A brief history of story points, and why they're not as useful as they may seem at first glance due to the complexity they introduce.

An analysis of how much of DZone's audience lives up to the lofty goals of the Agile Manifesto.

You’re sitting at your desk, trying to “track” down a bug that’s been reported, when it happens. The hunt takes you into some method that inspires you to do a double take. It’s about 1,200 lines long, it has switch statements nested three deep, and you think (but you aren’t sure) that it does the same thing two or three times in a row for no particular reason. You look at the source control history and see that this is another “Bob special.” After seeing this, you start thinking about finally having a long overdue talk with Bob so that you don’t have to keep cleaning up these messes. That sure won’t be a fun talk. So how do you approach it? Philosophically Speaking Let’s be clear about something up front. Getting really good at telling teammates that their code is littered with problems is like getting really good at breaking into your car after locking yourself out of it: it’s tactically useful in the moment but indicative that you need a better overall strategy. Your goal shouldn’t be to master gently telling coworkers about their bad code but rather to make the mastery unnecessary. And I say that not as some kind of meta cop-out, but rather to put your strategy into context as an attempt to start or further a relationship. “Getting really good at telling teammates that their code is littered with problems is like getting really good at breaking into your car after locking yourself out of it.” Tweet This Quote When you’re part of a team, someone on your team who is committing bad code is a failure of everyone on the team—yourself included. So as you prepare for the intervention you’re planning with the person in question, keep in mind that you aren’t some kind of neutral crime scene investigator, sizing things up antiseptically. You’re part of the problem, and you share in the responsibility. Your team. Your code. Your problem. The good news is that if you approach this conversation constructively, you’re taking the first step toward fixing the problem, the code, and thus the team. So the key is making it constructive. 5 Ways to Not Make Code Criticism Constructive Before I go into detail about how to approach this conversation, I’ll give you a quick rundown of 5 things not to do. Don’t have the conversation when you’re frustrated or angry. Instead, wait until you’re calm and rational. Don’t get into this unless there’s a demonstrable problem. If you and he just have different casing preferences or something, the tension you create is probably going to nullify the benefits of standardization. Cosmetic coding standards and other relatively minor concerns can and should be addressed with automated static analysis. Don’t rely on seniority or status in any way. There’s no faster way to breed resentment than forcing people to do things they don’t agree with “because you say so.” Don’t expect to revolutionize someone’s entire approach in a single sitting and make the conversation a marathon affair. You want to have a clear and relatively concise message so that you get your point across without exhausting the other person. Improvement will happen over the long haul. Finally, don’t say that the code is “” That’s a useless, subjective way to categorize. Everything in software is about trade offs, so what you want to do is show Bob that he’s paying for quick and dirty coding with maintenance headaches for the rest of the team. Build A Constructive Code Strategy and Environment You’ve already prepared a bit by reading what not to do, so now it’s time to complement that with what to do. There needs to be three main components to this preparation: (1) the gaps you want to address (2) the support for your argument (3) the outcome for which you’re hoping. These three things are going to frame the discussion you intend to have. The gaps are actual, specific problems with Bob’s code. You don’t want to stroll over to Bob’s desk, pull up a chair, sit on it backwards and say, “So, Bob, you’re pretty bad at this programming thing…great talk!” You need to decide what tangible items you want to address during this discussion. What’s the most egregious source of problems? Is it the gigantic methods? The nested switch statements? The duplicate code? Pick one or maybe two of these things to cover. Just as you don’t want to be critical and vague, you also don’t want to be critical and devastatingly specific, reading off 95 of Bob’s greatest coding flaws like some kind of departmental Martin Luther. There may be 95 things wrong with Bob’s code. But if you want to fix all of them, it’s important to lay the groundwork for a mentoring relationship because you’re definitely not going to fix all of them in one day. Building Support: Do Your Research. Let’s say that you’ve decided to focus on method length as the topic to address. The next thing to do is build support for your argument. It’s a lot more credible to cite some supporting studies or widely respected industry figures on the matter than to march over to Bob and declare that his methods are too long. Build a case with evidence for the principle that you want to cover, and then also find specific, problematic instances in the code base to discuss. The last thing you want is to be hand-wavy about the problem—you want to be able to point at it and say, “for instance, this right here is a really big method.” The Outcome Should Be Actionable Having picked your issue and built a case, the last thing to do is choose an outcome toward which to steer the conversation. So you’ve shown Bob a giant method that he wrote and convinced him of the evils of giant methods. “Uh, okay,” he’ll say. “So what now?” Decide ahead of time that you want to work together to break the method into X number of smaller methods or that you want to leave the code in a state where no refactored method is longer than Y lines. Whatever it is, pick something actionable so that you and Bob can cap the conversation off with a joint win. Be courteous At this point, you’re ready to have the hard conversation. If you do it right, it won’t be nearly as hard as you might think, and it will serve as a productive starting point for a series of subsequent conversations that will be easier and perhaps even pleasant. This article originally appeared at SmartBear's Blog, written by Erik Dietrich.

Get a crash course in understanding microservices and the difficulties in implementing them.

Git offers several types of workflows. Learn what they are and which type is best suited for your specific purpose.

