The Consultant, the Coach and Delivering Value
Published January 4th, 2010 Under Software Development | 3 Comments
The Winter 2009 issue of Methods & Tools contains an interesting article from Rachel Davies about Agile Coaching Tips. She shares her experience that is also available in the excellent book that she wrote with Liz Sedley. When I reviewed her book this summer, I started thinking about the coaching role that external people are now assuming versus the traditional consultant position. On the same question I saw a recent blog post discussing the utility of agile coaches. The author said that you should accept advice only from people that had achieved themselves something big, citing personalities like John Carmack or Linus Torvalds. Read more
CMMI: Less Hyped Than Agile but Equally Popular?
Published January 27th, 2009 Under Methods & Tools, Numbers, Software Development | Leave a Comment
A recent Methods & Tools poll examined at what stage is the CMMI approach adoption in software development organizations.
| Not aware | 13% |
| Not using | 29% |
| Investigating | 8% |
| Analysed and rejected | 4% |
| Trying to reach Level 2 | 12% |
| CMMI Level 2, 3 or 4 | 20% |
| CMMI Level 5 | 14% |
Participants: 392
Ending date: January 2009 Read more
How Yahoo! International is Becoming Agile
Published October 16th, 2008 Under News, Personnal, Software Development | 1 Comment
I had the chance to assist to the Geneva stage of the Agile Tour, an itinerary French-speaking agile conference. Alexandre Boutin made a very interesting presentation about the transition to agile by Yahoo International (the non-US operations of Yahoo). Read more
Software Development Articles
Published February 20th, 2008 Under Methods & Tools, Software Development | Leave a Comment
Some of the last interesting additions to our Software Development Articles Directory:
* Top-10 Application-Design Mistakes
Application usability is enhanced when users know how to operate the UI and it guides them through the workflow. Violating common guidelines prevents both.
* Why Do I Need All That Process? I’m Only a Small Project
At Intel’s Information Technology (IT) department, we developed extensive processes for our projects. While the large projects get the glory, the majority of our projects are less than six months long, have small teams, limited scope, and low risk. We found that we have a variety of project sizes but a single set of processes originally built for larger projects. So how did we fix that issue?.
* Spiral Development: Experience, Principles, and Refinements
Spiral development is a family of software development processes characterized by repeatedly iterating a set of elemental development processes and managing risk so it is actively being reduced. This paper characterizes spiral development by enumerating a few “invariant” properties that any such process must exhibit. For each, a set of “variants” is also presented, demonstrating a range of process definitions in the spiral development family. Each invariant excludes one or more “hazardous spiral look-alike” models, which are also outlined. This report also shows how the spiral model can be used for a more cost-effective incremental commitment of funds, via an analogy of the spiral model to stud poker.