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For decades, Victor has dedicated himself to strengthening theatre in Washington. As a supporter, as a champion, and especially as Founding Chair of theatreWashington's Board of Directors, he has always believed fervently in theatre's power to transform a community.
In addition to serving as theatreWashington's board chair from 1991 to 2014, Victor has been instrumental in advocating for the entire Washington theatre community. As board member and patron of several flagship theatres, he played a leading role in the area's artistic renaissance, which saw the number of professional theatres grow exponentially over three decades, creating a city that now supports more than 200 productions annually.
Throughout his decades of work in the Washington area, Victor Shargai has brought his artistic expertise and business acumen to the boards of The Washington Ballet, Studio Theatre, Signature Theatre, the Charlin Jazz Festival, The Kennedy Center Community and Friends Board, and the Laurel Fund, which provides scholarships to young people studying the performing arts, in addition to his longstanding leadership of the Helen Hayes Awards/theatreWashington board.
Thirty years ago there were 20 theatres. Today, there are more than 90 providing over 600 productions, readings, and festivals each year. These theatres are a driving force for the revitalization of Penn Quarter, 14th Street, Shirlington, H Street, and downtown Bethesda. Thousands of theatre professionals now call Washington home and Washington is recognized nationally as a world class theatre town, second only to New York City.
A ubiquitous presence at Washington area theatres large and small, Victor's ability to gather and inspire artists, audiences, and patrons is grounded in his exhuberance for the theater, personal generosity and charisma.
We hope that you will join our Board of Directors and many others in The Victor Circle to honor the great legacy, leadership, and dedication of this extraordinary man.
Your 100% tax-deductible contribution helps us build the next 30 years of our future – a future that Victor helped us envision and make possible.


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MUSTANG HOOFPRINTS: Spring season coming to fast conclusion
Hello Mustang Fans!
The spring semester is winding down, and we are two weeks away from finals on the campus of Southwest Minnesota State University.
The women's tennis team has concluded its spring season with baseball, softball and track and field just two weeks away from Northern Sun Intercollegiate Conference postseason competition. SMSU women's golf team begins its postseason play this weekend at Dakota Ridge Golf Club in Morton, where the Mustangs will be competing in the NSIC Spring Championships.
Patnoe earns NSIC scholarship
Congratulations to SMSU senior women's golfer Rachel Patnoe, who was been named the 2014 Willis R. Kelly Scholar-Athlete Award winner as the top female scholar-athlete in the NSIC. University of Sioux Falls cross country/track and field student-athlete William Brockmueller was awarded the 2014 Dr. William Britton Award for Academic Excellence as the top male scholar-athlete in the NSIC.
The member institutions of the NSIC nominate one male and one female student-athlete for the Britton and Kelly awards. The nominees must meet the following criteria: a grade-point average of 3.5 or better (on a 4.0 scale); evidence of academic excellence beyond the minimum grade-point average (scholarship prizes and other academic recognition), evidence of participation in the life of the institution and evidence of participation in at least two-thirds of the varsity events of the individual's primary sport. The award is voted on by the NSIC faculty athletic representatives.
The 30 student-athletes nominated for the NSIC's two most prestigious awards will also be honored as NSIC Male and Female Honor Student-Athletes of the Year at their respective institutions. Patnoe and Brockmueller will be recognized July 9 at the 2014 NSIC Hall of Fame Banquet at the Best Western Kelly Inn and Convention Center in St. Cloud, where each student-athlete will each receive a $2,500 post-graduate scholarship. Patnoe is the sixth SMSU female student-athlete to earn the award in the last 29 years.
Download app to follow Mustangs
The Southwest Minnesota State University Department of Athletics and sponsors, Aramark, Hy-Vee and Pepsi, are excited to announce a new way for fans to interact with the Mustangs on their mobile devices.
The Mustang app, which is now available for download, will not only allow you to keep updated with SMSU athletics, but will also allow you to earn rewards for attending Mustang events and receive great offers from Aramark Dining Services, Hy-Vee, and Pepsi.
The app, which is compatible with Apple devices and Android-based platforms, can be downloaded by searching, "Mustang app" in the Apple App Store, Google Play Store or any other app stores.
Another way you can download the Mustang app is to follow these instructions: Step 1, text Mustangs to 80802; Step 2, click the link in the text message you received; Step 3, download it from Application Store; Step 4, register for the application; Step 5, start earning rewards.
Drown SMSU Golf Classic
Save the date!
The 29th annual David and Carol Drown SMSU Golf Classic will be held June 20 at the Marshall Golf Club.
The Golf Classic is the next Mustang Booster Club fund-raising event, and the Golf Classic Committee will be convening in the next couple of weeks to begin the planning for this great event.
For all your information on the Dick Bragg Spring Volleyball Invitational, the Mustang app and SMSU athletics, visit our website: www.smsumustangs.com.
Upcoming SMSU athletic events
The SMSU baseball team (17-20 overall, 8-13 NSIC) lost a pair of games Tuesday to Concordia-St. Paul.
The Mustangs have moved this weekend's games to Friday and Saturday in Crookston due to forecasted weather conditions. SMSU will play two doubleheaders versus the Golden Eagles as the Mustangs look to earn one of the eight spots in the NSIC Tournament Championship.
The Mustangs softball team (12-29-1, 9-16-1 NSIC) split a doubleheader at Concordia-St. Paul on Tuesday.
SMSU will be on the road this Saturday, taking on Minnesota State-Moorhead, and Sunday, battling Northern State in Aberdeen, S.D., with doubleheaders scheduled for both days. The Mustangs are also looking to earn a trip to the NSIC Tournament Championships with a strong finish to the regular season.
Women's Golf
The SMSU women's golf team will compete this weekend in the third and fourth rounds of the NSIC Championship at Dacotah Ridge Golf Club. The first two rounds of the championship were played at The Classic at Madden's in Brainerd on October 5-6, 2013.
The Mustangs are currently in fifth place in the 12-team championship with a two-round score of 122-over-par 698. Augustana and Concordia-St. Paul are tied for the team lead with an 80-over 656 and hold a 12-shot lead over Minnesota State. Maggie Leland from Augustana is the individual leader at 14-over 158. The third round begins with tee times starting at 10 a.m. Saturday, while Sunday's final round begins at 9 a.m. with a shotgun start.
Track and Field
The SMSU women's and men's track and field teams competed in the two-day Red Raider Open hosted by Northwestern College last Thursday.
For the women, Samantha McNeel led SMSU by earning a third-place finish in 1:08.72 in the 400-meter hurdles and also finished fourth in the long jump with a mark 16-feet, 10 1/2-inches. Rylee Armstrong, who won the high jump in the heptathlon with a jump of 1.55m, finished third overall in that event with 3,363 points. Amanda Grengs finished in sixth place in the 1,500 run in 5:06.58, while Nia Buom recorded an eighth-place finish in 1:06.81 in the 400 dash.
On the men's side, SMSU's Kelly Fitzsimmons captured first place in the 3,000 steeplechase in 10:41.59. Anthony Dean picked up a second-place finish in both the long jump, with a mark of 20-7 3/4 and the triple jump, with leap of 43-8 1/2. Alejandro Sanchez had a strong showing in the 400 dash, finishing second with a mark of 49.11 seconds, while Austin LaFollette also recorded a second-place finish in the 400 hurdles in 55.96 seconds.
Dallin Finley finished third in both the 100 and 200 dashes in 11.28 and 22.31 seconds, respectively. Ben Tonsager also finished third in the shot put with a throw of 49-3 1/2.
SMSU's 3,200 relay team (O.J. Ojullu, Chris Kveseth, Sanchez and Fitzsimmons) earned a third-place finish in 8:09.20, while the Mustangs' 1,600 relay team (LaFollette, Chris Kveseth, O.J. Ojullu and Sanchez) earned a fourth-place finish out of 15 teams in 3:21.40.
The Mustangs will be competing on Satruday at the Gustavus-Drake Alternative Meet in St. Peter.
Good luck to all of our SMSU teams competing this weekend!
Go Mustangs!
Trivia Contest
Congratulation to Neil Kruse who provided the correct answer to the Mustang Hoofprint's Trivia Question: Can you name the two recipients from SMSU who have received the Noel Olson Volunteer of the Year Award from the NSIC?