Curated TED Talk playlists integrated within Cornerstone Learning enable organisations to instantly access new, innovative ideas and share knowledge across their workforce June 30, 2015 - Cornerstone OnDemand, a global leader in cloud-based talent management software solutions, today announced the company is teaming with TED, the non-profit global community devoted to spreading ideas, to deliver curated TED Talks to Cornerstone clients for a new, innovative approach to professional learning and development. The first and only collaboration of its kind, Cornerstone clients now have the ability to provide their workforce with modern, mobile-enabled TED Talks from world-class leaders at the forefront of their fields from within Cornerstone Learning. Cornerstone's collaborative learning functionality also allows organisations to enable peer-to-peer knowledge capture and discussions that can extend the learning impact of TED Talks. Watched and listened to more than 1 billion times this year, TED Talks introduce ideas that can help companies transform how their people think and work. Cornerstone clients will have access to a series of curated TED Talk playlists designed to address key business challenges in an innovative format that is unique, powerful and inspiring. With curated TED Talk playlists through Cornerstone: Inspire your workforce. TED brings together the world's most inspiring and ingenious people whose ideas can strengthen how professionals understand and think about the world around them. TED's curation of talks on behalf of Cornerstone can help organisations generate excitement and engagement among employees, help management crystallise goals, start important conversations, and spark collaborations. Provide the best, most relevant content. Organisations will gain access to the very best collections of TED Talks across a wide range of topics that are central to innovation and talent development, including change management, culture building, leadership, technology, globalisation, diversity and design. Playlists have been curated to reflect talks from visionary leaders across the most influential industries, such as healthcare, education, technology, manufacturing, finance and more. Amplify the value of your learning and development strategy. Employees can view TED Talks from within Cornerstone Learning, the global learning management system (LMS) for over 1,800 leading organisations. Integrating TED Talks into professional development curriculum allows organisations to inspire each individual employee at any stage in their career. Organisations can easily target and deliver learning and development to groups or individuals with the support of TED Talks and measure impact on workforce development from within Cornerstone. Watch and Share Instantly on Mobile: As smartphones emerge as the leading platform for watching video and Web content among busy professionals, TED Talks allow employees to consume and share content on their mobile devices while on the go. Comments on the News "TED Talks are brilliantly crafted and make an emotional connection with viewers. Their ability to convey innovative and complex ideas through powerful, first-person stories is the type of talent management content that can inspire and drive real change in the workforce," said Kirsten Helvey, senior vice president, client success, Cornerstone OnDemand. "We are dedicated to helping people reach their potential by providing our clients with the most innovative talent management solutions that support their professional development and training initiatives." "With the growing demand from companies for TED Talks, Cornerstone provides TED with the expertise and efficiency in reaching millions of learners in organisations across the globe that can benefit from our content," said Deron Triff, TED's director of global distribution and licensing. "This collaboration also provides TED with an important opportunity to understand how the talks can be utilised for professional development to strengthen how we collaborate with the business community. Cornerstone will be a great alliance for bringing TED Talks to companies and sparking innovation among their employees." Additional Resources Learn more about curated TED Talk playlists for Cornerstone via the Cornerstone Marketplace: marketplace.csod.com/#/content/90 Read additional commentary by Cornerstone's director of talent management, Jeff Miller, on the value and influence of TED Talks for empowering today's workforce via the Cornerstone blog: www.cornerstoneondemand.com/blog/how-ted-gets-your-workforce-talking

This article was originally published on 6/29/15 For developers coding in c/c++, NetBeans IDE provides a c/c++ bundle of its set of tools. However, the NetBeans c/c++ toolset is the application platform for Oracle Studio IDE, which provides a set of features that extend the NetBeans c/c++ toolset. In this interview, we meet Ikroop Dhillon, who is the principal product manager of Oracle Solaris studio. She tells us about herself and about the Oracle Solaris studio. Speaking with the True Professionals Anytime we set up an interview with someone in space, we always want to ensure that they are someone with something interesting to say. Believe it or not, that is not always as easy to find as you might imagine. This is why we were so thrilled when we heard back from Ikroop Dhillon about our interview request. Dhillon is a great person to speak with about these matters because she is a product manager at Oracle Solaris Studio, and she has overseen countless projects in her time there. Not only that, but we find her insights and information to literally be second to none. It was our greatest pleasure to get to speak with her. As someone with a background in computer science, Dhillon is exactly the kind of person that is up-to-date and knowledgeable about the inner workings of computers and all of the latest updates in the industry. She has been continuously learning about how various processes work and what the latest updates are in the world of computers. Thus, it is with great pleasure that we were able to meet up with her and go over the latest as it was developing all around us. What we wanted to cover included topics that have not often been discussed by other teams of interviewers before. We knew that Ikroop Dhillon would provide us with the time that we needed to start getting some answers from her about what all of these changes might mean for the brave new world that we are all entering at this time. It has been an interesting and challenging time, to say the least, and we can all stand to learn something from those who are tracking the developments as they happen day by day. Dhillon is exactly the kind of person you want in your corner if that is your mission, and that is why we spent such a lengthy amount of time speaking with her at this time. We hope that you gain some useful insights from our conversation. We certainly picked up a lot of information that we wouldn’t otherwise have had access to. Hi Ikroop, thanks for taking the interview. Can you tell us a bit about who you are and what you do? Hi! Thanks for chatting with me today. I am the principal product manager for oracle Solaris studio, and I focus on business development, product strategy, and go-to-market plans. How and when did you get involved with oracle Solaris studio? I have an educational background in computer science and was a technical marketing engineer at Intel prior to joining oracle. I have always had an interest in application development and started product management of oracle Solaris studio development tools about seven years ago. What are the key aims of oracle Solaris studio? Oracle Solaris studio is an advanced c, c++, and Fortran development environment. It runs on both Oracle Solaris and Oracle Linux operating systems, and with remote development support, developers can build, debug, analyze and optimize applications from virtually any laptop or desktop environment. Oracle Solaris studio delivers a complete and comprehensive tool suite aimed at simplifying the development of high-performance, secure, reliable, and robust enterprise applications. So, it doesn't run on windows? If you go to the oracle Solaris studio download page, then you'll see downloads for Linux and Solaris. http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/server-storage/solarisstudio/downloads/index-jsp-141149.html but a tar file can be downloaded as well, and on any java-aware oses, the user can run GUI tools in "remote mode": https://blogs.oracle.com/d/entry/using_the_solaris_studio_ide What do you consider to be the most awesome and unique features of oracle Solaris studio? Oracle Solaris studio contains some very powerful application analysis tools. The oracle Solaris studio performance analyzer helps you optimize your application by enabling you to easily identify and fix performance bottlenecks. It has an intuitive and easy-to-use interface that allows you to visualize performance data from various angles and easily drill down and isolate performance issues. The code analyzer is another great component of oracle Solaris studio that helps you protect your application from memory access issues, including memory leaks. In addition to the analysis tools, Oracle Solaris studio also has an award-winning IDE. Based on the NetBeans platform. The IDE is specifically geared for c/c++ developers and is optimized to handle large enterprise applications very well. We focus on making sure that the IDE has a low memory footprint when handling large applications and fast response times. Under what conditions should oracle Solaris studio be used instead of the c/c++ tools that come with NetBeans IDE? Oracle Solaris studio delivers advanced performance, memory, and thread analysis tools in addition to those provided by NetBeans IDE. These powerful analysis tools help optimize application performance and improve software reliability and quality. In addition, Oracle Solaris studio delivers highly optimized c, c++, and Fortran compilers and performance libraries for compute-intensive applications. If you are looking for a complete and comprehensive c/c++ and Fortran development tool suite, it is recommended that you use Oracle Solaris studio. What kinds of customers are using Oracle Solaris studio, and what are they doing with it? Our customers include leading companies in finance, telecommunications, and defense. We also work closely with top oracle ISVs and partners. Our customers rely on oracle Solaris studio for the development of their mission-critical enterprise applications, and most Oracle applications are built using Oracle Solaris studio. Can you tell us a bit about the social media and related sites that are important for those using Oracle Solaris studio? The oracle technology network contains the product download (oracle Solaris studio free to use in production) and learning resources, including technical articles, whitepapers, and how-to videos: http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/server-storage/solarisstudio/overview/index.html The oracle.com site includes the datasheet, product briefs, and customer quotes: oracle.com/goto/solarisstudio You can also follow us on Facebook or Twitter for product and content updates: https://www.facebook.com/oraclesolarisstudio https://twitter.com/solarisstudio Anything else you'd like to share with the NetBeans community? I just recorded some videos that highlight some important features of oracle Solaris studio. The oracle Solaris studio performance analyzer also supports java and does a terrific job of optimizing java application performance. It is quite useful if you have a mixed c/c++ and java application.

