From construction to manufacturing, retail to healthcare, the three Vs– Velocity, Volume, and Variety – govern everything. These also form the essence of all technological innovation such as Bigdata. ...
DevOps is an everyday term that is associated with profit, progress and fruitful business. While some of the benefits it offers include better collaboration between teams, faster time to market, ...
Cloud management and digital transformation are almost inseparable, if not for the strategies that go into bridging the two. Digital transformation, indeed, is not only about moving to the clouds, ...
Cloud management platforms are the next big thing in the innovation and technology sector in the coming years. Be it data security or building a development model for a business, cloud-based ...
The bleak wide world has been reduced to a global village, thanks to the internet. Whether one believes it or not, but the internet has literally taken over their personal and professional lives by a ...
Cloud and DevOps together have revolutionized the IT industry, making solutions easier, faster and safer. They are increasingly gaining importance because they help address some key transitions in ...
Businesses are not just driven by the motto to generate revenues these days, they also harp on customer satisfaction and lucrative consumer experience, leading to a successful business prospect. ...
The key to business growth is making informed decisions, which is by adopting Big Data analytics. It is the complex process of analyzing and examining large and varied data sets to uncover ...
Cloud computing and management is shaping the future of businesses, cutting through the need for devices, storage servers, networks, security, and architecture. Companies are realizing the benefits ...
The pace of digital transformation continues to increase in organizations across the world, owing to the speed it bestows to corporate affairs. Right from data storage to customer experience, digital ...
The importance of supply change management continues to increase for the healthcare sector, owing to the challenges it faces with proper distribution and time-bound fulfillment. Members of the ...
We have come a long way from the past when data were recorded manually, often to the extent of making mistakes that had a negative impact on business. While human error is an unavoidable factor, no ...
In a world that’s overwhelmed daily by new digital technology and where customer experience rules the roost, can the healthcare industry be any different? Big Data emerges as the superhero as the ...
DevOps is unique for each organization but the 3 key areas that are common to almost all DevOps methods are asset management, CI/CD and monitoring. Below you will find a 3 Point Health Checklist for ...
So you’ve got the Atlassian Suite up and running. Jira, Confluence, and maybe some other products too, like Bitbucket and Bamboo. Life is great! Or is it? Unfortunately, we often hear from customers ...
Inc. Magazine Unveils Its Annual List of America’s Fastest-Growing Private Companies—the Inc. 5000 CirrusLabs Ranks No. 1 in IT Services on the 2019 Inc. 5000, with Three-Year Revenue Growth of 263 ...
It’s not all about the team. For Agile to work in a large program or a large organization, the cross-team issues are even more important than how well teams function individually. This is a common ...
Teams are not constrained by how much they can learn. They are constrained by how much they are allowed to try, as well as by how much they don’t know what they don’t know. When Agile adoption ...
There is a trend today that I find troubling: non-technical release train engineers, Agile coaches, or others in Agile leadership roles who are non-technical, leading the way for Agile ceremony ...
Doctors, hospitals and other healthcare professionals collect huge volumes of data about your health. Using Big Data analytics can help stop diseases in their tracks, change public policy or alert ...
Delivering A Best In Class Customer Experience Quest Trust is one of the fastest-growing direct custodian of IRAs and other self-directed accounts in the United States. The company allows Americans ...
A company transitioning to the digital platform requires a lot of strategy to ensure that the transforming is a complete success; Otherwise, it will not only lead to failure but will also cause a ...
In the third and final episode of our Agile Coaching Intensive series - Ken Fritz (Director of Software Delivery) overviews the agile coaching roadmap and key agile mindset shifts that come along ...
In the second episode of our Agile Coaching Intensive series - Ken Fritz (Director of Software Delivery) overviews the who, what, when, where and why of an Agile Team Facilitator. Watch this episode ...
In the first episode of our Agile Coaching Intensive series - Ken Fritz (Director of Software Delivery) overviews the four main pathways of an agile coach's career and how the agile coach interacts ...
Organizations that still depend on legacy logistics processes miss opportunities to improve efficiency all along the supply chain. That reduces costs and can increase profitability. Every business ...
Cloud computing and cloud management services are not just any terms per service. They are accompanied by a gamut of benefits and challenges at the same time, some not even known to the user. Cloud ...
In order for an organization to be successful with Continuous Business Value Delivery® the organization has to set a new destination and has to create a “new” route to reach this destination. This ...
