Category: Articles

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Getting Loyalty in Software Development Projects

Lack of loyalty is a serious problem in organizations everywhere today and software development projects. People don’t expect to spend their full career in the same company and are ready to jump ship rapidly if they think that they could loose their job or if the get a better offer...

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Fear of Intervention

Sometimes simple practices can be used to increase the efficiency of developers in software development projects. Fear of intervention of subordinates is one of the main impediment for efficiency and this is what Willem van den Ende discusses in this article.

The Best and Brightest of the Agile Methods

Scrum Still a Minority in Software Project Management

As Agile approaches like Scrum are supposed to be dominant for enterprise software project management, the latest Methods & Tools survey asked the following question: Which project management approach is used by your project? The results make us think that the situation is a little bit more complex than the...

Tuning Agile to Business Objectives

To successfully create breakthroughs in your development effectiveness that are possible with agile, it has to be aligned with why you want to do it in the first place and what you need to achieve from it. This excerpt of the book Practical Approach to Large-Scale Agile Development explain that...

Collaboration in Project Management

Collaboration is an essential ingredient in healthy Agile project communities, yet in my experience truly effective collaboration is perhaps the hardest thing to do well. We have become so adept at using e-mail, instant messaging, voice mail, and telephones to communicate that we have lost our preference for face-to-face communications.

Transitioning to Relative Estimation

Agile approaches use relative estimations to size requirements during the planning phase. Instead of the traditional man/days measure, you use story points that follow a Fibonacci sequence: 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, … Playing “planning poker” allows the team to attribute story points to each user stories...

How to Sell Scrum to Your Boss

As Agile adoption is spreading and more software development teams want to adopt an Agile project management approach like Scrum. In this article, Robert Karlsson ask the question the question “Why should your boss let you implement Scrum in your organization?”. Your boss might be satisfied with the current situation...

Accurate Estimating with Relative Size Scale

Estimation is a touchy topic in software development projects. In this article, Grant Rule proposes a quick and easy guide to accurate early estimating of software project size, costs and viability based on clothing sizes: Small, Medium, Large, Extra Large.