ThoughtWorks Studios Blog
Industry-leading thoughts on Agile, Software, Technology
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Blog Entry posted February 5, 2012 by Elena Yatzeck , tagged Agile Transitions in Agile Transitions > Agile Transitions Blog publicDelegation, Meet AgileYou might not expect to encounter the "delegation" concept in a blog post about agile software development. After all, agile is all about the "self governing team." But in the real world, if you are in a company which is transitioning to agile, and you are the project manager of a newly created agile team, you may well need to consider how to create a situation around your team that allows self-governance to emerge without making you completely crazy. In real life, your first few weeks with your agile team can seem like your worst nightmare. This is not because there is something wrong with you. This is completely predictable. Stop blaming yourself.
If your team is used to having you, as a project manager, take all the responsibility, and you suddenly stop telling people what to do, (along with not setting up their meetings, not taking their notes, and not getting them a projector every single time for every single meeting), you should not expect them to do what is needed, no matter what the Agile Founding Fathers say. Instead, your team members, being humans, will go ahead and take advantage of you and do whatever they feel like doing. And remember, they are under a bunch of stress themselves with this whole "agile transformation" thing, so you're not seeing them at their best.<more>
- Blog Entry posted January 22, 2012 by Elena Yatzeck , tagged Agile Transitions in Agile Transitions > Agile Transitions Blog publicNo-Blender Zone: Cross-Functional Doesn't Mean Homogenous
In the glory days when giants still walked the earth and the Agile Founding Fathers created "the team," they decreed that there would be three "team roles:"
- The Product Owner
- The Scrum Master
- The Team
The product owner would be omnipresent and omni-knowledgeable, the scrum master would (somewhat mysteriously) "move boulders and carry water," and the team itself, the AFFs explained, would be "cross-functional." Without being told how, the team would just swarm around the work and get it done: analysis, design, development, testing, release, the works. Boo-yah!
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- Blog Entry posted January 15, 2012 by Elena Yatzeck , tagged Agile Transitions in Agile Transitions > Agile Transitions Blog publicRoad Rage: You and Your New Agile Teammates
As you join your teammates in your sparkling new agile team room, and you all do your best to quickly "become agile," I guarantee that despite being surrounded by brightly colored index cards and sticky notes, you may sometimes feel...angry. Here you are, supposedly liberated to be "self managing," out from under the collective thumbs of your corporate hierarchy, and you realize that you are reminded briefly of the Lord of the Flies.
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Blog Entry last edited January 12, 2012 by Mark Richter , tagged Agile, Go, Mingle in ThoughtWorks Studios > ThoughtWorks Studios Blog public.NET Extensibility and MingleOver the past year ThoughtWorks has introduced several technologies and extensions that allow Mingle to more seamlessly integration into the Microsoft Office and development ecosystem. We have started three open-source projects supporting this effort:
Mingle.NET – A library wrapping Mingle’s REST API that is easily consumed by clients written in C#, Visual Basic or C++.
Visual Studio Extension – An extension for Visual Studio 2010 that delivers Mingle interoperability inside the Visual Studio IDE working environment for software developers. In its current form the Visual Studio extension supports Mingle. Soon it will also integrate GO with build management and control for continuous integration and delivery. You can watch a five-minute demonstration video here. Mingle Extension is available for download from the Visual Studio Extension Gallery.
Excel Add-In – An add-in for Microsoft Excel 2010 that compliments Mingle’s export feature providing general-purpose data extraction from Mingle into Excel from Excel. Another add-in is planned for Outlook. All this is crafted using the architecture shown below (see diagram).
Mingle can run anywhere on your network or on the Internet. Mingle.NET is an open source library written in C# that provides convenient programmatic APIs for client application software. We’re doing clients ourselves for Visual Studio and Microsoft Office. Your application could be a desktop program or a web app.
My Visual Studio desktop is Southern California using a Mingle system in the San Francisco Bay Area working with team mates in the United Kingdom. The interoperability and productivity are amazing.
- Blog Entry posted November 15, 2011 by Elena Yatzeck in Agile Transitions > Agile Transitions Blog publicHow BDD and Feature Injection can help you be a better Product Owner
Product Ownership is very difficult. Take a big step away from the Agile Manifesto and think for a moment about project stakeholders, user stories, and how they don't fit together as neatly in real life as they do in Mike Cohn's User Stories Applied, as awesome as that book is. How in the world is it possible for there to be a single person standing in for all project stakeholders in negotiating with the team?
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