There are many misconceptions about what Agile means. Here are a few of the most common that I've heard: Agile is a development methodology. Well, not really, but there are a group of methods that ...
So, creating a Agile team sounds good on paper, but making this a reality is often harder in most organizations. The hardest part of moving to dedication of team members is first believing that the ...
So you graduated with your degree in IT - how long ago? And you have been learning lots as you have worked at different jobs and on different teams. But you keep getting emails about taking this ...
Wearables as a technology category is emerging as one of the leading technologies within health care. Whether it is Mixed Reality (MR) via the holo-lens, Virtual Reality (VR) from Samsung Gear or ...
Apple just announced their iPhone 8 series and the next-gen iPhone X. What was the buzz all about? A lot of the press and media is about the ARKit and how Apple is positioning the iPhone to be the ...
Applications running in production, test, and development environments produce massive files filled with endless lines of text in the form of log files. Mining the data available in these files ...
Cucumber, Selenium and Gherkin have become popular tools for helping teams implement test automation or what is often referred to as Acceptance Test Driven Development (ATDD) or Behavior Driven ...
Cucumber, Selenium and Gherkin have become popular tools for helping teams implement test automation or what is often referred to as Acceptance Test Driven Development (ATDD) or Behavior Driven ...
INTRODUCTION:
INTRODUCTION:
INTRODUCTION:
Ever since taking hold in 2001, Agile has done nothing but grow in popularity. This osmosis of the Agile methodology is due to the positive effect is has had on helping organizations of all scope and ...
Transforming to an agile software delivery model is filled challenging, especially when you are working in an organization of a large scale. In large organizations, one of the most common practices ...
DevOps!! Now, WHAT crosses your mind on hearing this word? Well, you might think of it as another bit of fancy terminology or a buzzword in the IT industry. As a matter of fact, I too thought the ...
How do you learn?
“I have been asked from a lot of developers “What is responsive design all about? How does it work, and how do I do it?” In this article I’m going to try to explain responsive design and how that ...
User Story Mapping is an excellent technique to visualize how the solution is going to be iteratively developed in fast-feedback cycles. MVPs can be defined for various reasons such as validating the ...
Have you ever thought about learning AngularJS but didn’t know where to start? Today I’m going to show you how to quickly spin up an AngularJS 1.6.x application using a couple of different tools and ...
In my experience delivering high velocity, critical business projects, I have worked in environments that have traditional software development approaches as well as environments using agile ...
If you’re a CEO of a company, agile and scrum should be very familiar to you. If not, you run the risk of losing productivity and profit in your business. The top 3 challenges for CEOs who are ...
Are you looking to streamline your software artifacts, application packages, open source dependencies? Wouldn't it be great to have a solution that is easy to install, upgrade, maintain, and has a ...
Cucumber, Selenium and Gherkin have become popular tools for helping teams implement test automation or what is often referred to as Acceptance Test Driver Development (ATDD) or Behavior Driven ...
In Agile Testing, you want to adhere to the testing pyramid when designing your automated tests. For this discussion, I will be focusing on the bottom tier of the pyramid, Unit Tests, where you want ...
The Scrum framework has four key events: 1) Sprint Planning, 2) Daily Scrum, 3) Sprint Review, and 4) Sprint Retrospective. At Sprint Planning, we set a Sprint Goal that binds the team to work ...
Scrum is a framework comprised of roles, events, artifacts and rules along with a set of values to be lived by Scrum Teams. We have seen Scrum done well and, in many instances, Scrum not done so ...
Agile frameworks, like Scrum, are generally easy to understand. With many teams where we have taught and coached, there are some common mindset and practice tweaks that make a real difference to ...
What is Agile? And, how can it make you faster, more innovative, and competitive? In today’s business environment, how is your organization remaining relevant? Is it investing in innovation? Is your ...
Cucumber, Selenium and Gherkin have become popular tools for helping teams implement test automation - what is often referred to as Acceptance Test Driver Development (ATDD) or Behavior Driven ...
Want to Performance test your web Applications? Then you should know about Apache JMeter. What is Apache JMeter? It is a 100% pure Java application and Open Source testing software .It was designed ...
Heard about Node.js and Express but are confused where to start? Well, here you can find 3 easy steps to create and run Express application in Node.js on a Mac OS.