Ken Mukomela (2011) and Kevin and Karla Anundson (2013) were nominated by SMSU and received the award for their service and dedication to SMSU athletics.
Trivia Contest
Who was the last SMSU female student-athlete to be awarded the Willis R. Kelly Award as the top female scholar-athlete in the NSIC?
The first person to email me at firstname.lastname@example.com with the correct answer to this question will receive an SMSU T-shirt.

subset: commoncrawl


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Follow RFF News on your cell phone. Text follow rff to 40404 you will receive txt messages with RFF News
0 Members and 1 Guest are viewing this topic.
Puddin, you're badly in need of a DVR(Digital Video Recorder). You can tape 2 shows at once with one of them. <[/
but im not organized..my tapes are not labeled {l{ I think I have 24 hours of stuff to watch yet ^/^
Does anybody around here watch any shows when they're actually on? {l{Or are we too busy talking on these forums? ]][
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13 results for "Music and film, Journals, other languages, Books in Dutch, Newspapers in Dutch, Bibliographies, Subject websites"
Academic Search Complete (ASC)
Over 9,000 academic journals full text; international bibliography 13,000 academic journals; social sciences & humanities; from 1890s
Belgische Bibliografie (BB)
Official Belgian Bibliography; publications from and about Belgium; instalments of the last 12 months
Biography Reference Center
Biographies, international
Ebsco Electronic Journals Service
Gateway to thousands of e-journals, English, records, partly fulltext, >20,000.
Search engine for many EBSCO-databases:
* Academic Search Complete
* Art & Architecture Source
* ATLA Religion Database with ATLASerials
* Education Resource Information Center (ERIC)
* European Views of the Americas 1493-1750
* GreenFILE
* Historical Abstracts with Full Text
* Humanities Source Ultimate
* Library, Information Science & Technology Abstracts
* Library & Information Science Source
* Political Science Complete (PSC)
* Religion & Philosophy Collection
* Sociology Source Ultimate
* SPORTDiscus with Full Text
* Teacher Reference Center
Film Indexes Online
Portal: Film Index International, FIAF International Index to Film Periodicals & AFI Catalog; filmography, bibliography, American film.
International Bibliography of Periodical Literature (IBZ)
Reference work of academic periodical literature; humanities, social sciences and related fields; 40 languages.
JSTOR Arts & Sciences - Complete
Academic journals (>2000) and books, archive of records of articles, fulltext access 3-5 years ago, international, mainly arts and social sciences.
National Dutch research portal: academic publications (theses/reports, articles), data sets, research projects and organisations.
Nederlandse Bibliografie
Official Dutch bibliography, publications from or about the Netherlands or the Dutch language; includes announced publications


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Little East Conference Coaches' Poll
Five Things to Know About Your Beacons...
1. UMass Boston features three players who have earned Little East Conference All-Conference honors previously in their careers. The three former All-Conference players on an opening-day roster ties a program-record set by the 2007 team. Senior Erika Vecchiet (Pequannock, N.J.) and junior Kristina Bove (Medford, Mass.) each were named to the Second Team last year, while senior Natalia Bouyea (East Longmeadow, Mass.) earned Second Team honors in 2012.
2. The Beacons are set to play three teams for the first time in program history this season. UMass Boston will take on The College of New Jersey (April 15), Farmingdale State (April 15) and Washington & Jefferson College (April 19) during their season-opening trip to Florida.
3. Head coach Natalia Ardagna is just five wins away from 100 career victories at the helm of the Beacons. Ardagna earned her 100th career overall win last season in Florida and carries a 95-130 record at UMass Boston into this season.
4. UMass Boston was picked to finish sixth in the Little East Conference Preseason Coaches' Poll. If the Beacons finish in the top six in the LEC, UMass Boston will earn their program-record fourth-straight trip to the LEC Tournament. Before their current streak of three in a row, the program had reached the postseason in just two campaigns.
5. The Beacons will play 14 of their 18 home games this season in April, including all six of their home conference games. Those 14 conference games includes a 10-game homestand from April 10-19.
Following Along: In addition to following the softball team through UMass Boston Athletics, you can also look for updates on twitter (@BeaconSB) and instagram (@beaconsoftball).
Get To Know Your 2014 Softball Team
|#2 Jillian Shepherd
|#3 Haley Dutton
|#5 Michelle Zullo
|#6 Natalia Bouyea
|#7 Kaitlyn Morse
|#9 Sarah Keene
|#10 Toni Scola
|#11 Samantha Hemstock
|#12 Kristina Bove
|#13 Kelsey Cruse
|#14 Lyndsey Capra
|#15 Erika Vecchiet
|#16 Gia Raczkowski
|#17 Abby Goulet
|#19 Lauren Mitsiaris
|#22 Emily Gray
|#23 Kelsey Svenson


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MySQL Workbench
To be able to migrate from Microsoft SQL Server, ensure the following:
The source SQL Server instance is running, and accepts TCP connections.
You know the IP and port of the source SQL server instance. If you will be migrating using a Microsoft ODBC driver for SQL Server (the default in Windows), you will need to know the host and the name of the SQL Server instance.
Make sure that the SQL Server is reachable from where you will be running MySQL Workbench. More specifically, check the firewall settings.
Make sure that the user account has proper privileges to the database that will be migrated.


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Isn't this the best offer for every Thursday morning? Sherry is there at 9:30 AM. Please RSVP if you plan to go. Look for her Meetup signs.
Menu - Rise and shine, your morning is here.
All American Scrambler - Freshly scrambled eggs with three strips of applewood smoked bacon. Substitute chicken apple sausage
Farmer's Scrambler - Wake up to freshly scrambled eggs with bell peppers, mushrooms, onions
Anaheim Scrambler - Freshly scrambled eggs with applewood smoked bacon, tomatoes, green onions...
Buttermilk Pancakes & Eggs with Bacon
Buttermilk Pancakes with Bacon
Scrambled Egg Sandwiches & Flats
Oatmeal & Yogurt
...and much more!
Not an official HSGP event. Just some good people getting together in a fun place to socialize and enjoy coffee and/or breakfast together. See you every Thursday!
Please observe polite cell phone etiquette and take calls away from the table. Thank you!
Your host, Sherry
(Image from Pixabay)


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This blog posting has been replaced by the more detailed article: Full Agile Delivery Lifecycles.
Thank you for your patience.
Disciplined Agile Delivery (DAD) Lifecycles
ScottAmbler 120000HESD Tags:  lifecycle scrum discipline dad agileadopt disciplined-agile-deliver... 25 Comments 65,781 Views
This blog posting has been replaced by the more detailed article: Full Agile Delivery Lifecycles.
Thank you for your patience.
Reworking the Agile Manifesto for Enterprise-Class Development
ScottAmbler 120000HESD Tags:  agility-at-scale agileadopt disciplined-agile-deliver... agile manifesto 19 Comments 61,805 Views
This article has been replaced by an official "Disciplined Agile Manifesto".
The text of the original article remains below.
I've recently been working with Mark Lines of UPMentors and we've had some interesting discussions around evolving the Agile Manifesto which I thought I would share here to obtain feedback. Note that this is not any sort of official position of IBM, nothing in my blog is by the way (unless explicitly stated so), nor is it some sort of devious plot to take over the agile world (although if we did have some sort of devious plot, we'd make the exact same claim). What we hope to accomplish is to put some ideas out there in the hopes of getting an interesting conversation going.
Updates Since this Was First Published:
Requirements Envisioning on Agile Projects at Scale
ScottAmbler 120000HESD Tags:  requirements modeling agility-at-scale agileadopt 8 Comments 21,833 Views
Contrary to popular belief, agile development teams do in fact model and yes, they even do some up front requirements and architecture modeling. Two of the best practices of Agile Modeling are Requirements Envisioning and Architecture Envisioning where you spend a bit of time at the beginning of the project doing enough initial modeling to get you going in the right direction. The strategy is to take advantage of modeling, which is to communicate and think things through without taking on the risks associated with detailed specifications written early in the lifecycle. In this blog posting I will focus on requirements envisioning, in a future posting I'll cover architecture envisioning.