Many people believe that marketing is just advertising or selling. But, in reality, marketing is actually a conversation that you the entrepreneur start by meeting your customers’ needs. One of the biggest challenges in marketing we see is executives who resist it by asking, “Yes, but how will this help me sell more?” Many businesses struggle with just such a sales- or product-focused culture, forgetting that they were formed to solve a customer problem and that the solution to that problem was born of insights gleaned from talking to potential customers. It’s this forgetfulness that makes marketing look less like it’s about serving customers and more like it’s about (only) sales and advertising. And that’s not good. In fact, for many business-to-business brands, marketing originally emerged from the sales team’s need for more leads in the field. In the consumer space, marketers started on the traditional advertising side, where the game was all about reach and frequency, and where the goal was to get the brand message out to the target audience. The legacy of such thinking leads to the biggest mistake marketers make: They make the message all about themselves. When I started my own content-marketing journey, I remember, I was always hearing, “How much more stuff will this help us sell?” Yet the worst way to try to reach your target audience in today’s digital, consumer-led world is to try to sell yourself directly. Businesses that succeed in reaching their customers have stopped trying to interrupt the content their consumers are interested in and instead have started creating, publishing and sharing the content their customers enjoy. Related: A Guide For Creating Consistently Great Content Answer customers’ questions, and you may earn the right to tell them more about yourself. But building a company that focuses on helping people versus selling stuff? That’s a question of culture! And culture flows straight from the boss. So, if you’re a CEO, your job is to build a customer-focused culture of content. And here are three questions to pose that help you do just that. 1. What is a culture of content? Effective marketing is the art of providing the best answers to your buyers’ questions, and that’s a content problem — which in turn is a job that flows to just about every employee. Everyone in your business produces content. Everyone has an email address and a few social accounts. Content drives real business value when it connects with your potential customers. Late last year, Altimeter published a report on how to foster a culture of content, to which I was honored to contribute. The research pointed to education, executive buy-in and employee advocacy as key components of a culture of content. 2. How do you shift away from a culture of selling? Most businesses believe that the best way to drive new sales is to talk about themselves, thinking that if they’re not outright asking for new business, they won’t get it. Today, however, customers tune out such promotional messages. They can tell which content is trying to sell. Businesses need to make the customer the hero of their stories, exhibiting empathy in a real and emotional way. Many businesses forget that one of the most effective ways to use content to drive traffic is to simply answer your customers’ most basic questions. If you sell widgets, the first question your content should answer is, “What are widgets?” And then: “How can widgets help a business like mine?” Once you’ve done that on a regular basis, you can answer why your widgets are best. There is no magic pill for effective content that drives traffic. The best businesses have a documented strategy for publishing helpful, high-quality content; they drive that strategy by publishing on a consistent basis. Publishing audience-focused content more than once per day is much more effective than publishing less frequently. And frequency requires a culture of content. 3. How can brands establish a culture of content? The best way to build a “culture of content” is to help your employees understand what problem you set out to solve. The mission must be bigger than the service or product you sell. The brand is about more than what you sell, it’s about people. Companies that do this well understand the larger world they operate in and how they fit into it; they activate their employees to tell authentic and personal stories about how they contribute. As a content marketer, I have often found myself teaching others how to write, share on social media and build their personal brands. To succeed takes executives who embody this spirit — living and breathing the notion that your brand is bigger than what you sell. Creating and defining a culture of content, then, starts with the CEO. However, it’s also the daily job of everyone else. What content have you produced today that will help a potential customer? Have you coached any executives on how to turn their presentations into slideshares and blog posts? Have you encouraged any of your thought leaders to start contributing more often? It’s time to get started to create this bright new customer-winning culture Original post

At Bloomfire’s User Conference in May, I had the pleasure of listening to City of Austin’s Chief Innovation Officer Kerry O’Connor present on how government knowledge management is changing. The Innovation Office focuses on internal and public service innovation, as well as open government. O’Connor has worked in the public sector for many years – at the U.S. Department of State, the Office of Management Policy Rightsizing and Innovation, and several U.S. Embassies. She talked about seeing firsthand that the government is changing from a “need to know organization” to a “need to share organization.” O’Connor argues that disruption is inevitable, and will come whether in the form of opportunity or threat – and there’s no script. “When there’s no script,” O’Connor says, “we have to be intentionally improvisational.” O’Connor defines innovation as any project that is new to you and has an uncertain outcome. She talked about how important knowledge is in supporting innovation. As the first person to ever fill this role, her goal for her first year in office was to set up an innovation infrastructure. This included putting into place the processes, teams, and skills and information to create an environment that fosters innovation. O’Connor recommends that to facilitate intentional improvisation, you must frame the problems you want to solve first. Once you know the goal, look for innovation technology infrastructure that helps you manage contacts, relationships, projects, knowledge, ideas, and insights. We live in a world that is increasingly interconnected and disrupted, and O’Connor says that organizations are naturally becoming more networked, human-centered, and improvisational. She encouraged attendees to “use what you have; we must connect, coach, mentor, share, and experiment.” To ensure that citizens can interact with the knowledge that city employees have, the City of Austin created online public spaces. These spaces, created on Bloomfire, offer the opportunity for citizens to participate in a conversation with employees around innovation, data, and city orientation. I was inspired by O’Connor’s presentation, and proud to live in a city that is so forward thinking about how information is shared. It made me want to get more involved in finding ways to solve some of problems Austin is facing as a result of our rapid growth. As a result of her talk, I’m going to try to make it to this weekend’s ATX Hack for Change. If you would like to watch O’Connor’s entire presentation, you can access it on the Bloomfire Community. Like this post? Click here to subscribe to our blog and receive the latest content on social learning, customer support, sales enablement, or all three.

