I am currently reading the excellent "Debug It!" book written by Paul Butcher and I wanted to share with you some of the little gems that I have found in it.
This article presents what are the Scrum Product Owner activities and how he has to keep the balance of interests between the Scrum team and the other stakeholders.
Author: Marion Eickmann, CEO of agile42, www.agile42.com, first published in German in the IX-Magazin 8/2009
The fact that this book is already at his second edition after a first publication in 2004 says something about its value. In one of his definition of Agile, Jim Highsmith says, “Agility is the ability to balance flexibility and stability”. I will say that his book balances nicely high level thinking and a pragmatic approach. The book provides a framework for running agile projects and gives also insight in some more neglected related topics like managing projects portfolios or measuring the success of Agile projects.
Methods & Tools is a free e-magazine for software developers, testers and project managers. Winter 2009 issue has just been published with the following articles: * Refactoring Large Software Systems * An Introduction to Domain Driven Design * Agile Coaching Tips * Are Enterprise AJAX Applications Doomed…Or Are We? * Does Process Improvement Really Pay Off? * SQuirreL SQL Client
I am currently reading the book “Agile Project Management” from Jim Highsmith. I will publish a review later on this blog, but in the meantime I would like to share some of the interesting quotes that I have found in the book. I am sure they will make sense to software project managers… and developers ;o)
As we always say, every new training is a new experience, and you never stop to learn something, which is the exciting part of the job... at Ericsson has been another very interesting experience, and again we learned something together
Scrum gets more and more common as an agile method for the management of projects. Those who want to use the model of Scrum successfully should first take a closer look at the description of the three roles and not mistake the Scrum Master with a Team Leader.
Author: Marion Eickmann, CEO of agile42, www.agile42.com, first published in German in the IX-Magazin 9/2009
This is a book about leadership. This is not an easy topic to discuss in a book, but this one gives you some tools that will help you to assess situations and act on them. I think that the authors give a very good definition of leadership when they explain their title: “Standing back does not imply abdicating all responsibility, but rather requires leaders to perform a careful balancing act between stepping back to let the right people in the organization do their thing and stepping up to provide steering when the team has strayed off course”. The deliver part exists because the most important measure of success is defined as delivering value to the business.
Methods & Tools has just published in its Fall 2009 issue "Mature Scrum at Systematic". Co-written by Carsten Ruseng Jakobsen and Jeff Sutherland, this article explains how the experiences from combining Lean, CMMI and Scrum have led Systematic to identify examples of explicit guidance from CMMI that help to execute Scrum activities even better.
“Agile is all about teams working together to produce great software. As an Agile coach, you can help your team go from first steps to running with Agile to unleashing their full Agile potential.”