The goal of initial requirements envisioning is to identify the scope of your effort. You need to do just enough modeling early in the project to come to stakeholder concurrence and answer questions such as what you're going to build, roughly how long it's going to take (give a range), and roughly how much it's likely to cost (once again, give a range). If you can get the right people together in the room, which can sometimes be a logistics challenge but not one that you couldn't choose to overcome, there are very few systems (I suspect less than 5%) that you couldn't initially scope out in a few days or a week. I also suspect that most of the remaining systems could be scoped out with less than 2 weeks of modeling, and if not then I'd take that as an indication that you're taking on too large of a project. I'm not saying that you'll be able to create big detailed specifications during this period, and quite frankly given the problems associated with "Big Requirements Up Front (BRUF)" you really don't want to, but I am saying that you could gain a pretty good understanding of what you need to do. The details, which you'll eventually need, can be elicited throughout the lifecycle when you actually need the information. A common saying in the agile community is that requirements analysis is so important for us that we do it every single day, not just during an initial phase. I'll discuss just in time (JIT) approaches to requirements modeling in a future posting.
To envision the requirements for a business application, you might want to consider creating the following models:
For small teams simple tools such as whiteboards and paper are usually sufficient for requirements envisioning. But what happens at scale? What if you're working on a large agile team, say of 50 people, 200 people (IBM has delivered software into the marketplace with agile teams of this size), or even 500 people (IBM currently has teams of this size applying agile techniques)? What if your team is distributed? Even if you have people working on different floors of the same building, let alone working from home or working in different cities or countries, then you're distributed (see my postings about distributed agile development). Suddenly whiteboards and paper-based tools (index cards, sticky notes, ...) aren't sufficient. You're still likely to use these sorts of tools in modeling sessions with stakeholders, but because of one or more scaling factors you need to capture your requirements models electronically.
In January Theresa Kratschmer and I gave a webcast entitled Agile Requirements: Collaborative, Contextual, and Correct which overviewed agile approaches to requirements elicitation and management, including requirements envisioning. We also showed how Rational Requirements Composer (RRC) can be used to electronically capture critical requirements information, enabling you to address the needs of large and/or distributed agile teams, while still remaining lightweight and flexible. I suspect that you'll find the webcast to be very illuminating and RRC something that you want to take a look at (the link leads to a trial version). Of course RRC can be used in other situations as well, but that's not what I'm focused on right now.
Teams which find themselves in regulatory environments will likely need to do more than just use RRC, as might very large teams. Regulatory compliance often requires more complex requirements documentation, which in turn requires more sophisticated tools such as DOORS or Requisite Pro, and I would consider using those tools in the types of situations that warrant it. One of the things that people often struggle to understand about agile approaches is that you need to tailor your strategy to reflect the situation at handle. One process size does not fit all, so you will end up using different tools and creating different artifacts to different extents in different situations. Repeatable results, not repeatable processes, is the rule of the day.
Further reading:
[Read More]
Bureaucracy Isn't Discipline
ScottAmbler 120000HESD Tags:  agileadopt disciplined-agile-deliver... repeatability culture antipattern 7 Comments 19,682 Views
Again and again I've seen IT organizations suffering from what I call the "Bureaucracy is Discipline" antipattern. For example, filling out forms and reviewing documents are both bureaucratic activities, neither of which require significant skill nor discipline to accomplish. However, agile practices such as developing potentially shippable software every iteration is easy to say but requires great discipline to accomplish. Respecting the decisions of your stakeholders, particularly those pertaining to requirements prioritization, is easy to talk about but proves to require great discipline in practice (particularly when you don't agree with a decision). It's easy to talk about taking a test-driven approach to development, but in practice it requires significant skill and discipline to actually do.
A "process smell" which indicates that your organization is suffering from this antipattern is a focus on following repeatable processes instead of focusing on repeatable results. An example of repeatable processes is following the same route to work every day regardless of driving conditions. An example of repeatable results is getting to work on time every day, but being willing to change your route as required, bicycling into work instead of driving, taking public transit, and so on. Nobody really cares how you get to work each day (the process), what they really care about is that you got to work on time (the result). Sadly, we've been told for decades now that repeatable processes are critical to our success in IT, yet when you step back and think about that's really a reflection of a bureaucratic approach. On the other hand, a focus on repeatable results is a reflection of a more disciplined approach. Interestingly, the DDJ 2008 Process Framework survey found that given the choice that people would much rather have repeatable results over repeatable processes when it comes to IT.
Mistaking bureaucracy for discipline, or rigour if you prefer that term, is a reflection of the cultural damage that has occurred over the years in IT organizations as the result of traditional philosophies and techniques. Unfortunately, this mistaken belief is a significant inhibitor to software process improvement (SPI) efforts, in particular agile adoption efforts, which must be addressed if you're to be successful. Overcoming this challenge will require a significant cultural shift in some organizations, and many people (particularly the bureaucrats) will find this uncomfortable.
Further reading:
I'd like to leave you with this parting thought: Bureaucracy is bureaucracy and discipline is discipline, please don't confuse the two.[Read More]
Scaling Agile with Risk-Based Milestones
ScottAmbler 120000HESD Tags:  disciplined-agile-deliver... agile risk agileexec governance rup phases agility-at-scale 6 Comments 16,408 Views
The explicit phases of the Unified Process -- Inception, Elaboration, Construction, and Transition -- and their milestones are important strategies for scaling agile software development to meet the real-world needs of modern organizations. Yes, I realize that this is heresy for hard-core agilists who can expound upon the evils of serial development, yet these very same people also take a phased approach to development although are loathe to admit it. The issue is that the UP phases are like seasons of a project: although you'll do the same types of activities all throughout a project, the extent to which you do them and the way in which you do them change depending on your goals. For example, at the beginning of a development project if you want to be effective you need to do basic things like identify the scope of the project, identify a viable architecture strategy, start putting together your team, and obtain support for the project. Towards the end of a project your focus is on the activities surrounding the deployment of your system into production, including end-of-lifecycle testing efforts, training, cleaning up of documentation, piloting the system with a subset of users, and so on. In between you focus on building the system, including analysis, design, testing, and coding of it. Your project clearly progresses through different phases, or call them seasons if the term phase doesn't suit you, whether your team is agile or not.
The UP defines four phases, each of which address a different kind of risk:1. Inception. This phase focuses on addressing business risk by having you drive to scope concurrence amongst your stakeholders. Most projects have a wide range of stakeholdres, and if they don't agree to the scope of the project and recognize that others have conflicting or higher priority needs you project risks getting mired in political infighting. In the Eclipse Way this is called the "Warm Up" iteration and in other agile processes "Iteration 0".2. Elaboration. The goal of this phase is to address technical risk by proving the architecture through code. You do this by building and end-to-end skeleton of your system which implements the highest-risk requirements. Some people will say that this approach isn't agile, that your stakeholders should by the only ones to prioritize requirements. Yes, I agree with that, but I also recognize that there are a wide range of stakeholders, including operations people and enterprise architects who are interested in the technical viability of your approach. I've also noticed that the high-risk requirements are often the high-business-value ones anyway, so you usually need to do very little reorganization of your requirements stack.3. Construction. This phase focuses on implementation risk, addressing it through the creation of working software each iteration. This phase is where you put the flesh onto the skeleton.4. Transition. The goal of this phase is to address deployment risk. There is usually a lot more to deploying software than simply copying a few files onto a server, as I indicated above. Deployment is often a complex and difficult task, one which you often need good guidance to succeed at.
Each phase ends with a milestone review, which could be as simple as a short meeting, where you meet with prime stakeholders who will make a "go/no-go" decision regarding your project. They should consider whether the project still makes sense, perhaps the situation has changed, and that you're addressing the project risks appropriately. This is important for "agile in the small" but also for "agile in the large" because at scale your risks are often much greater. Your prime stakeholders should also verify that you have in fact met the criteria for exiting the phase. For example, if you don't have an end-to-end working skeleton of your system then you're not ready to enter the Construction phase. Holding these sorts of milestone reviews improves your IT governance efforts by giving senior management valuable visibility at the level that they actually need: when you have dozens or hundreds of projects underway, you can't attend all of the daily stand up meetings of each team, nor do you even want to read summary status reports.