How do you know what tool to choose? JIRA, VersionOne, Rally, DAD, LeanKit... the list goes on.
As a product owner, I am constantly challenged with writing user stories that meet my stakeholder needs. A key deliverable from a Product Owner is having user stories with crisp acceptance criteria. ...
Why Sync Spaces? Contentful provides spaces to group related resources into one repository. The content from these spaces can then be retrieved using Contentful’s Content Delivery APIs. In situations ...
But where is the system documentation?
The CI [continuous integration] pitfall to utilizing Git and Gerrit for code review.
Increasingly, IT development organizations are turning to automated testing techniques to improve the quality of their code and to save time and money. While this market remains fractured, Selenium, ...
We developers live in an object oriented world where data is represented as objects in our applications. However, these applications often end up saving their data in SQL databases which are ...
If you are familiar with open-source Jenkins, you understand that it is an award-winning continuous integration and deployment tool for a reason. It’s growing ecosystem of plugins has taken Jenkins ...
Selenium Grid is a powerful tool for testing web applications across browsers and operating systems, but incorporating it into a Continuous Integration pipeline can be frustrating. Integrating the ...
Teams are an intricate balance of skills, cooperation, leadership and willingness to go the extra mile to make a quality product. Each grouping has individuals with specific roles and ...
Have you ever had your scrum master ask you, "what is going on with that story?" As somebody that has assumed virtually every role possible on an Agile team over the course of my career, I can assure ...
1. Continuous Integration (CI)
I have heard it asked many times, “Where do architects fit into Agile?” But that's the wrong question. Instead, you should be asking, "Is our architecture Agile-Ready?" One reason for adopting Agile ...
JIRA Portfolio is a powerful tool which provides an easy way to manage one or more teams' backlogs and schedule work for months at a time. Portfolio for JIRA 2.0, which was just recently released, ...
All your software deployments happen very late at night/very early in the morning
You wrote a fancy new API that handles everything you can throw at it. You spent hours doing manual testing to make sure your API works perfectly. You release your code and make some updates. Now you ...
The DevOps Story Needs to Be Told! There is so much chatter about DevOps these days, but so little clarity about what it really means. The shame of it is that very few of us have really heard the ...
The lack of built-in test support for JIRA can feel like a strange omission. Luckily, there are multiple JIRA plugins that add testing support to JIRA, the most popular of which is Zephyr. However, ...
Now that you are hopefully convinced that you want your organization to be steeped in a Culture of Commitment, how do you infuse the CofC in your company’s DNA? The “Culture of Commitment enabling” ...
Welcome to Interview Series! In this Series, we ask questions that you submit through our social media channels to our consulting practice leaders.
Having played senior leadership roles in many solutions delivery organizations, we have witnessed both the presence and absence of a Culture of Commitment.
Welcome to our Interview Series! In this Series, we ask questions that you submit through our social media channels to our consulting practice leaders.
Being lean doesn’t mean being mean.
More often, organizations pervert the notion of the Sprint “commitment” with crushing delivery pressure or a lack of a support structure that allows a real commitment culture to take hold. For these ...
We have all heard of the test pyramid, and the importance of a well-formed base of unit tests, a highly flexible set of integration tests and UI test automation that supports multi-browser validation ...
The Scrum Guide has entirely moved away from using the word “commit” in relation to the Sprint Planning ceremony and favors having the Development Team “forecast the functionality that will be ...
We are happy to announce that Brian will be speaking at the PMI-Delaware Valley Chapter on Thursday, August 26, 2015. You can learn about Agile and earn 2 PDU's!
As we discussed in the previous blog, lean release management processes are the foundation block for release orientation. In order to amplify the value delivery across multiple synchronized value ...
The first step is to get the organization aligned on a agile delivery cadence that is most appropriate depending on the type of business – more importantly the expectation from your end users. For ...
At the Portfolio Level, there are really no significant impacts for SVS pattern organizations. We still use Kanban systems to manage the business epic and architecture epic pipelines that flow into ...
We are happy to announce that Naeem and Brian will be speaking at the Global Scrum Gathering New Orleans 2014. Our session is called "Hop Onto the Release Orientation Trolley" (in the New Orleans ...
We are happy to announce that Naeem and Brian will be speaking at CD Summit on Wednesday, November 19th. Our session is called "Realizing Continuous Delivery: From Startups to Large Enterprises" - so ...
