When Agile Isn’t Enough

When Agile Isn’t Enough

We’ve sifted through a decade of Version One’s State of Agile Development survey in order to create our Decade of Agile report (that you can get for free here), to see how Agile has evolved over the years. It’s no surprise to those who follow the...
Finding the Right Agile Coach

Finding the Right Agile Coach

This year at the Toronto Agile Tour I ran a new session about how to hire an Agile Coach. A few months ago I saw an article on Linked In titled something to the effect of “how to pass your Scrum Master/Coach interview”. Thanks to whoever wrote it, because...
How Roles Change With Agile

How Roles Change With Agile

Scrum has 3 roles: Product Owner, Scrum Master, and Team Member. Scrum specifically says the team needs all the necessary skills to do the work, which is why people are referred to as Team Members. What happens in large organizations that have oodles of specialists?...

Organizing Your Organization Around Microservices

In 1968, programmer Melvin Conway stated: “organizations which design systems … are constrained to produce designs which are copies of the communication structures of these organizations.” Basically, if you have three teams building a compiler, they’ll likely build a...

Management Goes First

Sometimes Agile is thought of as a way to fix teams. I like to call this spray-on transformation.  That is, management reads an article about how Agile helps teams go faster, while increasing quality for less cost, and then they decide they need to spray some of that...