These milestone reviews enable you to lower project risk. Last Autumn I ran a survey via Dr. Dobb's Journal (www.ddj.com) which explore how people actually define success for IT projects and how successful we really were. We found that when people define success in their own terms that Agile has a 71% success rate compared with 63% for traditional approaches. Although it's nice to that Agile appears to be lower risk than traditional approaches, a 71% success rate still implies a 29% failure rate. The point is that it behooves us to actively monitor development projects to determine if they're on track, and if not either help them to get back on track or cancel them as soon as we possibly can. Hence the importance of occasional milestone reviews where you make go/no-go decisions. If you're interested in the details behind the project, they can be found at http://www.ambysoft.com/surveys/success2007.html .
Done right, phases are critical to your project success, particularly at scale. Yes, the traditional community seems to have gone overboard with phase-based approaches, but that doesn't mean that we need to make the same mistakes. Let's keep the benefit without the cost of needless bureaucracy.[Read More]
Agility at Scale: Become as Agile as You Can Be
ScottAmbler 120000HESD Tags:  agility-at-scale agile 5 Comments 14,146 Views
I recently wrote an "e-book" for Internet Evolution overviewing agile software development at scale. The goal of the Agility at Scale: Become as Agile as You Can Be ebook is to get people thinking outside of the box a bit when it comes to agile development strategies and see that they really are ready for primetime.
[Read More]
Criteria for a Disciplined Agile Team
ScottAmbler 120000HESD Tags:  governance agileadopt spi criteria disciplined-agile-deliver... 5 Comments 18,296 Views
Although it might not be obvious, and important success factor in adopting agile techniques is to be able to determine whether a team is agile or not. The challenge that many organizations face is that many teams will claim to be agile, yet management, who often has little or no experience with agile approaches, cannot tell which claims are true and which are over zealous (I'm being polite). The following are the criteria that I suggest you look for in a disciplined agile team:1. Produce working software on a regular basis. This is one of the 12 principles behind the Agile Manifesto, and in my experience is a critical differentiator between the teams that are agile and those that are merely claiming it. Ideally the team should produce potentially shippable software each iteration. That doesn't mean that they'll deploy the system into production, or the marketplace, each iteration but they could if required to do so. Typically the team will deploy into a pre-production testing environment or a demo enviroment at the end of each iteration (or more often for that matter).2. Do continuous regression testing, and better yet take a Test-Driven Development (TDD) approach. Agile developers test their work to the best of their ability, minimally doing developer regression testing via a continuous integration (CI) strategy and better yet do developer-level TDD. This approach enables development teams to find defects early, thereby reducing the average cost of addressing the defects, it also helps them to deliver higher quality code and to move forward safely when adding or changing functionality.3. Work closely with their stakeholders, ideally on a daily basis. A common practice of agile teams is to have an on-site customer or product owner who prioritizes requirements and provides information on a timely manner to the team. Disciplined agile teams take it one step further and follow the practice active stakeholder participation where the stakeholders get actively involved with modeling and sometimes even development.4. Are self-organizing within a governance framework. Agile teams are self-organizing, which means that the people doing the work determines how the work will be done, they're not told by a manager who may not even be directly involved with the work how it will be done. In other words the team does its own planning, including scheduling and estimation. Disciplined agile teams are self governing within an effective governance framework.5. Regularly reflect on how they work together and then act to improve on their findings. Most agile teams hold a short meeting at the end of each iteration to reflect upon how well things are working and how they could potentially improve the way that they are working together. Sometimes this is done in a more formalized manner in the form of a retrospective, but often it's done informally. The team then acts on one or more of their suggested improvements the next iteration. Disciplined agile teams take this one step further and measure their software process improvement (SPI) progress over time: the act of taking these measures, perhaps via a product such as Rational Self Check, helps to keep the team on track in their SPI efforts.
I have yet to discover an ad-hoc development team which met all five criteria, and most of them rarely meet two or three.
Further reading:
[Read More]
Acceleration: An Agile Productivity Measure
ScottAmbler 120000HESD Tags:  metrics velocity acceleration governance agileexec 5 Comments 48,266 Views
A common goal of IT governance is to determine the productivity of various techniques, tools, and people as part of the overall effort to improve said productivity. If you can easily measure productivity you can easily identify what is working for you in given situations, or what is not working for you, and adjust accordingly. A common question that customers ask me is how do you measure productivity on agile teams. Although you could use traditional strategies such as function point (FP) counting, or another similar strategy, this can require a lot of effort in practice. Remember that we don't only want to measure productivity, we want to do so easily. Ideally it would be nice to do so using information already being generated by the team and therefore we won't add any additional bureaucratic overhead.
A common metric captured by agile teams is their velocity. Velocity is an agile measure of how much work a team can do during a given iteration. At the beginning of an iteration a team will estimate the work that they're about to do in terms of points. At the beginning of a project the team will formulate a point system, which typically takes a few iterations to stabilize, so that they can consistently estimate the work each iteration. Although the point system is arbitrary, my team might estimate that a given work item is two points worth of effort whereas your team might think that it's seven points of effort, the important thing is that it's consistent. So if there is another work item requiring similar effort, my team should estimate that it's two points and your team seven points. With a consistent point system in place, each team can accurately estimate the amount of work that they can do in the current iteration by assuming that they can achieve the same amount of work as last iteration (an XP concept called "yesterday's weather"). So, if my team delivered 27 points of functionality last iteration we would reasonably assume that we can do the same this iteration.
So, is it possible to use velocity as a measure of productivity? The answer is not directly. For example, we have two teams, A and B, each of 5 people and each working on a web site and each having two-week long iterations. Team A reports a velocity of 17 points for their current iteration and team B a velocity of 51 points. They're both comprised of 5 people, therefore team B must be three times (51/17) as productive as team A. No! You can't compare the velocity of the two teams because they're measuring in different units. Team A is reporting in their points and B in their points, so you can't compare them directly, The traditional strategy would be to ask the teams to use the same unit of points, which might be a viable strategy with two teams although likely not if you have twenty agile teams and particularly not if you have two hundred teams. Regardless of the number of teams that you have it would minimally require some coordination to normalize the units and perhaps even some training and development and support of velocity calculation guidelines. Sounds like unnecessary bureaucracy that I would prefer to avoid. Worse yet, so-called "consistent" measurements such as FPs are anything but because there's always some sort of fudge factor involved in the process which will vary by individual estimator.
An easier solution exists. Instead of comparing velocities you instead calculate the acceleration of each team. For example, consider the reported velocities of each team below. Team A's velocity is increasing over time whereas team B's velocity is trending downwards. All things being equal, you can assume that team A's productivity is increasing whereas B's is decreasing. Of course it's not wise to manage simply by the numbers, so instead of assuming what is going on I would rather go and talk with the people on the two teams. Doing so I might find out that team A has adopted quality-oriented practices such as continuous integration and static code analysis which team B has not, indicating that I might want to help team B adopt these practices and hopefully increase their productivity.
Team A: 17 18 17 18 19 20 21 22 22 ...Team B: 51 49 50 47 48 45 44 44 41 ...
There are several advantages to using acceleration as an indicator of productivity over traditional techniques such as FP counting:1. It's easy to calculate. For example, the acceleration of team A from iteration 1 to iteration 6 is (20-17)/17 = 0.176 whereas for team B it is (45-51)/51 = -.118. Of course, you don't need to calculate the acceleration over such a long period of time, you could do it iteration by iteration, although I find that doing it over several iterations gives a more accurate value. You'll need to experiment to determine what works for you.2. It is inexpensive. Acceleration is based on information already being collected by the team, their velocity, so there is no extra work to be done by the team. 3. It is unlikely to be gamed. Teams aren't motivated to fake their velocity because it provides them with important information required to manage themselves effectively. 4. It is easy to automate. For example, Rational Team Concert (RTC) calculates velocity automatically from its work item list (an extension of Scrum's product backlog) and does trend reporting via it's web-based project reporting functionality, providing a visual representation of the team's acceleration (or deceleration as the case may be).5. It offers the opportunity for more effective governance. This approach reflects three of the practices of Lean Development Governance: Simple and Relevant Metrics, Continuous Project Monitoring, and Integrated Lifecycle Environment.6. You can easily adjust for changing team size. If the size of a team varies over time, and it will, this metric falls apart the way that I've described it. To address this issue you need to normalize it by dividing by the number of people on the team to get the average acceleration per team member.7. You can easily monetize this metric. By knowing the acceleration of the project team and knowing how much they're spending each iteration, you can estimate the amount of money you're saving through process improvement. For example, if you're spending $100,000 per iteration and your acceleration is 2%, your cost savings is $2,000 per iteration.
