Agile*Product*AI

Big tech is partnering with automotive companies to bring intelligent digital co-pilots into cars. Its been a blast building this new business at Amazon and it was great speaking with Engadget at CES this year. https://www.engadget.com/2017-01-09-amazon-alexa-will-make-your-car-smarter.html  

<rant> I am so sick of listening to people propagate the myth that agile methods don't scale. Guess what everyone, scaling software development is hard! Regardless of approach or methodology. I am not going to waste your or my time quoting all the well know (but somewhat outdated studies), but suffice it to say that the success or failure of a software development effort correlates pretty damn well with the size of the effort. So if its gotta be big, its gonna be hard. Count on it. And that’s why one of the most important things we do with agile development efforts is to decompose them into smaller chunks. Ideally, incrementally delivering to our customers production ready capabilities rather than embarking on the classic 24-month death march to preordained failure and/or obsolescence. </rant>  Ok. I feel better now. For those edge cases where the minimum marketable set of features translates to a large software development effort, lets be smart about it and make sure w...

For some reason I can't explain, metaphors abound with respect to farm animals and agile (Pigs and Chickens for instance).  So, I figure I'll pile on a bit here! I've seen, read, and listened to several agile and lean experts discuss how lean and agile are related.  The discussion is a bit frivolous in my opinion, but after hearing it enough times, I wanted to set the record straight on Scrum. We built Scrum for one reason.  We wanted a process that reflected how software was built rather than one that tried to control how people should think and structure code.  While at Easel Corporation, as the software development manager for the first ever Scrum (Ken Schwaeber hadn't yet started the CSM marketing machine, so there was no such thing as a "Scrum Master"), I had to figure out how to manage my team in an environment where most of the requirements weren't well understood, and those that we did understand seemed to change as quickly as they could be committ...

The success of agile approaches depends on how close you are to your customer. This is an indisputable fact. So, if you’re an independent software vendor (ISV) that is producing commercial software products (like me at Pacific Edge Software), then how do I get my customer "on the team?" It’s likely not possible or practical and this is where effective Product Management kicks in. The Product Manager (PM) is the proxy for the customer on an agile team in an ISV or for that matter any company building products for customers that they are at least once removed from. Being on an agile team will change how a product manager elaborates and drives their product to market. And I've had some interesting challenges on retooling classically schooled PMs (some of them didn't make required adjustments and didn't survive the organizational change). While the roles and responsibilities are the same, the behavior patterns must change. The PM is integrated into the development tea...

User Stories and Epics are inadequate to capture and express critical elements of product design.  User Stories are fine grained and atomic – remember they are “implementable” within a single Sprint.  Epic Stories tend to be semantic free containers of Stories.  Creating sophisticated applications with rich application interfaces requires pre-production activities to validate Epic and User Stories with product design considerations such as usability and architecture.  We experienced this on our latest project.  Ironically, this was while building an Agile On Demand solution for work management for teams (and teams of teams) using agile methods to create software!  The team had been Sprinting together for quite some time.  Probably in the neighborhood of 15 or more 3 week Sprints that included 3 releases to production of a SaaS product.  As we approached the completion of the third release, we started getting pretty clear feedback from some team me...

I am presenting my post on Agile ROI in a brief webinar today. I will basically go over my previous Agile ROI post with the inclusion of some new materials. Enjoy.

So I blogged on this topic a few months back. You can find that blog entry here. It was a popular post. So much so that we made a webinar out of it with the Agile Journal. Jeff McKenna, Serena's Chief Agile Evangelist and the first Scrum Coach, and Paul Dupuy, an agile black belt and the Product Owner for Serena Agile On Demand joined me for the session. We had a great time and hopefully the attendees found it valuable. You can find the information on the webinar here and a recording of the webinar here. We had far more Q&A than could be addressed in time allotted. I guess the discussion going a little long didn't help much either! So I decided to cross post the Q&A here in my blog. Enjoy (or ignore)! What if the business process isn't defined how does Agile handle business  reengineering?  When the business process is not defined, an agile approach provides an incremental model to explore and define it! Using Scrum for instance, you would work with your Product Own...