At the recent Jazoon conference in Zurich, Ken Schwaber talked about the lack of technical practices in Scrum projects that lead to technical debt. However, the end of the talk made me thinks that this topic could have been chosen only to promote its Scrum.org certification courses.

This article  presents how to lead the transition to an Agile process.

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 

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

Methods & Tools is the sponsor of a large number of software development conferences, but I cannot find the time and budget to visit them. This year I managed to find some time after the publication of my summer issue to visit Wednesday the Jazoon, an important Java event located in Zurich. Besides the global morning keynote, the conference has five parallel tracks, so the first thing in the morning is to make your choice between 30 presentations. This is easier for me, because I am not a Java specialist and so I focused on talks with content that could reach outside the Java community.

This article is based on Chapter 6 of Becoming Agile by Gregory S. Smith. It discusses the feature of a good pilot project when you transition to Agile.

This article is taken from the book The Art of Unit Testing. As part of a chapter on the pillars of good tests, this segment shows how to remove duplication from unit tests.

Confessions of a serial product owner is a short guide to a business person aiming for becoming an excellent product owner. Based on the personal experience of Anna Forss.

CMMI is the successor of the Capability Maturity Model (CMM) or Software CMM. The CMM was developed from November 1986 until 1997 as part of the software process maturity framework project. Then the CMMI, where “I” stands for Integration, replaced the CMM. This is certainly not currently a hyped concept. You will find no CMMI category on dzone.com or infoq.com and the CMMI channel on reddit.com has two subscribers. A recent Methods & Tools poll examined at what stage is the CMMI approach adoption in software development organizations. I was therefore surprised to see that the adoption, ignorance or rejection rates for the CMMI were very close to the results achieved by a similar survey on Agile approaches ended at the beginning of 2008.