Of course, nothing is perfect, and there are a few potential disadvantages:1. It is an indirect measure of productivity. Truth be told velocity really is a productivity measure, it's just that because it's measured in different units it's difficult to compare between teams. Acceleration is merely an indicator of the change in productivity.2. You actually need to measure what you're interested in. When you step back and think about it, you're not really interested in measuring your productivity, regardless of what the metrics wonks have been telling you the past few decades. In this case what you really want to know is your change in productivity because your real goal is to improve your productivity over time, which is what acceleration actually measures.3. Management must be flexible. For this to be acceptable senior management must be willing to think outside the "traditional metrics box". Using a non-standard, simple metric to calculate productivity? Preposterous! Directly measuring what you're truly interested in instead of calculating trends over long periods of time? Doubly preposterous!4. Your existing measurement program may be questioned. Once management learns how easy it can be to obtain metrics which enables them to truly govern software development projects they may begin to question the investment that they've made in the past in overly complex and expensive metrics schemes. This can be dangerous for the metrics professionals in your organization, particularly if your metrics group doesn't have valid measurements around the value of their own work. Ummmmm....5. The terminology sounds scientific. Terms such as velocity and acceleration can motivate some of us to start believing that we understand the "laws of IT physics", something which I doubt very highly that as an industry we understand. All it would take is for someone to start throwing around terms like "standard theory" and "unified model" and we'd really be in trouble. Wait a minute..... ;-)
In summary, measuring the acceleration of development teams is an easy to collect, straightforward measure of team productivity. I hope that I've given you some food for thought, and would be eager to hear about your experiences applying this metric in practice.
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Context Counts - Choose the right tools for the job
ScottAmbler 120000HESD Tags:  agility-at-scale tools agile rrc 4 Comments 33,390 Views
For some reason, it seems as if everyone's grandfather at one point in time recommended to use the right tools for the job. That's practical wisdom from my point of view, one that is certainly an issue for agile development.
One of the primary messages, I hope, of the Agile Scaling Model (ASM) is that context counts. Although the focus of the ASM is on describing a contextual framework for tailoring your process to meet the needs of the situation that you find yourself in, it's also applicable to your tooling selection. For example, the tool choices of a co-located team will be much different than that of a geographically distributed team. A co-located team will likely use a whiteboard or paper for their agile modeling efforts, whereas distributed team members may need to capture their diagrams using a more sophisticated tool such as Rational Requirements Composer (RRC) so that their work can be shared electronically. Having said that, RRC would be overkill for a co-located team (unless they had regulatory compliance issues). Different teams, different situations, therefore different tooling choices.
One of the concerns that I run into from customers is that some of our legacy products don't support agile very well. Once again, it's a matter of context because many of our legacy products reflect the realities faced by more traditional teams. The challenge occurs when you try to take a legacy product which is well suited for traditional development, such as Rational ClearCase, and try to apply it on agile projects. Although ClearCase makes sense in certain scaling situations, particularly very large teams that are geographically distributed, you'd be better advised to use something like Rational Team Concert (RTC) for configuration management on most agile teams (note that RTC does far more than just SCM).
So, if you're taking an agile approach you should consider Rational tools such as RTC, RRC, Rational BuildForge, Rational AppScan, and others which support agile development. Granted, some you would only use at scale -- for example Buildforge is a good option in really complex environments, but if you don't face that complexity then you'll likely find that RTC's build engine is sufficient. Similarly, if you're taking a traditional approach to development then you'll likely consider products such as ClearCase, Appscan, RTC, and Rational Software Architect (RSA) instead. Different situations, different tooling choices.
What's even more confusing is that some products support a range of process paradigms. For example, RTC supports agile, lean, iterative, and traditional approaches to development. The same can be said of Appscan and several other products. Notice how I listed RTC and Appscan for both agile and traditional development above.
So, if anyone tells you that Rational tools don't support agile development don't believe them. Ask them which tools that they're talking about, and ask them if they're aware of the Rational products that do support agile development. Context counts.
You Can't "Cherry Pick" Agile Projects at Scale
ScottAmbler 120000HESD Tags:  agility-at-scale agile smarter-work agileadopt measured-improvement 4 Comments 16,610 Views
When you are first adopting agile techniques in your organization a common strategy is to run one or more pilot projects. When organizing these projects you typically do as much as you can to make them successful, such as finding:
In North America we refer to this as "cherry picking" because you're picking the cherry/best situation that you can find.
Some thoughts:
Our integrity debt continues to grow
ScottAmbler 120000HESD Tags:  agile scrum certification integrity-debt 4 Comments 20,989 Views
Recently I spent some time in the UK with Julian Holmes of Unified Process Mentors. In one of our conversations we deplored what we were seeing in the agile community around certification, in particular what the Scrum community was doing, and he coined the term "integrity debt" to describe the impact it was having on us as IT professionals. Integrity debt is similar to technical debt which refers to the concept that poor quality (either in your code, your user interface, or your data) is a debt that must eventually be paid off through rework. Integrity debt refers to the concept that questionable or unprofessional behavior builds up a debt which must eventually be paid off through the rebuilding of trust with the people that we interact with.
The agile community has been actively increasing their integrity debt through the continuing popularity of Scrum Certification, in particular the program around becoming a Certified Scrum Master (CSM). To become a CSM you currently need to attend, and hopefully pay attention during, a two-day Scrum Master Certification workshop taught by a Certified Scrum Trainer (CST). That's it. Granted, some CSTs will hold one or more quizzes which you need to pass, an optional practice which isn't done consistently, to ensure that you pay attention in the workshop.
Scrum Masters, as you know, take the leadership position on a Scrum team. The idea that someone can master team leadership skills after two entire days of training is absurd. Don't get me wrong, I'm a firm supporter of people increasing their skillset and have no doubt that many of the CSTs deliver really valuable training. However, there is no possible way that you can master a topic, unless it is truly trivial, in only two days of training. From what I can tell the only thing that is being certified here is that your check didn't bounce.
The CSM scheme increases the integrity debt of the IT industry by undermining the value of certification. When someone claims that they're certified there's an assumption that they had to do something meaningful to earn that certification. Attending a two-day course, and perhaps taking a few quizzes where you parrot back what you've heard, clearly isn't very meaningful. The problem with the term Certified Scrum Master is two-fold: not only does the term Certified imply that the holder of the certification did something to earn it, the term Master implies that they have significant knowledge and expertise gained over years of work. It is very clear that people are falling for the Scrum certification scheme.
A quick search of the web will find job ads requiring that candidates be CSMs, undoubtedly because they don't realize that there's no substance behind the certification. Whenever I run into an organization that requires people to be CSMs I walk them through the onerous process of earning the designation and suggest that they investigate the situation themselves. Invariably, once they recognize the level of deception, the customer drops the requirement that people be CSMs.
Another quick search of the web will find people bragging about being a CSM, presumably being motivated by the employment opportunities within the organizations gullible enough to accept Scrum certification at face value. My experience is that the people claiming to be CSMs are for the most part decent, intelligent people who 99.99% of the time have far more impressive credentials to brag about than taking a two-day course. Yet, for some reason they choose to park their integrity at the door when it comes to Scrum certification. I suspect that this happens in part because they see so many other people doing it, in part because they're a bit desperate to obtain or retain employment in these tough economic times, and in part because the IT industry doesn't have a widely accepted code of ethical conduct. These people not only embarrass themselves when they indicate on their business cards or in their email signatures that they're Certified Scrum Masters they also increase the integrity debt of the agile community as a whole.
Yet another search of the web will find people bragging about being Certified Scrum Trainers (CSTs), the people whom have been blessed by the Scrum Alliance to deliver Scrum master certification courses. Once again, my experience is that these are intelligent, skilled people, albeit ones who have also parked their integrity at the door in the pursuit of a quick buck. Surely these people could make a decent living via more ethical means? I know that many of them have done so in the past, so I would presume that they could do so in the future. The actions of the CSTs increase our integrity debt even further.