From time to time I’ve been heard to say: “Agile is Punk.” But I’ve never explained myself. I’ve also been heard to say things life “Agile is about democratising the workplace” but I’ve never explain myself there either. Let me try… What I mean when I say this is: Agile (software development) has a lot in common with Punk rock. To me the important thing about punk rock was that it was about people trying it - music, their own thing. Anybody trying to play music, anybody forming a band, anyone who had a novel idea trying to get a record contract. Yes, even if they couldn’t play an instrument they could have a go, and who knows, maybe they would learn as they went. (I should say that while I’m old enough to have been around when punk was I’m not old enough to have been there. Both post-punk and post-disco influences were at work in the New Wave music which was common when I came music listening.) Punk had a democratising effect on music. Music has aways been of the people, anyone can listen, anyone can try to sing - although I’m not very good at it even I can try! But the music industry was something different, performing, recording - there were barriers there! Punk tore down barriers. Punk opened up the recording industry. Punk opened up music. Agile opened up the software process industry. Before Agile official software processes were pretty locked down. You had to be an academic or expert/consultant to dabble in that space. Programmers who worked in under official software processes were on the receiving end. Agile said: “Your opinion is important too.” In truth music has always was been open to everyone, just not the recording industry. And in software development processes were open to anyone, most programmers did not work under an official process, mostly it was common practices which, if they worked, were probably more effective than official ones. Unfortunately these unofficial work practices came with guilt: because we did not do it the way the books said we should. When faults occurred we blame ourselves for “not doing it properly”. Agile says: “Everyone involved with software development should have a voice in deciding how to work, it can be improved and you don’t need to be an expert, academic, consultant or certified member of some body to express that view.” That also makes it democratic. I don’t mean democratic in the sense that we all get to vote, I mean democratic in the sense that it is power is vested in the hands of the collective people. Everyone has a voice, everyone can participate, and those who hold executive power do so by the will of the people. Agile is about giving everyone a voice. Like Punk that means accept that those who don’t have much skill are also entitled to a voice. Funnily enough, I’ve long held that any punk band that made a second album weren’t punk anymore because they were part of the industry, they were now experts! The same is true with Agile, hang around for long enough (like me) and you are no longer an outside but an insider, an expert. Increasingly we see Agile heading outside of software development. When this happens it becomes necessary to ask: What is Agile? My answer is: Democracy. Agile is about valuing everyone, agile is about giving everyone a voice, agile is about putting the power to change the workplace (process, systems, norms) into the collective hands of the people who work there. Yes at times it feels revolutionary, but there are fellow travellers, it is all a Theory-Y movement.

Written by Jim Magers for LeadingAgile. When I’m teaching an agile bootcamp class and talking about work in process, I always make a point (usually multiple times) to tell the attendees that agile is about finishing work…not about starting work. I reinforce this by pointing out that you can have a glorious looking burndown chart for the duration of the sprint but completely fail in your mission to meet your commitments and finish stories. The team can be burning down hours beautifully on a daily basis, with the remaining task hours looking like they are tracking right along the ideal line, and then boom… It’s closing time for the sprint and no stories actually got completed. Remember that notion of building working, tested software? Didn’t happen. The team started too many stories at once and ended up not being able to bring any of them across the finish line when the bell rang. This notion of finishing work applies to sprint planning as well. If you short-change the time it takes to do good sprint planning, and the team meanders off to begin writing code and test plans too soon, there is a risk that the team is going to struggle to be successful. Remember what we do in sprint planning. Consider velocity, and load the sprint backlog with high priority stories from the product backlog. Check. Determine capacity for the team to work on sprint tasks over the coming sprint. Check. Break stories into tasks and determine who is doing what. Check. Make sure the work is going to fit. Check. Commit to the work. Check. But what can happen when you don’t take the time to thoughtfully break down tasks and estimate hours of effort? Consider the following burn down chart. In this example, the team left sprint planning thinking that they were committing to 830 hours. But just two days into the sprint they discovered additional task hours and instead found themselves in the awkward position of actually needing almost 1200 hours of capacity to complete the committed stories. Guess what…they did not have 1200 hours of capacity to give, especially since they were now a full two days into the work. In looking more closely at their burndown chart over the course of the two-week sprint, it took them almost 6 days of work to get back to the point where they had 830 hours of work left to do. Six days just to get back to where they thought was their starting point when they concluded their sprint planning meeting. And surprise, they didn’t finish the sprint successfully. So, don’t short-change the value that good sprint planning affords. Yes, it takes time. Yes, it can seem tedious. Yes, the team is anxious to get started. But good sprint planning pays dividends. Remember that it is about finishing work, and not about starting work.

Business leaders like to be in control of every aspect of their operations, but if any element is outsourced, that sense of governance becomes much more difficult to maintain. Outsourcing can be appealing to organizations looking for talent at reasonable costs - it just takes significant planning to pull off successfully. When a team is in a different location from the company, there are a number of challenges that must be overcome. We will look at what some of the biggest issues are and how you can appropriately manage an outsourced quality assurance team. Obstacles of outsourcing While outsourcing can have a lot of advantages for businesses, the number of roadblocks can be intimidating for many enterprises. Here are the biggest challenges to prepare for: Information sharing: When you don't see individuals every day, it can often be easy to forget to relay important messages. Communication in this situation is imperative, as it could affect the overall operation of the application. As soon as a request is given, there should be seamless transfer of knowledge to ensure that everyone is on the same page and that the project proceeds as expected. This will eliminate any redundancies and lower the overall development cost. Engagement: Many outsourced teams have a difficult time becoming personally involved with their projects. This will also affect their ability to collaborate effectively with other teams in the business, ultimately hurting program quality. Organizations must have a strategy to keep these individuals motivated and provide them with the tools to succeed. Technology/skills: An outsourced team may use different pieces of technology or have skills separate from what the organization was looking for. For example, if the company really wants to move to agile software development, but the outsourced group still uses waterfall methods, that could create problems down the road for their software development initiatives. Similarly, the business must ensure that the outsourced individuals have the skills necessary to meet corporate goals and spur innovation through their app testing. How to regain control Although total governance of outsourced assets won't be possible, there are still some things that organizations can do to take control of these teams and ensure that they're fulfilling business objectives. Australian outsourcer Beepo suggested a consistent schedule for gathering feedback and using technology like the cloud and test management tools. Let's dissect each of these ideas. Many outsourced teams are often left by the wayside when it comes to communication. This can reasonably lead to mistakes being made and leave the members feeling apathetic toward their work. However, by setting up regular video conferences and requesting feedback, outsourced individuals can feel empowered to express their opinions and become a larger part of their projects. This will also help build trust and motivate teams to collaborate more. Using tools like test management and the cloud can also be helpful when working with an outsourced team due to the fact that they provide a singular platform for all users. This means that the outsourced and in-house teams can be working on the same project at the same time, with any changes being made in real time. This will not only reduce redundancies, but it creates accountability and ensures that tasks are being addressed according to their priority. Considerations to make when outsourcing Whether you're looking to outsource, or simply make your outsourced team better, there are some key items to address. Ashok Mani from AppLabs noted that organizations must look into a provider's engagement models, mobilization efforts, communication plans, security and scalability. These elements will be essential to clear up before trying to manage a team. "While organizations are deriving value from outsourcing software development, outsourced software testing will maximize returns from their investments and provide the right level of objectivity and rigor required to create a high-quality product," Mani stated. "If an independent QA and testing service provider is chosen whose focus is on ensuring quality products/systems are implemented, benefits will be fully maximized." Outsourcing a quality assurance team is going to have a few challenges for businesses. But by preparing for these obstacles, they will be able to manage the outsourced group more effectively. Having a communication plan and technology available will be essential to working well with the team and improving development operations.

