30Oct One of the critical factors in the success of agile adoptions is the organizational culture in which agile teams function. In his blog Agile Software Development, Dave Nicolette stated that “an agile team is most effective when it is part of an agile organizational culture“. I agree completely, but just what is an agile organizational culture anyway? There are probably lots of different answers to this question and all may be equally valid. But at the heart of the matter, an agile organizational culture is one that supports the freedom of agile teams to do the best work they can in their efforts to deliver quality software quickly.
There are plenty of large companies out there practicing agile in many different forms. They all have components of what most would consider an agile organizational culture. I’ve blogged about Netflix, whose CEO describes a culture of “freedom and responsibility” within their organization. I’ve also discussed the strides Microsoft has made in terms of supporting their Patterns & Practices lab in their efforts to become agile.
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30Oct After writing my post about agile in the fixed-price world, I received numerous comments and e-mails about the topic. It seems like selling agile to the customer is a very common concern amongst agile practitioners, especially in fixed-price situations. While it seems like no one has a real magic bullet to help us navigate the fixed-price world, there is quite the conversation going on in the agile community about this topic. If you’re interested in more opinions about selling agile to your customer, check out some of the following links:
How to Sell Agile to the Customer A discussion thread on Facebook in the Agile and Lean Development Community group. Also, I highly recommend joining this group if you’re interested in agile practices.
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26Oct 
This week I was asked to give an extremely brief description of agile practices and Scrum. I had about 30 seconds to respond. I think I did pretty well under pressure and came up with something along the lines of:
“It’s a framework of practices…no, more like guidelines, that help us deliver useful, valuable increments of functional software to our customers on a very frequent basis, like two weeks, in a completely transparent environment. We do it by constantly re-prioritizing requirements and reviewing our incremental progress with our customer. We also continually inspect and adapt our development practices to increase both our efficiency and our our effectiveness.”
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24Oct As part of our move to using Rally Software as our agile management tool, we asked for a trial subscription to Rally’s Web Services API. We decided to give the API a test run by integrating a defect reporting function into our custom ESRI ArcGIS application for a large enterprise project. Mike Juniper and Jeff Germain, two of our GIS software engineers, put the API through its paces to see what it could do. I had the chance to discuss the API with Mike and ask him 10 questions about it. Here are Mike’s answers:
1. Can you tell us a bit about yourself and your development experience? Read more »