The group of people who have most embarrassed themselves, in my opinion, are those whom we consider thought leaders within the agile community. Leaving aside the handful who are directly involved with the Scrum certification industry, the real problem lies with those who have turned a blind eye to all of this. The Scrum certification scheme was allowed to fester within our community because few of our thought leaders had the courage to stand up and publicly state what they were talking about in private. This of course is all the more galling when you consider how much rhetoric there is around the importance of courage on software development projects. As Edmund Burke once observed, all that is necessary for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing.
There are several things that we can do today to start paying off some of our integrity debt:
Suggested Reading
Is software development an art or a science?
ScottAmbler 120000HESD Tags:  philosophy agile mcif 4 Comments 22,214 Views
I was recently in Bangalore speaking at the Rational Software Conference, which was really well done this year, and visiting customers. In addition to discussing how to scale agile software development approaches, particularly when the team is distributed geographically and organizationally, I was also asked about what I thought about a software factory approach to development. My instinctual reaction was negative, software factories can result in lower overall productivity as the result of over specialization of staff (I prefer generalizing specialists), too many hand-offs between these specialists (I find close collaboration to be far more effective), and too much bureaucratic overhead to coordinate these activities. I initially chalked it up to these people still believing that software development was mostly a science, or perhaps an engineering domain, whereas my experiences had made me come to believe that software development is really more art than it is a science. Yet, the consistent belief in this strategy by very smart and experienced people started me thinking about my position.
Just let me begin by saying that this blog posting isn't meant to be yet another round in the age old, and relatively inane, "art vs. science" debate within the software development community. That debate is a symptom of versusitis, a dread disease which particularly plagues the IT industry and which can any of us at any time. There is no known cure, although the combination of experience, open-mindedness, and critical thought are the best inoculation against versusitis that we have so far. In that vein, let me explore the issues as I see them and I will let you think for yourself.
On the one hand software development has aspects of being an art for several reasons. First, the problem definition is never precise, nor accurate, and even when we have detailed specifications the requirements invariably evolve anyway. The lack of defined, firm requirements requires us to be flexible and to adjust to the situation that we find ourselves in. Second, teams typically find themselves in unique situations, necessitating a unique process and tool environment to reflect this (assuming that you want to be effective, otherwise there's nothing stopping you from having a "repeatable process" and consistent tool environment). Third, software is built by people for people, requiring that the development team have the ability to build a system with a user interface which meets the unique needs of their end users. One has only to look at the myriad UI designs out there to see that surely there is a bit of art going on. Fourth, if software development wasn't at least partially art then why hasn't anyone succeeded at building tools which take requirements as inputs and produce a viable solution that we can easily deploy? It's been over four decades now, so there's been sufficient time and resources available to build such tooling. Fifth, regardless of how much of a scientific/business facade we put over it, our success rate at producing up front detailed cost estimates and schedules speak for itself (see Funding Agile Projects for links to articles).
On the other hand software development has aspects of being a science for several reasons. First, some aspects of software development have in fact been automated to a significant extent. Second, there is some mathematical basis to certain aspects of software development (although in the case of data-oriented activities the importance of relational theory often gets blown way out of proportion and I have yet to see a situation where formal methods proved to be of practical value).
What does this have to do with Agility@Scale. As you know, one of the agile scaling factors is Organizational Complexity, and cultural issues are the hardest to overcome. Whether your organization believes that software development is mostly an art or mostly a science is a cultural issue which will be a major driver in you choice of methods and practices. Organizations which believe that software development is more of a science will prefer strategies such as software factories, model-driven architecture (MDA), and master data management (MDM). And there is ample evidence to support the claims that some organizations are succeeding at these strategies. Although you may not agree with these strategies, you need to respect the fact that many organizations are making them work in their environments. Similarly, organizations which believe that software development is more of an art will find that agile and lean strategies are a better fit, and once again there is ample evidence that organizations are succeeding with these approaches (there's also evidence that agile projects are more successful than traditional projects, on average). Once again, you may not agree with these strategies but you need to respect the fact that other people are making them work in practice.
Trying to apply agile approaches within an organization that believes software development is mostly a science will find it difficult at best, and will likely need to embark on a multi-year program to shift their culture (likely an expensive endeavor which won't be worth the investment). Similarly, trying to apply a software factory strategy in an organization that believes that software development is mostly an art will also run aground. The bottom line is that one size does not fit all, that one strategy is not right for all situations and that you need to understand the trade-offs of various strategies, methodologies, techniques, and practices and apply them appropriately given the situation that you face. In other words, it depends! If you are embarking on a software process initiative, and you don't have the broad experience required to effective choose between strategies (very few organizations do, although many believe otherwise), then you should consider Measured Capability Improvement Framework (MCIF) to help increase your chance of success.
Agile Scaling Factors
ScottAmbler 120000HESD Tags:  asm agile agility-at-scale scale 4 Comments 35,157 Views
In the early days of agile, the applications where agile development was applied were smaller in scope and relatively straightforward. Today, the picture has changed significantly and organizations want to apply agile development to a broader set of projects. Agile hence needs to adapt to deal with the many business, organization, and technical complexities today's software development organizations are facing. This is what Agility@Scale is all about – explicitly addressing the complexities which disciplined agile delivery teams face in the real world.These agile scaling factors which we've found to be important are:
Further reading:
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Should We Train Contractors in Agile Techniques?
ScottAmbler 120000HESD 3 Comments 17,628 Views
I recently ran into an interesting issue at a customer organization. This customer is in the process of transitioning to Disciplined Agile Delivery (DAD) and part of that effort is to train, mentor, and coach their people in these new ideas and techniques. The challenge is that some of "their people" are full time employees (FTEs) and some are contractors/consultants. When we were planning an upcoming DAD workshop with them, part of the planning effort was to identify who should get that training, which we're delivering in a just-in-time (JIT) basis on a team-by-team basis. The only people invited to take the training were FTEs because the customer has a policy of not training contractors. I pushed back a bit on this, but they were adamant about not training contractors because their view was that contractors should either have the skills required to do their jobs or be willing to get those skills on their own time. Fair enough, but from an agile team building point of view this isn't ideal.
This situation got me thinking a bit. One issue is that not all contractors are the same. Some are short term contractors that are brought in for a specific purpose, they're paid well, and then they move on. Other contractors stay much longer, sometimes months or even years, and as a result gain deeper knowledge and understanding of your business. For these longer term contractors it seems to me that there is little difference between them and FTEs, perhaps only in the way that they're remunerated. Some countries such as the United States now have laws in place limiting how long someone is allowed to remain a contractor because these similarities lead to interesting legal questions around extending benefits to them.
Another issue is that if you intend to build teams from both FTEs and contractors, it behooves you to ensure that these people get similar training, coaching and mentoring to streamline the transition effort.
Here's the logic I would suggest to address the issue of whether or not to train a contractor:
As always, let the context of the situation drive your strategy.
10 Reasons to Consider Disciplined Agile Delivery (DAD)
ScottAmbler 120000HESD Tags:  agile disciplined-agile-deliver... enterprise-agile 3 Comments 43,537 Views
A fair question to ask is why should your organization consider adopting the Disciplined Agile Delivery (DAD) process framework. I believe that there are several clear benefits to doing so:
In short, DAD provides a lot of proven advice culled from years of experience applying agile software techniques in enterprise-class environments. Instead of figuring all of this stuff out on your own, why not jump ahead and leverage the hard-won lessons learned from other organizations that have already dealt with the challenges that you're struggling with today?
The primary shortcoming of the DAD framework is it makes it very clear that software development, oops I mean solution delivery, is quite complex in practice. As IT practitioners we inherently know this, but it seems that we need to be reminded of this fact every so often. DAD doesn't provide a simplistic, feel-good strategy that you can learn in a few hours of training. Instead it defines a coherent, tailorable strategy that reflects the realities of enterprise IT.
There is a wealth of information at DAD posted at the Disciplined Agile Delivery (DAD) web site and great discussions occuring on the DAD LinkedIn discussion forum. For those of you interested in agile certification, the Disciplined Agile Consortium site will prove valuable too, in particular the list of upcoming DAD workshops provided by several IBM partners. And of course the book Disciplined Agile Delivery: A Practitioner's Guide to Agile Software Delivery in the Enterprise (IBM Press, 2012) written by Mark Lines and myself is a very good read.