I am sure by now most people understand that there is strong correlation between employee satisfaction and business results. If you need more convincing have a read of these two articles: Forbes & Research Paper So how do you best go about measuring it? On my current project I have decided to go with the following 4 questions: I would recommend this account and my project as a good place to work I have the tools and resources to do my role well I rarely think about rolling off this account or project My role makes good use of my skills and abilities For those of you who have read Jez Humble’s “Lean Enterprise”, these questions will look familiar. I have adopted them to the project setting that I work within. We have just set out on a cultural transformation to become truly Agile and adopt DevOps in a large complex legacy environment. To me measuring the above will give me the best indicator that we are doing the right thing. Of course there will be other measures who determine the quality of the outcomes and the levels of automation among others, but changing the culture of an organisation is critical if your Agile and DevOps adoption is to be successful. I will report back throughout that journey to tell you what my experiences is with the above questions. IT delivery is complex and it is not always clear what the right solution is. I found in the past that it is near impossible to create processes and tools that work by itself, you need to have the right mindset that people use the processes and tools with the right intent. It’s very frustrating when you implement great automation only to see a few months later that the solution has degraded. It is with hindsight that I understand that the solution is to not just implement process and tools but to instill the right culture and mindset for progression, a culture where we blamelessly identify a way to avoid the same mistake again rather than looking for the person in fault, a culture where we strive for automation and lean processes and are not concerned about the size of our teams or budgets, a culture where you don’t have to protect your fiefdom and where you are happy to collaborate with others to solve problems no matter where the root cause lies. I think we all in IT need to understand this dynamic between employee satisfaction and outcomes better, I for sure believe that I have come across a magic potion that I aim to bring to all my future projects. About these ads

Every business has unique characteristics that set it apart from other organizations, even within the same industry. For this reason, it shouldn't be surprising that there's not a one-size-fits-all approach to app security testing. Each company has certain protection expectations and regulations to adhere to, making it essential to find the best way to achieve these goals. Here are a few examples of security testing methodologies available for quality assurance teams to leverage: Black box With black box testing, QA professionals put themselves in the shoes of the hacker and attempt to break the app through various attack vectors. This methodology can yield a lot of information and help better secure the program from actual threats. A white paper by Security Innovation noted that software testers first analyze the system's architecture and business model to identify any security vulnerabilities. Looking over the software logic in this way can uncover subtle security and privacy issues that may not have been noticed otherwise, such as defects in design, input, system dependency, authentication, cryptography and information disclosure. "Although white box code inspection is good for analyzing static behavior, only black box exploratory testing can determine the dynamic behavior of how a system is implemented and used, the coupling between systems and the interactions of the distributed systems," Security Innovation wrote. Dynamic For QA teams that like to execute code, dynamic testing is the approach for them. This methodology checks the running application for how it behaves and responds to a variety of inputs. This is done to ensure that the product meets up with established regulations and is giving the expected outcomes. IBM noted that dynamic analysis is especially useful to identify code coverage, as it can discover bugs in paths that have gone untested. While dynamic testing can be manual work for testers, it can also yield significant information that will help mitigate defects and produce quality products. Static In contrast to dynamic testing, static approaches directly review the source code, often through an automated test management solution. TechTarget contributor Michael Cobb noted that this methodology occurs at the implementation phase, rather than when the app is running, and often helps mitigate vulnerabilities involved with industry compliance standards. Automation in this area can reduce the amount of time it takes to complete these tasks. However, it may not be able to detect sophisticated threats, which can be supplemented by dynamic security testing. "A thorough source code review has an advantage over dynamic testing," Cobb wrote. "Nothing is hidden from analysts during a source code review, so they can examine exactly how data flows through a program. By solving the problem at the code level, static testing reduces the number of security-related design and coding defects, and the severity of any defects that make it through to the release version, thus dramatically improving the overall security of the application." There are a number of security testing methodologies that organizations can pursue, and designing a combination of approaches may result with a solution that's best for their needs. Using these strategies, companies can better ensure the protection of sensitive information while providing users with the software testing tools needed to succeed.

