Agile*Product*AI

I just picked up ScrumBan from Cory Ladas.  Very thoughtful and interesting read. Cory does an excellent job describing lean principles and offers some examples that are very easy to understand. There we a few comments he made that I don't neseccarily agree with - for instance that XP is a derivation of V-Model. This was a bit dismissive of the revelolutionary work the Kent Beck did on XP! But again, if you into agile and want to learn about lean check out ScrumBan.

When we created Scrum back in the early 90's, we sequestered ourselves in an office park in Burlington, Massachusetts sufficiently protected from the blustery New England winter. We were trying to build something different. And we knew we had to do it in a different way. Jeff Sutherland had already discovered some previous art on new product development (Takeuchi and Nonaka. The New New Product Development Game. Harvard Business Review , 1986). In this paper the authors used scrum (among others) as a metaphor for new product development. They discuss how like in a rugby scrum, the product development team moves toward a goal. Well perhaps the authors played or watched a different version of rugby than I was familiar with! A rugby scrum is brutal. Opposing teams come together fight each other to influence the progress of the ball. Ears are bitten. Fingers are broken. While there needs to be "healthy tension" in product development, I winced at using "Scrum" as a ...

I just got back from a grueling trip to Australia. I was on the ground for four days. In that time, I visited Brisbane, Sydney and Melbourne with days packed with public seminars and customer visits. While IT and application development are a smaller community in Australia, I was very happy to see the interest and level of adoption. While in Melbourne I had the good fortune to speak with Lorraine Pauls Longhurst from Computerworld. We had a great conversation about some of the basics of agile and teams struggles around agile adoption. Given that this was in the early phases of the global financial meltdown, so our conversation naturally turned in this direction. Lorraine asked me point-blank - How will agile help organizations in times like these? Wow. Here was my chance to solve the financial crisis. Move aside McCain and Obama! Joking aside, there were some practical things we discussed. I asserted that agile and lean are clearly aligned with helping organizations through times like ...

I just returned from Serena's annual user conference called "TAG". The "TAG" is a bit of play on words. Its a mixture of TAG as in an XML TAG and TAG as in graffiti. The conference had both great content and production quality. The highlight for me was the unveiling of Serena Agile On Demand (AOD). AOD is a SaaS offering that enables agile development at the enterprise scale. I gave a couple main stage demonstrations of the new product, and we had several conference presentations on agile development. Part of our AOD offering includes transformational services that will be delivered by Valtech. My favorite main stage session was Agile Mythbusters. This was a tongue and cheek panel discussion that was MC'd by Jeff McKenna Serena's Chief Agile Evangelist and another co-creator of the Scrum agile method. Jeff presented 10 Agile myths that were debated by the panelists. The panelists were Al Goerner (Valtech), Tim Walker (Valtech), Paul Dupey (Serena) and me...

I recently completely a business trip to India for Serena Software. I visited Chennai and Bangalore. It was an amazing trip and the first opportunity I've had to directly experience the Indian people and their culture. The purpose of my trip was to visit Serena customers and prospects and to speak with them about Agile development. I had meetings with HCL, Cognizant, and Infosys. These companies graciously hosted me and brought technical and project leaders from their organizations to discuss various aspects and issues with regard to the adoption of agile methods. I was very impressed with where they were. While Agile's initial foothold in India has for the most part been driven by the service company's foreign (mostly US) customer, agile was also being adopted now for its inherent benefits as well. I believe we are about to see an explosive adoption wave in India similar to what we are seeing in the states. Most of what we discussed was "typical" challenges for t...