My Agile Scaling Model (ASM) White Paper has Been Superceded
ScottAmbler 120000HESD Tags:  scale agile asm whitepaper 3 Comments 22,669 Views
In 2009 I wrote a white paper entitled The Agile Scaling Model (ASM): Adapting Agile Methods for Complex Environments for IBM Rational. Apparently it's been taken down, which I think is unfortunate as it contains some interesting ideas that your organization may be able to benefit from.
The original white paper addresses several key issues:
Defining Disciplined Agile Software Development
ScottAmbler 120000HESD Tags:  agileadopt disciplined-agile-deliver... 3 Comments 15,849 Views
When adopting agile software development techniques across a large number of teams within your organization it is important to provide a definition for what agile software development is, in addition to criteria for what it means to be agile. Many people will point to the four values of the Agile Manifesto and claim that's a good definition. Well... it might be a good definition for the visionaries and early adopters among us, but for people on the right-hand side of the technology adoption chasm (the early majority, late majority and the laggards) this isn't enough. Don't get me wrong, I'm a firm believer in the agile values but I like to cast them as philosophies instead of as a definition.
At IBM Software Group, the definition of disciplined agile software delivery which we have been sharing with our customers is:Disciplined agile software delivery is an evolutionary (iterative and incremental) approach to delivery which regularly produces high quality software in a cost effective and timely manner. It is performed in a highly collaborative and self-organizing manner, with active stakeholder participation to ensure that the team understand and addresses the changing needs of its stakeholders. Disciplined agile delivery teams provide repeatable results by adopting just the right amount of ceremony for the situation which they face.
I think that this is a pretty good definition, although I have no doubt that we'll evolve it over time.
I also suspect that the agile community will never settle on a common definition for what agile is and more than likely are smart enough not to even try. ;-)
Further reading:
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Questioning Case Studies
ScottAmbler 120000HESD Tags:  agileexec agileadopt 3 Comments 11,652 Views
I'm often asked by customers for case studies of successful agile adoptions or agile projects in general. This is definitely a valid request, and yes, such case studies exist. But I'm often concerned that the people making these requests don't appreciate the implications of what they're asking for. My concerns with case studies are:
Further reading:Read More]
Large Agile Teams
ScottAmbler 120000HESD Tags:  large teams agility-at-scale 3 Comments 28,574 Views
A common misunderstanding about agile software development approaches are that they're only applicable to small, co-located teams. Yes, it's much easier to be successful with small teams, and with co-located teams, and as a result agilists being smart people prefer to work this way. After all, why take on extra risk when you don't need to do so? But, sometimes reality gets in the way and you find yourself in a situation where you need a large team, or you need to distribute your team (see previous blog postings for strategies for distributed agile development), and you would still like to be as agile as possible. The good news is that it's still possible to be agile with a large team, although you will need to go beyond some of the popular "agile in the small" strategies to succeed.
Here are some disciplined agile strategies to succeed at large-team agile:
Further reading:
Scaling Test Driven Development (TDD)
ScottAmbler 120000HESD Tags:  design tdd agileadopt amdd testing agility-at-scale specification requirements 3 Comments 14,604 Views
Test-driven development (TDD) is a common agile programming technique which has both specification and validation aspects. With TDD, you specify your software in detail on a just-in-time (JIT) basis via executable tests that are run in a regression manner to confirm that the system works to your current understanding of what your stakeholders require.
TDD is the combination of test-first development (TFD) and refactoring. With TFD, you write a single test (at either the requirements level with customer/acceptance tests or the design level with developer tests) and then you write just enough software to fulfill that test. Refactoring is a technique where you make a small change to your existing code to improve its design without changing its semantics.
TDD offers several benefits:1. It enables you to take small, safe steps during development, increasing programmer productivity.2. It increases quality. Agile developers are doing more testing, and doing it more often, than ever before. We're also fixing the problems that we find right on the spot.3. It helps to push validation activities early in the lifecycle, decreasing the average cost to fix defects (which rises exponentially the longer it takes you to detect them).4. Through single sourcing information, by treating tests as both specifications and as tests, we reduce the work required, increasing productivity.5. We leave behind valuable, up-to-date, detailed specifications for the people who come after us. Have you ever met a maintenance programmer who wouldn't want a full regression test suite for the code that they're working with?
But TDD isn't perfect. Although TDD is great at specifying code at a fine-grain level, tests simply don't scale to address higher level business process and architectural issues. Agile Model Driven Development (AMDD) enables you to scale TDD through initial envisioning of the requirements and architecture as well as just-in-time (JIT) modeling at the beginning and during construction iterations. To scale requirements-level TDD, you must recognize that customer tests are very good at specifying the details, but not so good at providing overall context. High-level business process models, conceptual domain models, and use cases are good at doing so, and these work products are often created as part of your initial requirements envisioning and iteration modeling activities. Similarly, to scale design-level TDD you must recognize that developer tests are very finely grained but once again do not provide overall context. High-level architecture sketches created during envisioning activities help set your initial technical direction. During each construction iteration, you'll do more detailed design modeling to think through critical issues before you implement them via TDD.
You also need to scale the validation aspects of TDD. TDD is in effect an approach to confirmatory testing where you validate the system to the level of your understanding of the requirements. The fundamental challenge with confirmatory testing, and hence TDD, is that it assumes that stakeholders actually know and can describe their requirements. Therefore you need to add investigative testing practices which explore issues that your stakeholders may not have thought of, such as usability issues, system integration issues, production performance issues, security issues, and a multitude of others.
For further reading, I suggest:1. My article "Introduction to TFD/TDD" at http://www.agiledata.org/essays/tdd.html which overviews TDD.2. My February 2008 column in Dr. Dobb's Journal entitled "Scaling TDD" at http://www.ddj.com/architect/205207998 which explores this issue in detail. 3. Andrew Glover's article "In pursuit of code quality: Adventures in behavior-driven development" at http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/java/library/j-cq09187/ which describes a new-and-improved take on TDD called BDD.[Read More]
Agile Stakeholders at Scale
ScottAmbler 120000HESD Tags:  agileadopt amdd xp analysis scrum agility-at-scale outside-in-development agile disciplined-agile-deliver... modeling 3 Comments 15,804 Views
The popular Agile literature can often seam naive when it comes to how Agilists work with project stakeholders:- Extreme Programming (XP) has a practice called On-Site Customer where one or more people work closely with your team to provide information and to make decisions in a timely manner.- Scrum has the role of Product Owner who is the one single person that the development team goes to for decisions about requirements. - Agile Modeling (AM) has the practice of Active Stakeholder Participation which extends On-Site Customer to get the stakeholder(s) actively involved with the modeling effort through the use of inclusive tools and techniques.
These are great strategies for small, co-located teams doing straightforward development, but they quickly fall apart at scale. This occurs for several reasons:1. Stakeholders are a diverse group. Your stakeholders include end users, business management, project funders, enterprise architects, operations staff, support staff, other system development teams, and many others. Different people have different, and often contradictory, requirements and they certainly have different priorities. It's questionable whether a single person, or a handful of persons, can adequately represent this diverse group.2. One person becomes a bottleneck. Even with a small co-located team this is a problem, let alone one that is geographically distributed or one that is very large. There's no way that a single person can be available 24/7 in a responsive manner to support distributed teams.3. It's a difficult role. The Product Owner/Customer (POC) is responsible for representing the business to the development team. They're making important decisions on a regular basis, decisions which they'll be held accountable for.4. One person becomes a serious project risk. Not only is it questionable whether a single person can fairly represent all stakeholders, even if they could what happens if you lose that person? They effectively become a single point of failure for your team.