When a team works with a lot of maven projects it becomes quickly painful to do some basic tasks like: manage versionning and connections between the different projects. releasing and opening versions, especially when the maven-release plugin needs to be run on many projects and when versionning is not standard. managing external dependencies also can become complex, and ensuring that a single version of a dependency is used accross different projects is sometimes not a trivial question to ask. in a one word, applying transformations on a dependency graph is difficult. mind-mapping the dependency graph is difficult when the number of projects grows. That can increase the amount of time needed by new people to understand a project graph, and that also makes maintaining and changing things difficult. checking consistency and optimizing the dependency graph is not an easy task neither. having an always up-to-date build of snapshots and release is not easy when projects are distributed everywhere. Pom Explorer So there is the Pom Explorer tool which tries to address those problems by providing those functionalities : release a graph : release a pom or all poms and its/theirs dependencies and updates all dependent poms accross multiple repositories and projects, change a gav : updates a project’s gav and make all the project which depends on it follow this change. manages properties, dependency management, and so on. Pom-explorer knows what pom.xml to update and where to update. If a dependency specifies ${foobar.version}, pom-explorer will go to update the foobar.version property. query the dependency graph to retrieve pertinent information about your projects, statistics and check functions are also available, display 3d interactive graph, export graphml files, find not used dependencies and other similar problems, list java classes provided by artifacts, list java classes referenced by artifacts, runs a light and efficient web server so local and shared usage is possible. The tool will also support automatically building projects in order to always have such or such project always up to date. Use cases In this article, I will show some common use cases possible with this tool. Installation First one needs to install and run the software. Put yourself in a temporary directory and type those commands : git clone https://github.com/ltearno/pom-explorer.git cd pom-explorer java -jar target/pom-explorer.jar The program should welcome you and ask you to go to this address : http://localhost:90 This is the console to the application. You can type commands in the prompt, they will be sent to the server and it will answer. You can use up and down arrows to recall past commands. Let’s start by typing ? to get the available commands : Analyze of repositories OK. First we will analyse a directory where there are many maven projects, then we will work a bit to optimize those projects. You will have to adapt the exercise to your computer. Let’s analyse my git repositories directory : analyze directory c:\documents\repos This will analyze my projects and construct an in-memory graph of the dependency graph : Now, the program knows about everything on my projects, let’s start asking questions ! List of GAVs… Let’s get the list of all existing GAVs (groupId, artifactId, version) in the graph. There will be my projects and all the GAVs on which they depend. Type this command : gav li Note that you can type only the first letters of a command, as long as there is no ambiguity. Here li stands for list. Find dependencies on an obsolete artifact As I look through the list of GAVs, I remark that there are still an old snapshot version of the hexa.binding artifact hanging around. The latest released version is 1.3 and the working version is 1.4-SNAPSHOT so the version 1.3-SNAPSHOTshould not be used anymore. Which is the project still depending on this very deprecated this version ? Let’s ask the question : depends on fr.lteconsulting:hexa.binding:1.3-SNAPSHOT Here it is ! the project rigpa.org:regsys-clients:1.0.0-SNAPSHOT is still using an old snapshot. Let’s arrange that. Pom Explorer is able to change the pom properties and dependencies by itself. Updating this wrong dependency What we want is to change fr.lteconsulting:hexa.binding:1.3-SNAPSHOT tofr.lteconsulting:hexa.binding:1.3 so that the project uses the latest release available. We could desire to change for fr.lteconsulting:hexa.binding:1.4-SNAPSHOT which would be possible with the same command as we’ll see. For that we will use the change gav command : cha ga fr.lteconsulting:hexa.binding:1.3-SNAPSHOT fr.lteconsulting:hexa.binding:1.3 Here is what Pom Explorer answers : So first Pom Explorer finds what needs to be changed in the graph. This might be the project itself and all projects which depend on it. After that the program begins a loop in which all changes are checked and appropriately transformed when needed. For instance changing a dependency version can become changing a property value. Changes are first resolved as described before and they are then transformed in a change list to apply to be applied to pom.xml files. In the ouput, there is first a little warning saying thefr.lteconsulting:hexa.binding:1.3-SNAPSHOT project was not found. That’s normal because the project in now in version 1.4-SNAPSHOT. So there is no need to modify it. Then in the change list section, the changes that are to be applied to pom.xml files are listed. The first one says ‘project not found’ and that’s ok as seen before. The second one says to modify the C:\documents\repos\regsys-clients\pom.xmland change the dependency ([DEPENDENCY])fr.lteconsulting:hexa.binding:1.3-SNAPSHOT tofr.lteconsulting:hexa.binding:1.3. The “causes” message is useful when a change is caused by other changes (as said before a dependency change can become one or several property changes). If we had properties involved, Pom Explorer would have found them and included them in the change set. Now that we reviewed the proposed changes and agreed with them, let’s apply them by using the same command with the -apply flag : cha ga fr.lteconsulting:hexa.binding:1.3-SNAPSHOT fr.lteconsulting:hexa.binding:1.3 -apply We see that at the end of the same process, the program updated the dependency in the right pom.xml file. Let’s have a look at the file it self : fr.lteconsulting hexa.binding 1.3 compile OK, the file is correct now… Oh well no ! I just find other dependencies in SNAPSHOT versions ! Finding more duplicate and obsolete dependencies Let’s accept it, our projects are not up to date. Well let’s see how many of those artifacts there are with multiple versions used. For that i type the checkcommand : Ok there is some work to do ! Opening a version Now let’s look at another use case. Say that the hexa.binding project is in version 1.3 and i want to open the version 1.4-SNAPSHOT. I also want all the projects which depend on version 1.3to move to 1.4-SNAPSHOT. On the way, I want all modified projects still in a release version to be SNAPSHOT-ized too. And i want this to happen recursively as new projects are opened. With Pom Explorer, that’s only one command : change gav fr.lteconsulting:hexa.binding:1.3 fr.lteconsulting:hexa.binding:1.4-SNAPSHOT As you can see, warnings are generated when projects are reopened : Those are normal warnings, they are just here so that you know what happens. Then, there is a big list of changes to be made, because the hexa.bindingartifact is used in many central projects that were in a release state. Glad that we didn’t do that by hand ! Even with the maven-update-version plugin, there would have been a lot of repositories to go to open and update. Let’s apply the changes with the -apply flag : cha ga fr.lteconsulting:hexa.binding:1.3 fr.lteconsulting:hexa.binding:1.4-SNAPSHOT -apply All the changes have been made, about 30 of them. In one go ! Refresh the page so that a new session is created from the changed files. We can see that many of the projects have been reopened : You now have to commit all the repositories with this update. Pom explorer does not do that yet, but maybe in the future ! Releasing many poms Imagine the sprint is almost finished now and it’s now time to release the projects. Type the gav li fr.lteconsulting again to get the GAVs list (fr.lteconsulting is my projects package name, so I filter GAVs with that), choose one and let’s release it : fr.lteconsulting:hexa.binding.samples:1.4-SNAPSHOT The thing in the release is to have all direct and transitive dependencies released too. That’s what Pom Explorer checks. It then generates a change list to materialize your requirements. Other use cases Listing provided and referenced classes You can ask which Java classes are provided and referenced by GAVs. That’s sometimes a useful information to have. Try those commands : classes providedBy fr.lteconsulting:hexa.css:1.3 classes referencedBy fr.lteconsulting:hexa.css:1.3 Optimizing your project’s dependencies Sometimes, you ask yourself “do I still need this and that dependency ?” but you are not very sure, and since you lack time to investigate, eventually the dependency stays in your project for a long time, causing of course maintenance issues sometime. Let’s have Pom Explorer help us in the quest for the obsolete dependency. garbage dep fr.lteconsulting:carousel:1.0-SNAPSHOT This will give you something like that : You can refer to the project documentation to find how to use those informations. But sure that it can help you give away those useless dependencies ! Other goodies : graphs ! Pom Explorer can do two other things to help you visualize your dependency graph : export GraphML files so you can use them in another graph software (like yEd for instance). display an interactive 3d graph Exporting GraphML files GraphML is an open format to describe graphs. With the graph exportcommand, you can get graphml files of your working session. The program will create two files and display the links to them. Those two files are corresponding to two graphs : the dependency graph as usual, and the dependency graph between the git repositories containing your projects. Sometime one git repository can contain multiple projects and a view of the dependencies at the repository level is useful in those cases. This is the kind of picture you can get easily from editors like yEd : Interactive 3D graph Thanks to the WebGL standard which allows direct access to the 3D hardware on the running machine and thanks to libraries like three.js and ngraph.pixel, it is possible to display an interacive 3d graph. More over it is possible to customize the appearance of the graph to give account of different perspectives. Type the graph command and click on the link. This will open another tab containing the living 3d graph of your projects. When focus is given to the 3d viewport, the W, A, S, F and arrow keys allow to move in the 3d space. On the right, there is a text area where you can edit some javascript callback to customize the graph appearance. You can also stop the moving of the particle with the checkbox at the bottom right of the screen. It is not necessarilly useful, but sometimes it is relaxing to admire your work in the form of a living and moving graph ! Conclusion There are many other functions in Pom Explorer, but they are for you to discover now. This tool finds easily its place in the daily workflow because of the functions it provides. The fact that one can run it locally or on a shared server allows to use it as you wish. It is still in early development phase so many more functionalities could come up. On this subject, don’t hesitate submitting a little pull request on the GitHub repository… Pom Explorer is made with love by LTE Consulting

