You cannot sustain agility on a fragile technical foundation. These articles cover the engineering practices, from TDD to continuous delivery, that let teams deliver fast without sacrificing quality.
In today's software development landscape, speed, flexibility, and reliability are more than just buzzwords. They form the backbone of successful product delivery. One practice that stands out in enabling these qualities is continuous delivery.
Creating software requires more than technical expertise--it thrives on teamwork, innovation, and problem-solving. When a team feels valued, supported, and motivated, they deliver exceptional results.
IT Agility drives organizations to thrive in a fast-paced digital world. It's about creating a mindset that allows IT teams to quickly respond to change, deliver meaningful results, and support innovation.
Delivering exceptional software in a dynamic and competitive market requires a development process that adapts to rapid changes and complex demands.
In Agile product development, acceptance criteria play a vital role in ensuring that teams deliver high-quality products that meet stakeholder expectations.
The Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe®) is a popular and widely adopted framework for scaling Agile practices across large organizations. Organizations must be able to respond quickly to market demands, align teams towards common goals, and continuously deliver value to customers.
![The Damaging Impacts of Technical Debt on Dev Team Performance [Video]](/_next/image?url=%2Fimages%2Fblog%2FImpacts-of-technical-debt-thumbnail.png&w=2048&q=75)
Enterprise Coach Randy Hale interviews Principal Software Engineer Joshua Meriyah on the biggest challenges impacting development teams. They focus on technical debt and organizational strategies to prevent debt from bankrupting your teams and product.
In a previous post in our Scrum Assessment Series, we shared some ideas to help catalyze engaging sprint reviews. Here, we take a deeper dive into the topic of awesome Sprint Reviews.
STATIK (Systems Thinking Approach To Implementing Kanban1 2) can be a great technique to help teams get up and running quickly, even teams that are using Scrum.
The final installment of our MVP, PSI, MMF Alphabet series digs into MMF (Minimum Marketable Feature). Understanding the distinction between Potentially Shippable and what you actually want to ship is critical for Product Owners.
For the second installment of our MVP, MMF, PSI Alphabet Soup series, we're going to tackle the PSI (Potentially Shippable Increment) also known as PSPI (Potentially Shippable Product Increment).
When I'm working with new Product Owners, I frequently find that we get caught up in a sea of TLA's (Three Letter Acronyms) when it comes time to actually start turning their Backlog of ideas into releasable increments of value.
When you hear the term 'extreme programming', what do you think of? Coding while skydiving at 15,000 feet? Bug-fixing while scaling the north face of Kilimanjaro? Refactoring while swimming with sharks at the Great Barrier Reef?
Principal Agile coach Allison Pollard was kind enough to take a break from her busy Keep Austin Agile schedule to discuss how to create an Agile tech practices craftsmanship culture, management's role during a tech turnaround, and the developer secret handshake.
Agile is no longer the kid it once was. From 1957 to 2016, Agile has progressed through the stages of cute kiddo, awkward teenager, eager twenty-something, to mature thirty-ish adult.
Becoming Agile is not just a process change. That's the first and probably most common misconception-and pitfall-in an organization's Path to Agility®. There are several facets of an Agile transformation, and a big one is to improve technical practices.
A digital marketer slowly tests Agile marketing by incorporating Kanban and writing acceptance criteria in day-to-day.
David Croley, Agile Player-Coach, presented Tech Debt - Understanding its Sources and Impacts Through a Game at the Keep Austin Agile conference.
When clients start the journey of an Agile transformation, it is almost never without some pre-existing code.
I struggled with a number of potential topics for this blog before settling on this one.
Technical Debt Every software project has it. Technical debt in a software project is essentially a backlog of technical stories the development team thinks need to be completed that are not visible to the product owner and don't directly implement user features.
David Hawks' presentation, Being Agile vs. Doing Agile: Deliver Double the Value in Half the Time, given at the PMI conference in Austin, September 2014. Being Agile: Our highest priority is to satisfy the customer through early and continuous delivery of valuable software.
In the first article of this two-part series, we discussed how to define scenarios for testing. Now, once this is done, the Testers can partially implement the new steps to fail. For example, adding assertions that a file exists on the file system.
Behavior Driven Development is the process of writing high-level scenarios verifying a User Story meets the Acceptance Criteria and the expectations of the stakeholders.
Last week I presented a workshop session called Courageous Software Development Through Craftsmanship (Slides) at Keep Austin Agile 2014 here in Austin. It was a great crowd both at the conference overall and in the session.
Many times, we experiment with ideas and processes on new, or 'greenfield', projects. When starting something new, it is human nature to start with a clean slate and go from there. However, this is not always possible when automating testing.
Our first post in a series on decomposition introduced the importance of breaking things down throughout the process of delivering software. Let's continue this series by looking at more concrete examples of decomposition to attack software architecture and software complexity.
Software Quality Assurance, Why I love it: #10 I love quality assurance because every bug I find is one that was not found by the customer. #9 There is always more to learn about testing techniques and tools. #8 Being part of a team that delivers a quality product gives me great pride. #7 Running [...
Agile software practitioners focus a lot of attention on people, communication, collaboration, and strong values. In many environments, these are unquestionably the best opportunities for improvement.
As children, we were told by adults to take smaller bites when eating. We didn't always understand the risk of choking that they saw, but ultimately it was easier and safer to chew those smaller bites.
Last week some of our team attended several DevOps Austin related events. We had a great time learning and interacting with other technologists attending both PuppetCamp Austin and DevOps Days Austin.
I noticed some interesting announcements recently concerning the open-source Apache project Hadoop. Firstly, in the last week, both Intel and EMC have announced their own distributions (link).
WAIT! Stop Right There!!! I know some of you saw Ruby in the title and are about to move on, but I encourage you to read on. This could be beneficial to you even if you don't know or don't care about the Ruby programming language. Podcast Description For those of you who listen to [...]
Behavior Driven Development Behavior Driven Development is the process of writing high-level scenarios verifying a User Story meets the Acceptance Criteria and the expectations of the stakeholders.
I used to cringe when I heard developers say they were going to refactor some code. To me, as a tester, that meant they were going to change working code and possibly introduce bugs into the software. If it ain't broke, don't fix it, right? Why are we refactoring it? Truly, the answer lies in [...
You! Might Be an Agile Tester... Here's my list of 12 reasons you migh be an Agile Tester: If you work in close proximity to Developers, you might be an Agile Tester. If you are test-infected. If you think automated testing is key in software development.
Whether your team is agile, lean, or anything else, you have likely run into frustrations with your infrastructure. See if any of the following strike a chord with you in relation to Infrastructure Agility.
Test-Driven Development is one of the key Agile practices that should be combined with Scrum in order to be highly productive. Scott Ambler outlines two forms of TDD: developer TDD, where you write tests before code, and acceptance TDD, which drives development from the customer's perspective.
18 questions. 4 minutes. See exactly where your organization stands across 9 Business Outcomes.
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