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Showing posts from February, 2012

Agile Succeeds 3X over other brands

There is an interesting discussion of the Standish Groups 2012 report on Mike Cohn's blog .  Go read the article ( Agile Succeeds Three Times More Ofter Than Waterfall ) and the comments. Here's the summary graphic.

An Agile Process is an Integral Equation

How does one define an Agile process.  I've heard that mathematics should be able to describe most anything; so here is my attempt at describing an Agile process. An integral equation.  The integral from sprint 1 to sprint N  of teamwork multiplied by the sum of test-driven development to the power of continuous integration plus pair programming plus the summation of refactoring. See Also:       S.O.L.I.D. design principle posters .       Which Agile Process Should You Choose?  a comparative study of processes       A List of Agility Tests During Scrum boot camps at SolutionsIQ back in the day we ran an exercise to map the engineering practices to the Agile manifesto's 12 principles .  The first several groups to participate in the exercise arrived at a set of practices that felt to all as if they had covered most of the 12 principles, but not all sufficiently.  That's what instigated the practice of teamwork, not that it had been missing on our teams, it j

The Founder Effect

One way to scale Scrum is to get one team functioning (mature team) and then populate new teams by dividing the original members up amongst the newly created teams. Does this work?  I think the answer is both yes and no.  Does science have any analogies to study that would help us to predict what factors lead to the yes answer and away from the no answer? The Founder Effect - an effect that evolutionary biology predicts from the classic theory of evolution.  The most adaptable will survive.  We agilist believe in this theory.  Here's a study of the founder effect in Caribbean lizards .  The study reflects that the founders of a population have a significant  effect upon the new population.  However the environment also has a significant effect. To draw the conclusion the studies author,  Schoener said: “The answer we found is that founder effects can leave a persistent signal as generations replace one another over time, even as populations adapt to new conditions. Our study