Are you really sure what makes a programmer productive? Is it VIM instead of Emacs, the latest Haskell web framework or your favourite NoSQL database? Sorry, but if you focus on tools, frameworks or even processes, you got it backwards! Real programmer productivity starts at the very beginning: Proper requirements. Why you as a developer must care - not only the business staff ! Sure, the founder/product owner/team lead/name of the month must care to build something that a customer ultimately pays the company money for. But what about it from a developer’s view? Ever been in the situation where someone shouts over the table: „Just start building XYZ right away, if any questions pop up, we will deal with them during development. We got a head start anyway“ ? We call that: Start first, finish never. Nothing beats building something, where half of what you are building is actually still unclear. How do you know you are done DONE? Not surprisingly, not knowing 100% „what“ to do, leaks a lot into „when are you finished?“ „Oh, we just forgot this…and that!..And actually it should also be doing this! That point of the feature…dunno really?“ And how do you go about testing unclear requirements? This has nothing to do with your favourite BDD tool of the month, or your freaking out if someone does not always test first. (Even though we think there are some, let’s call them preferences, that make building software easier.). If the input is unclear, tests are unclear and the output is even more unclear. You are always super-motivated, right? But the worst part is, that frequent unclear requirements are a sign. A sign that your business people are unsure of what your customers really want/need/pay for. Unfortunately this also means, that a lot of the stuff you build is for the trash can. Nothing keeps programmer motivation and ultimately productivity higher than repeatedly baking bread and throwing it in the trash while it is still hot. What exactly is a proper requirement ? Now what exactly is a proper requirement? Is it a sentence that is written on an index card and starts with „as a user I want to be able to use my Asian CCB credit card?“. Nope. We actually came up with a fancy sounding process for generating and checking proper requirements. We will go into detail on the individual points in our next blog articles, but here’s the abstract spoiler for what a proper requirement is. (Oh, and we'll spice it up with real-life examples from the requirements engineering for the new BMW (car manufacturer) website a while ago.) A proper requirement has (1) been worked out with business people AND programmers, with two-way street communication. It has (2) been repeatedly deconstructed. deconstructed. deconstructed. And it has (3) been defended, which includes what we call „angling“ and „skinning“. STOP it already ! I'm a programmer, requirements are not my job! Yes, in bigger organisations you most often have dedicated business analysts, whose sole job is to iron out detailed requirement specifications before they get passed to „implementation teams“. And in dreamland this all works flawlessly, and you just sit down and start coding, but in reality not so much. Anyway, the smaller an organisation gets, the more a programmer becomes a hybrid. The founder might shout across the table: And you as a „programmer“ have to not only sort out the implementation, but also what the hell this is all about. In any case, you should be a professional ! As much fun as it might be to read through he upgrade path of AngularJS 2.0 instead of accustoming yourself with your customers problem domain and requirements : At the end of the day, as sad as it might seem, your technical skills, voice of frameworks or algorithms are only a part of your day-to-day job. And the basis for all development work is : proper requirements. Next Step: Share your experiences in the comment section or on our blog, subscribe to our newsletter and stay tuned for the follow-up articles!

Former Executive Vice President of HP Software and Operating Partner at Silver Lake Partners Brings Deep Experience to Accelerate Continuous Quality and Digital Engagement Boston, MA – June 25, 2015: Perfecto Mobile, the world’s leader in mobile app quality and experience, today announced the appointment of George Kadifa to its Board of Directors. As a Board member, Kadifa will expand Perfecto Mobile’s vision towards enterprise digital engagement and accelerate the momentum with Agile and DevOps teams. Kadifa has extensive expertise in growing and managing technology businesses, having held leadership positions at HP, IBM, Silver Lake Partners, Corio, Oracle, and Booz-Allen & Hamilton. As Operating Partner at Silver Lake Partners, Kadifa was responsible for driving the growth of a 24-company enterprise portfolio from the firm’s large-cap investment fund. Most recently, Kadifa served as Executive Vice President of HP Software and Strategic Relationships, where he led HP’s multi-billion dollar software portfolio under the direction of HP’s CEO. “We are delighted to welcome George Kadifa to Perfecto Mobile’s Board of Directors,” said David Reichman, Chairman of the Board at Perfecto Mobile. “His extensive leadership experience at the top global technology companies, paired with his deep operational knowledge, will add a valuable dimension to the Board as he supports Perfecto Mobile’s vision into the next phase of digital engagement.” Kadifa is currently the Managing Director at Sumeru Equity Partners, Director at Velocity Technology Solutions and serves as a trustee for the University of Chicago Booth School of Business. "As someone with first-hand experience leading both a new breed of companies as well as some of the largest technology organisations in the world, I have come across many companies who set out to change an industry,” said Mr. Kadifa. “It is quite rare to find a company such as Perfecto Mobile, with superior technology, a vast market to penetrate, and a visionary executive team. In addition, it offers a highly disruptive business that is transforming legacy tools and waterfall methodologies to an open and continuous approach, matching the way DevOps, Agile and Mobile teams work. I am excited to work with CEO Eran Yaniv, the Perfecto Mobile executive team and the Board to support Perfecto Mobile’s explosive growth becoming the standard in the mobile and digital quality market.”

COLOGNE, Germany – June 22, 2015 – ParStream, the IoT analytics company, today announced its participation at the TDWI Munich Conference 2015, one of the largest gatherings of expert Business Intelligence, Big Data and data warehousing leaders and educators in Europe. The conference will take place June 22-24, 2015 at the MOC Order and Event Center in Munich, Germany. Albert Aschauer, Sales Director DACH at ParStream, will present on requirements for an analytics platform for the Internet of Things (IoT) based on real-world use cases from the renewable energy and telecommunications industries. Big Data, fast data, edge analytics and real-time insights are driving new technology innovation to meet the demand for getting more value from IoT data. Additional details on the speaking session are below. What: “Requirements of an Analytics Platform for the Internet of Things” When: Monday, June 22, 2015 at 11:35 a.m. CEST Who: Albert Aschauer, Sales Director DACH at ParStream Where: MOC Munich, Germany – Room F112 To schedule a one-on-one meeting with Albert Aschauer and ParStream at TDWI Munich Conference 2015, send an email to events(at)parstream(dot)com.

