I returned from last week’s holiday to an e-mail telling me that the Guardian has been shortlisted in the 2011 Agile Awards. In not one, but two categories: Best Agile Team, and Best Use of Agile in the Private Sector. I’m thrilled, because it acknowledges that success really is a team effort, and while you’re … Continue reading
There was a fair bit of criticism last night of the UK government’s approach to agile development, and in particular its use of agile on the huge Universal Credit (UC) project. This was at a SPA 2011 session entitled “Towards Agile Government”, which came off the Institute for Government’s report on the subject. A straw … Continue reading
There’s a terrific piece over on Computer Weekly by Alistair Maughan of law firm Morrison Foerster. He says the UK government’s embrace of agile is doomed to fail… so here I’m going to set out the case for the defence. Actually, there’s much in Alistair’s text that I agree with, and it’s particularly heartening to … Continue reading
I was delighted to be at the launch event last night for System Error: Fixing the flaws in government IT. This is the report from the Institute for Government thinktank about how classic problems with government IT projects might be avoided. The event was tweeted under the hashtag #ukgovit. I need to declare the same … Continue reading
I’ve been involved in a few conversations this last week or so about kanban, after Ian Carroll visited the Guardian to talk about his experiences with it. The key thing that kanban adds to the usual agile processes is the idea of limits on each stage of development. I started thinking about how to explain … Continue reading
Freelance Unbound has some great laws, clearly learned the hard way, about… well, supposedly about website launches with new content management systems. But actually they can be generalised to be laws of almost any kind of big project with a strong technology element. Laws of physics? Laws of the land? Either way, you don’t need … Continue reading
Agile comes with tons of literature on how to organise work at a very detailed level. How much of this treadmill is activity for activity’s sake, rituals, and religious manifestations of an ‘Agile Sub-Culture’ aimed at integrating a growing workforce? Can this relentless ‘heart beat’ and this esoteric jargon stifle innovation and alienate the very … Continue reading
In my spare time over the past few months I’ve been writing an app for my Palm Pre, and have finally got to point where I’m happy enough to release it. Palm Pre and Pixi apps run on Palm’s webOS operating system in HTML and Javascript. This is a summary of how I got on… … Continue reading
A couple of weeks ago I presented at the Agile Business Conference 2009. Thanks to all those at the DSDM Consortium who made it such a great event. The theme of the conference was how Agile can help in adversity (e.g. an economic downturn), and I provided a case study — title above — of … Continue reading
I’ve been reading a bit about lean working recently, and this is a bit about what I’ve learned. Lean software development is a fascinating step on from Agile, but its history is in manufacturing cars and to date I’ve only been reading up on lean manufacturing, not lean development. There are two reasons for this. … Continue reading
