Catálogo de publicaciones - libros

The present movement in the adoption of agile methodologies as a contemporary approach to the management of the software development processes has seen a growing trend towards the selection of relevant practices from the agile family as opposed to the adoption of specific methods. This paper reports work-in-progress of a proposed novel modeling technique for tailoring methodologies to a particular environment using the family of methodologies approach. The tool is being applied by one software development organisation in Southern Africa and the partial results are included in this paper.

XP/Agile education and training remains a challenge from the perspective of determining relevant content; identifying effective methods for delivery; and maintaining the focus and motivation of students. This panel brings together academic and industry professionals to share their perspectives and experiences. Anticipated points for discussion include: education/training delivery strategies, curriculum definition, certification challenges, marketing issues, collaboration strategies to engage industry sponsorship, value assessments for students and sponsoring organizations, and program success stories. This will be a highly interactive panel and the audience should come prepared to both ask and answer questions.

Off-shore development is increasing in popularity. Off-shoring affects many things in our environment: what and where we build and deploy; how we budget and deliver services; and how and when we communicate. Can the high touch, high bandwidth model that Agile purports be applied to a situation where one of the fundamental tenants – a co-located team – is shattered? This panel will offer a forum to share and learn from industry practitioners and researchers on how to make off-shore software development work in an agile context.

A significant number of members of the Agile community seem to have a musical background, leading to a hypothesis that there are commonalities between the two disciplines, both of which draw on diversely skilled individuals, collaborating to cre-ate a common vision. While this notion is purely anecdotal and subjective, it is inter-esting enough to explore further, and this activity session is intended to delve into those commonalities in more detail.

The XP Game is a playful way to familiarize the players with some of the more difficult concepts of the XP Planning Game, like velocity, story estimation, yesterday’s weather and the cycle of life. Anyone can participate. The goal is to make development and business people work together, they both play both roles. It’s especially useful when a company starts adopting XP.

A panel of expert practitioners will offer advice to members of the audience on how to address the issues they are facing when applying XP. The format is to consider concrete cases, to talk about what we would do in those cases, and discuss the principles behind the actions. The goal is to help the audience to be more effective in response to their “leadership moments” as they apply XP.

We can read about Agile processes in books and articles. However, the management of projects using an Agile process represents a significant shift for both the project team(s) and the organization as a whole. The shift internal to the team occurs as the project manager teaches the customer how to drive the project iteration by iteration to maximize ROI and minimize risk, with no intermediaries between the customer and team. The other internal shift happens as the team realizes that self-management means exactly that – the team has to figure out how to mane its own work cross-functionally. These are trivial words, but the realization of their impact on career paths, relationships, and performance reviews is profound. Even more difficult is helping the team and organization overcome the bad habits they had acquired prior to implementing the Agile process – waterfall thinking, command-and-control management, and abusive relationships. Ken Schwaber, the instructor, has addressed these problems in numerous organizations and will share his insights with the attendees, along with a framework for thinking about the new role of a project manager. Since it is easy to think one knows what Agile processes are like without knowing what they really feel like, two case studies are used to help the class experience the differences.

Learn how to express business rules as storytests [1], with a focus on expressing the business domain with clarity and brevity.

Writing storytests (Customer tests) is usually complicated by several factors: The business domain needs to be understood, and often needs to be clarified. Storytests need to evolve to help this understanding evolve. Emphasis is often placed too early on the testing aspects, rather than on expressing the business domain as clearly as possible. The storytests often make premature commitments to details of the application being developed, or are not written until those details are known.

This tutorial will give participants experience in expressing business rules well as storytests. We’ll see that such storytests evolve as the whole team’s understanding of the business needs and the system evolve.

Long feedback loops are the biggest cause of waste in software development. They are the reason why well over 50% of all newly developed software is seldom or never used. Long feedback loops are the cause of seriously delayed projects, unmanageable software defect counts, and code bases that calcify because of their complexity.

Lean Software Development is all about shortening information feedback loops in the software development process and creating flow. The result is increased speed and quality along with lower cost. If this sounds unlikely, consider that in manufacturing, operations, and logistics, lean processes routinely deliver the highest speed, highest quality and lowest cost in extremely competitive environments. This tutorial will show you how to apply the principles that underlay lean manufacturing, lean logistics and lean product development to software development.

Applying the values of XP/Agile approaches to software development projects highlights the shift to the critical importance of functioning well in highly collaborative team environments. The excitement of trying something new and the intense learning curve of understanding and applying the practices tends to overshadow team member interactions through the first stages of project team development. However, once XP/Agile practices become the usual way of doing business, team members frequently discover the limits of their ability to communicate and work collaboratively. Effective, collaborative communication becomes the next challenge. Three skills in particular help a team make the move from adequate work performance to high performance. Effective XP team members learn the critical collaborative skills of group decision-making, active listening and interpersonal feedback – seeking it, giving it, and receiving it well.