Catálogo de publicaciones - libros

Most programmers are familiar with the notion that adding new resources to a project will most likely slow down progress if not bring it to a complete stop while new team members are brought up to speed. Unfortunately, in business situations there are often important opportunities missed or dollars lost if a software development team cannot increase the rate at which they complete functionality. Surprisingly, many of the practices of Extreme Programming also help teams overcome Brook’s Law and actually increase production by adding resources. If more software development teams successfully demonstrated this phenomenon, then many business sponsors would be interested in supporting the practices used by these teams.

A different way of bidding for contract work is introduced and discussed in this paper. The bid is priced on a per iteration basis. The throughput goal of each iteration is estimated in story point format based on projected load factor, planned work days, and staff plan. The development team is responsible for achieving the target throughput goal of each iteration. Though pricing bid this way gains client trust quickly, key lesions are learnt and advice are given specifically on estimation, load factor projection, and client education.

This experience report is from the viewpoint of the product owner and covers how a successful product was created by trying to be Agile throughout all aspects of product development and how other processes were incorporated with Scrum^1, including Prince 2^2 (a generalised project management process), a User Centred Design^3 process and an Innovation process. The report also covers how different disciplines were involved with the agile process to create a product.

Major challenges IT department in investment banking industry faces include but not limited to frequently changing requirements, last minute change request, frequent emergency release request and unavailability of business users. The paper addresses those challenges with tailored strategies, specifically focusing on four areas including requirement capture and flush out, iteration and release planning, project status tracking and build automation. The paper also listed strong management support, team advocate and more involvement of business users as the key successful contributors.

This experience report is about how one project in Norway made an agile approach to specifying software requirements for a new intranet. Rather than spending months on trying to detail all requirements and aspects of the solution, the team spent a few weeks specifying a prioritized list of high-level requirements. Further details will emerge by face-to-face communication through the iterations of the project quickly turning in to valuable working software for the customer.

In agile development stories are typically used to define small, independent pieces of functionality that have value for the customer. They are most often used to define requirements for future development. This paper describes a project where stories were used on a much broader scale as part of a strategic planning exercise to identify a long-term development roadmap for a new system. Stories were used not only to define what needed to be built but also to document existing functionality and gaps with current systems. This resulted in the generation of a large number of stories, which created challenges with managing and keeping the stories up to date as the project proceeded.

Bekk Consulting (BEKK), a Norwegian IT- and management consulting company changed their way of running projects from traditional waterfall to a more agile approach. It took more than a year getting the whole company onboard and more than two years to convince most of the customers. We are still learning, adjusting and improving the way we run our projects – with focus on the outcome over delivering features. BEKK is a Norwegian IT- and management consulting company leveraging on the intellectual capital of their more than 160 employees. With specialist like graphic designers through system developers, usability experts, project managers and management consultants we create cross-functional teams running projects to high business value solutions, based on internet technology. We will later in this report discuss what were the drivers for this transition, but first we need to understand that it’s about creating VALUE for the customer.

In this paper we present our approach to design and develop an enterprise email application called bluemail. We describe our development process that is orchestrated for fast, iterative deployments and aimed at offering increased transparency to our internal user community. We finish by discussing the relationship between iterative design and agile development practices.

In this paper we examine the close relationship that can be established between Agile methodologies and the FLOSS (Free-Libre Open Source Software) development model, by integrating a Health Information System (HIS) into the IT environment of an Italian hospital (a so-called software verticalization ). We followed XP approach during development of new features. This approach allowed us not only to contribute to the original Open Source project, helping it to become increasingly mature, but also to evaluate in a quantitative manner the effort devoted to the international project, to the national context and to the specific health care organization.

In this paper we show how agile practices have been used at the Poste Italiane for building a monitoring system of its complex IT infrastructure. The system, called Datamart, is built upon the existing monitoring infrastructure. A testing framework has been developed for performing assertion checking either on existing legacy modules or on the new functionalities. This framework is currently used, and is able to process data coming from 100,000 distributed computers, enabling and improving their centralized control.