Copeland and Jerry Weinberg have crossed paths—both on page and in person—many times over the years. Here, Lee reflects on some of those meetings and their valuable lessons.
 

Lee Copeland's picture Lee Copeland
The Roles of the Project Management Office in Scrum[magazine]

Successfully adopting Scrum entails understanding and perhaps adjusting the role of the project management office (PMO), whose workers are often resistant to the lighter-weight process. But, they can become a critical part of agile success. Discover how an agile PMO works.

Mike Cohn's picture Mike Cohn
License to Open Source[magazine]

Open source is widespread and growing in many software development organizations. While there's no purchase cost, the code does come with license obligations. Understanding open source from an intellectual property perspective can help avoid downstream legal.

Kamal Hassin
Simplify Your Combinatorial Testing[magazine]

Combinatorial testing is effective for testing multiple, non-sequential inputs that affect a common output in complex software. But, it's easy to misapply it or become a slave to the output. Learn to overcome limitations and benefit fully from this technique.

Bj Rollison's picture Bj Rollison
Collaborative Risk Analysis for Release Planning[article]

Release planning is more than just stuffing the highest ranked stories into iteration buckets. To be meaningful the whole team needs to participate. Lightweight risk management techniques are not orthogonal to an agile approach They can help proactively address previously hidden concerns and the planning process benefits all-around from shared dialog on release-impacting risks.

TechWell Contributor's picture TechWell Contributor

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