Written by Joel Bancroft-Connors for LeadingAgile. Okay, so your enterprise wants to start an agile transformation. Good for you! We’ll assume you know why you are doing it, what the values are and that it’s not an overnight process. That still leaves a question of where in the organization do you start? Do you start with a small scale team level approach? Do you get executive sponsorship for a top down push? Do you work through the PMO? And what about middle management? The answer is, yes. Let’s look at the various entrance vectors for an agile transformation, and why they can fail. From the Team Up When I first gained a formal understanding of agile (like many I’d been doing it for years without realizing it), my basic Shu understanding of agile was very team and individual focused. I think my background in customer service made this a very natural place to go to. As a natural extension of this I believed that “agile must grow from the teams”. If you believe you are agile, you will be. It was at this time I first came up with my “Better people lead to better teams, better teams to better projects, better projects to better products, better products leads to better companies and better companies will make a better world.” philosophy. Unfortunately, this is not unlike the kid with a blanket tied around his neck that jumps off his parent’s roof, in the belief he can fly. Belief will only carry you so far in the face of the law of gravity. A team level agile transformation can only go so far in the enterprise before it runs into the impediments of large organizations. From the Top Down At the other end of the spectrum you have agilists that firmly believe an agile transformation must come from the executive level. Without their support, you can never conquer the agile anti-bodies and organizational impediments. The most common problem with this method, is a failure to commit. The executive says “we’re going agile” and may even hire some consultants to come in and help. Only like the product manager who doesn’t get the shift to being a product owner, the executive does not take part in the transformation. Mandates and visions from the C-Suite rarely succeed unless the executives are willing to invest their time directly into the effort. Even if they do, they can run into strong resistance from the middle without constant support from the top. Meet in the Middle For a time I believed that this was the secret to success. Find a team that wanted to do an agile pilot and get the executive to support this from the top down. This too is fraught with risk. I learned this was not unlike burning the candle at both ends. Pretty soon the middle is melting. Even if the agile pilot was successful, two things would rise up to crush it. The first being most agile pilots are small scale, high performing projects that won’t scale across the organizational impediments. The other problem was that the managers in the middle had a tendency to become detractors out of sheer fear of how this would change their role. Which led me to to the realization that without middle management bought in and supporting, you could not be successful. This launched me on a quest to help educate managers on what it meant to be a manager in an agile organization. While teaching managers to move from managing tasks, to enabling their teams was certainly valuable, it was not the magic entry point to start a transformation. It did build on my “better people” belief in that I was helping managers to support their directs better, even if they were not doing agile development. That didn’t help me with finding the vector to start an agile transformation. The PMO My focus on better managers, combined with my PMI background, led me to explore driving an agile transformation from the program management office. I really thought I was on to something here. The PMO typically owns process or has a lot of influence on it. And as peers to the middle management can exert some strong influence with them. The problems though came from all directions. Teams have a somewhat understanding wariness for the “process of the month” from project managers. “These non-engineers want to tell us how to write software?” Next, while the PMO might be able to get an executive sponsor, more often than not that sponsorship extends only as far as the kick-off meeting. And while the PMO does own process, because agile calls for a fundamental change in how people managers interact with their directs, those managers are usually highly resistant. So the bottom, the top and the middle all have their challenges for originating an agile transformation. So what do we do? A Total Approach While I was exploring coaching better managers, LeadingAgile ‘s founders, Mike and Dennis began to realize that only a systematic approach would work to successfully transform an enterprise scale organization to agile. By establishing an agile structure, governance and metrics, a company could bring clarity to their requirements, accountability (and ability) to the teams and be able to measurably track progress through working, tested software. This approach doesn’t focus on just one approach vector. Instead it sets up an agile transformation plan from portfolio, through the program level (product owner teams) to the delivery level. When the agile pilot is done, it’s not a cutting edge XP practice or Lean Startup. Instead the pilot is testing the very first step the rest of the organization will also take. The executive sponsor is directly involved, much like a product owner should be. The managers not only know what is happening, they are directly a part of it and get the support they need to be able to support their teams, not drive them to a death march release. And of course the teams get the hands-on help to make a transition to a Shu level agile framework, the first step in a multi-legged journey of an agile transformation. Not unlike Agile itself When we talk about creating a stable agile team, we often use the slice of cake analogy. The Scrum team (to pick an agile framework) should have all the skills needed to release an increment of potentially shippable product. An agile transformation needs to be a slice of cake through the organization, with everyone an equal player in the transformation. When we talk about enterprise agile release ceremonies we have release planning, sprint planning and the standup. With an agile transformation, the portfolio is the release planning, the program is the sprint planning and the teams the daily standup. Conclusion If you want a successful enterprise-scale agile transformation, you can’t start at the top, the bottom, or the middle. You have to start all along the continuum, at the same time. And for me, it’s been a realization that my “better people, better teams” philosophy isn’t a “one leads to the next” progression scale. Instead you have to work with the company as a whole, to make all levels better, together. I still believe better companies will save the world and that’s what I’m doing when I help a company do an enterprise-scale agile transformation.

Written by Andrew Graves for LeadingAgile. People don’t buy what you do, they buy why you do it. – Simon Sinek Over the last few years I have come across the notion of an Agile Ecosystem and several different thoughts around what constitutes an Agile Ecosystem. I have seen people in the industry refer to the Agile Ecosystem as a number of practices used together to achieve a delivery team’s agility goals. For example, the marriage of Scrum, XP, DevOps and Kanban. I think leveraging the best of breed in all of these areas makes perfect sense. However, the Agile Ecosystem is much bigger and needs to support the business as a whole. To drive sustainable agility and continuous improvement, an ecosystem must be built and maintained at an enterprise level. So… how do you go about building a high performing ecosystem that can provide value and continually delight customers? Start With Why It starts with Why… In other words what are the business drivers for making the organizational transformation. Why are you transforming? It may be to increase your market responsiveness, improve quality or greater predictability. Whatever it is, it needs to be clear. When the why is understood and transparent, the trek toward an agile ecosystem that supports the entire enterprise can begin. The trek starts with defining the end-state vision of your transformation and putting structure, governance and metrics in place to support the transformation. When you have clarified why you are going through the transformation, the next step should include forming teams at the delivery, program and portfolio levels. Then setting up a clear governance model and a way to demonstrate measurable progress. When all of these things are in place, the journey toward enterprise agility can begin. With the end-state in mind and a shared understanding of why, it’s time to get clarity on the team structure so governance and metrics can be applied. In my next post, I will touch on the teams in a scaled enterprise agile ecosystem and how they need to work together to deliver value to the customer.