We are happy to announce that Naeem and Brian will be speaking at Agile DC 2014 on Tuesday, October 21st. Our session is called “Hop Onto the Release Orientation Trolley”. This session was first be ...
Back in May of this year, Naeem and I went down to New Orleans to the Global Scrum Gathering to present “Hop on the Release Orientation Trolley”. It was a great experience and we have had numerous ...
An agile transformation journey implies a starting point, where you are now, and a destination. That destination might not be the final end point for your transformation journey, but that destination ...
Naeem and I had the pleasure of presenting “Hop Onto the Release Orientation Trolley” at the Global Scrum Gathering in New Orleans last week. When you speak or go to a conference, you figure the ...
It was a great week at Global Scrum Gathering in New Orleans! We really appreciated all the energetic participation by the attendees at our session, “Hop Onto the Release Orientation Trolley”. We ...
There are many considerations on how to make the move from Project Orientation to Release Orientation. Probably more than any other, the key is a belief in moving your organization’s mindset to the ...
The third foundation –Agile Enterprise Portfolio Management– A lean project funding and tracking process that ensures Just In Time funding of ideas, so that the rest of the machinery can deliver the ...
So, does this picture bring up bad memories of late November or early December – out in the cold, hanging these up and not sure if all or any of these bulbs were going to light? For me, this picture ...
Project oriented organizations focus entirely on getting a related set of intent packaged into a container called a project and seeing that entire container move through from requirements generation ...
We are happy to announce that Naeem and Brian will be Keynote Speakers at Agile PA on Wednesday, May 14th, at 6 PM. Our session is called “Hop Onto the Release Orientation Trolley”. This session will ...
Here is a reprint of my article originally published with Scrum Alliance in March 2014. Enjoy! Been blazed and confused for so long it’s not true . . . So, your Agile transformation journey has been ...
As experienced leaders, we expect that our managers and executives trust us as well as give us autonomy in decision-making. Some call this empowerment. The secret for this empowerment begins with ...
Inspired at @gwu @uchicago
Ever tried getting a recipe book and recreating your favorite dish made by your favorite chef? You have followed all the instructions, gotten the right ingredients, and channeled your inner Emeril, ...
Expectations are everything. If you set a goal, communicate it and then meet it, your team is thrilled and so are your stakeholders.
In the previous post, we outlined the Agile Resource Allocation Dilemma and recognized that this is a pervasive issue and a tough one to solve.
Happy to report that I took the Certified Scrum Profession (CSP) exam this morning and passed with flying colors! My biggest reason for working towards the exam was using it as a forcing function to ...
Congratulations! You have now convinced your management team to adopt agile. Everyone (or at least most) in your leadership team have extended their support toward this initiative. Everyone believes ...
I have a new article published today with Scrum Alliance on why release orientation (vs. project orientation) is so important to being agile and critical to scaled agile.
This article is about the third and final alternative to the Ideal Team Structure – feature teams with mixed-composite skill teams.
Pulling all the ideas together from this article series, I want to leave you with a couple of key thoughts when you are trying to design your agile organization:
In the last article, I outlined the Large Feature Team pattern as a first alternative to the Ideal Team Structure (ITS) if your organization cannot make the immediate leap to the ITS when ...
I spent time outlining the guiding principles for organizing agile teams in my last article. With the challenge of delivering business intent where changes to 10’s of platforms / components are ...
Before I get on with describing the less-than-ideal organizational models, I thought it would be useful to spend some time describing what the Ideal Team Structure looks like to paint the picture of ...
Transforming to an agile software delivery model is filled with lots of challenges, especially when you are talking about solutions delivered in an organization of a large scale. In these large ...
When considering the Program Level of SAFe applied to Small Value Streams (SVS's - see the first article in the series for an introduction to SVS's), I will describe SAFe elements that "work out of ...
Last year, I got inspired to read Dean Leffingwell’s “Agile Software Requirements” book. As I read Dean’s concepts (better known as the Scaled Agile Framework™ - or SAFe for short), it was obvious to ...
One of the great parts of the SAFe framework is the emphasis on usage of industry standard practices like Scrum and XP (Continuous Integration, Pair Programming, Test-Driven Development, and ...
Small Value Stream (SVS) pattern organizations have the largest portion of their product development flow starting locally with intent generated from within each SVS. Therefore, we can optimize the ...
