Earlier this month, I was privileged to speak at Rally Software Development’s Customer Summit at the Agile Development Practices Conference in Orlando.  I gave a talk called Becoming Agile. It was a brief talk about our team’s transition to agile.  It follows our team’s agile journey from our humble beginnings to our exit from our old organization and our new home here at Data Transfer Solutions.  I’ve uploaded the slide deck from the presentation with notes so that you can read what was presented.  I hope you enjoy the presentation and I would really appreciate any feedback or comments as well.  You can view the presentation here or download the full PowerPoint with notes at my SlideShare site.  Or click here to download the slide deck and notes in Adobe PDF format.  Read the rest of this post

In the coming months, I’ll be conducting interviews with leaders in the GIS industry discussing their level of agile adoption.  However, today I found two new polls on the Directions Magazine website which give an insight into what the GIS market is doing with agile.  The first poll examined the level of knowledge GIS professionals had in terms of agile product/software management knowledge.  The results showed that only 28% of the 36 respondents are using agile practices (and what that means can be kind of nebulous).  The astonishing figure is that 31% of the industry has never heard of agile.  This may help answer Dave Bouwman’s and my questions about why the GIS industry is slow in adopting agile practices.  Read the rest of this post

If you missed Michael Mah of QSM at the Agile Development Practices Conference this month, he is doing an encore webinar of his very informative case study of the productivity of 5 agile companies.  If you haven’t seen this before, you need to see it.  It overwhelmingly makes the case for agile practices over waterfall methods with real world metrics.  Not only that, but Michael reveals the latest productivity and quality patterns from their research on Agile practices.

Details:

Case Study: Agile Productivity at 5 Companies by Michael Mah

January 17, 2008 at 11:30 am EST  Read the rest of this post

Our friends and fellow bloggers over at Project Management View have a series of agile project management and development podcasts coming up in the New Year.  Check out their website for full details.  Here’s a quick rundown of the schedule so far:

January 16, 12:00pm EST: Beyond Agile: How to Deliver Better Software, Faster with Matt Nolker

January 23, 12:00pm EST: How Good is Good? Quality Levels and the Cost of Perfection with Peter Hodgkins

February 6, 12:00pm EST: Scrum 101, with Sinan Si Alhir

April 16, 12:00pm EST: User Stories 101, with Sinan Si Alhir  Read the rest of this post