The Latest

No two people or groups are the same, but their differences don't have to force them apart. In this column, Esther Derby uses the example of feuding operations and development groups to explain how focusing on the source of structural conflict can help build a bridge across the disagreements.

Companies that develop multiple products often struggle with how to ensure they all work together as a solution and struggle with how to get the deliverables from various products together into a working release. Project managers and product managers have other priorities to handle. So who handles a release that wrangles together multiple project deliverables from multiple products that define a solution or complex release? The answer is the Release Manager.

Release management is a complex function that involves many essential technical tasks that must be completed in a very specific way. At first glance, one might think that Release Management has little or nothing to do with personality and psychology. In the book Configuration Management Best Practices: Practical Methods that Work in the Real World, Bob Aiello and I focused three of our fourteen chapters on the people side of CM. The fact is that people skills play an essential role in release management. Read on if you want to improve your ability to get the job done and achieve success in release management!

Sometimes we're blind to what's right in front of us. We think we're paying full attention, but, as Naomi Karten knows from a recent travel experience, we're not. In this week's column, Naomi describes what happened and discusses some fascinating research that demonstrates how common this form of blindness is.

Johanna Rothman recently wrote, commenting on Joshua Kerievsky's proposed definition of done. Both posts are worth a read, if for no other reason than to better understand why we have such a difficult time defining what "done" is, and why defining "done" is one of the major challenges for teams  trying to adopt agile practices.

Agile and ALM are two terms that you don’t often see side by side. To most developers, agile means team interaction, customer collaboration, dynamism, and responsiveness to change. In contrast, ALM seems to imply the opposite of agile, with echoes of rigid procedures, inflexibility, and top-down process control. But are the agile and ALM approaches as contradictory as they first appear to be?

Agile software development is designed to thrive within even the most dynamic business and technical environments. All agile methodologies include integrated practices and processes that manage evolving requirements to efficiently develop a continuous stream of new software capabilities. However, what Agile does not address are changes related to enterprise support that falls outside the scope of the project work. Enterprise Change Management (ECM) provides a framework that addresses many of these missing factors.