To scale this role, consider the following strategies:1. Recognize the true scope of the POC role. Not only are they stakeholder proxies they also are a development team representative to the stakeholder community as a whole. As stakeholder proxies they'll make decisions and prioritize the work, they'll run requirements elicitation sessions, they'll negotiate priorities, and they'll put the development team in contact with stakeholders who have expertise in specific aspects of the domain. As team representatives they'll often demo the current version of the system to other stakeholders, communicate the status of the project to people, and respond to various requests for information from the stakeholders.2. Have multiple people in it. A single POC works well for small, co-located teams developing simple software. At scale you'll soon discover that you need multiple people in this role so that they don't become a bottleneck. For distributed teams it's common to see each subteam have one or more POCs who are managed by a primary/chief POC. The primary POC typically works on the coordinating team with the chief architect (I'll talk about this role in a future blog posting) and the program manager (also a topic for a future blog posting).3. Train them in business analysis skills. The person(s) in the POC role need good business analysis skills. If fact, it's common for people who were formerly BAs for traditional teams to step into the POC role, particularly with BAs who originally come from the business side of your organization. This strategy has its advantages and disadvantages. As a BA they've likely got solid business knowledge but their instincts may motivate them to take a documentation-driven approach to providing information to the development team instead of a collaboration-based approach. Be careful.4. Consider the full system development lifecycle. There's far more to the POC role than supporting the development team during Construction iterations. During "Iteration 0", the Inception phase for an Agile RUP project or the warm-up phase for an Eclipse Way project, the POC(s) will often lead the initial requirements envisioning efforts. The product backlog, or better yet your work item list, needs to come from somewhere after all. During the release iteration(s), the Transition phase for RUP or the End-Game phase for Eclipse Way, the POC(s) will focus on communicating the upcoming release to the stakeholder community, will be actively involved with any final user acceptance testing (UAT), and may even be involved with training end users.
In my January 2008 column in Dr Dobb's Journal, posted at http://www.ddj.com/architect/204801134 , I provide detailed advice about how to scale the way that you work with stakeholders on Agile projects by applying the practices of Agile Model Driven Development (AMDD). There's no magic solution, you just need to choose to organize yourself effectively. The good news is that you can easily work with stakeholders at scale.[Read More]
Agile Software Development at Scale
ScottAmbler 120000HESD Tags:  rup xp agility-at-scale agile scrum 3 Comments 13,784 Views
It's customary to start a blog by describing the vision for it. Although this vision will undoubtedly evolve over time, it's always good to put a stake in the ground to get things started. Agile software development is clearly taking off and in my opinion is becoming the dominant development paradigm. Furthermore it appears that Agile approaches enjoy a higher success rate, providing better value for your IT investment, than do traditional approaches. Although organizations are succeeding at simpler projects with agile, many are struggling when applying Agile in more complex situations. They're finding that the "Agile rhetoric" doesn't always live up to its promises once you move into these complex situations. My goal with this blog is to share strategies for applying Agile techniques at scale.
When applying Agile strategies at scale you are likely to run into one or more of the following complexity factors:1. Geographical distribution. Is your team, including stakeholders, in different locations? Even being in different cubicles within the same building can erect barriers to communication, let alone being in different cities or even on different continents.2. Regulatory compliance. Regulations, including the Sarbanes-Oxley act, BASEL-II, and FDA statutes, to name a few, can increase the documentation and process burden on your projects. Complying to these regulations while still remaining as agile as possible can be a challenge.3. Entrenched policies, people, and processes. Most agile teams need to work within the scope of a larger organization, and that larger organization isn't always perfectly agile. Hopefully that will change in time, but we still need to get the job done right now. Your existing culture and organization can really hinder your ability to scale agile approaches, then a few "simple" changes can really help your efforts.4. Legacy systems. Although the politically correct term would be "proven assets" the reality is that it can be very difficult to leverage existing code and data sources due to quality problems. The code may not be well written, documented, or even have tests in place, yet that doesn't mean that your agile team should rewrite everything from scratch. Some legacy data sources are questionable at best, or the owners of those data sources difficult to work with, yet that doesn't given an agile team license to create yet another database.5. Organizational distribution. When your teams are made up of people working for different divisions, or if you have people from different companies (such as contractors, partners, or consultants), then your management complexity rises.6. Degree of governance. If you have one or more IT projects then you have an IT governance process in place. How formal it is, how explicit it is, and how effective it is will be up to you. IBM has been doing a lot of work in this topic over the past few years, and just recently Per Kroll and I have done some work around Lean Governance strategies. 7. Team size. Large teams will be organized differently than small teams, and they'll work differently too.8. System complexity. The more complex the system the greater the need for a viable architectural strategy. An interesting feature of the Rational Unified Process (RUP) is that it's Elaboration phase's primary goal is to prove the architecture via the creation of an end-to-end, working skeleton of the system. This risk-reduction technique is clearly a concept which Extreme Programming (XP) and Scrum teams can clearly benefit from.
It is definitely possible to scale Agile software development to meet the real-world complexities faced by modern organizations. Based on my experiences, I believe that over the next few years we'll discover that Agile scales better than traditional approaches. Many people have already discovered this, but as an industry I believe that there isn't yet sufficient evidence to state this as more than opinion. My goal with this blog is to provide advice for scaling Agile so as to increase your chances of success.
So, it looks like I have my work cut out for me. My strategy will be to address common questions which I get when working with customers and with internal IBM development teams. I have the privilege to work with a variety of software development teams worldwide, helping them to become more agile. They're all struggling with the same basic issues although don't recognize it because they're too focused on their own situation. So hopefully I'll be able to spread the word about what's actually working in practice.
I hope that you stay tuned.
- Scott[Read More]
Scrum Alliance 2.0
ScottAmbler 120000HESD Tags:  scrum 2 Comments 32,039 Views
I'm happy to announce that I've accepted the role of Managing Director of the Scrum Alliance (SA), a part-time position in addition to my duties here at IBM. On the surface this must appear to be a radical and unpredictable departure for me, considering my history of being critical when it comes to some of the past activities of the Scrum Alliance. To be fair, I've actually been critical of the Certified Scrum Master (CSM) scheme, and rightfully so. But I have also actively embraced the good ideas contained in Scrum and have incorporated them, with attribution, in my writings about Disciplined Agile Delivery (DAD) and other agile topics. I believe that I've made this very apparent in this blog and in other sources such as the Agile Modeling site. So, it really isn't such a radical departure for me afterall, although still arguably one that was difficult to predict. In fact, one of the reasons why the Scrum Alliance approached me to be Managing Director is the fact that I have been critical of many of the Scrum community's behaviors.
So, over the next few months you're going to see what I believe to be some welcome changes at the Scrum Alliance. Our first step at serving you better will be to apply agile strategies and principles in the way that we work. Importantly, we'll be taking a three pronged strategy based on respect, clarity, and integrity. We have dubbed this strategy "Scrum Alliance 2.0".
Respecting people
To be more respectful of existing and potential SA members, we will begin executing the following activities:
Clarity through openness and honesty
We are also starting to execute on four activities for improving the clarity of how we operate:
The fundamental idea here is that the Scrum Alliance should have nothing to hide from our membership. We've preached open and honest communication for years, now we're going to start actually living by those words. Yes, it may be a bit painful to work to this level of clarity, but we feel that you deserve this.
Integrity through actions, not words
Finally, we're taking three actions to increase the overall integrity of the Scrum community:
As I hope you have guessed by now this blog is an April Fool's joke. I have no intention of becoming the Managing Director of the Scrum Alliance and my condolences go out to anyone who would take on this position. This blog posting does however reflect what I would do to bring greater clarity, integrity, and respect to the Scrum community. The Scrum Alliance can and should choose to do a lot better. I hope it has been food for thought.
Survey Says: We're Not as Agile as We Claim
ScottAmbler 120000HESD Tags:  survey agileadopt agile 2 Comments 16,560 Views
My current agile newsletter for Dr. Dobb's Journal, How Agile Are We? discusses some of the results from my recent How Are Are You? survey. The survey investigated how well "agile teams" met the following five agile criteria:
Some interesting results include:
I believe that there are several important implications:
Agile and regulatory compliance
ScottAmbler 120000HESD Tags:  regulatory-compliance agility-at-scale agile asm 2 Comments 25,109 Views
One of the scaling factors called out in the Agile Scaling Model (ASM) is "regulatory compliance". This name is a bit of a misnomer because this scaling factor really addresses two issues: complying to regulations imposed upon you from external sources and choosing to adhere to internal regulations willingly adopted by your organization. It is relatively common for agile teams to find themselves in such situations. For example, in the 2009 Agile Practices Survey one third of respondents said that they were applying agile on projects where one or more industry regulations applied.
First let's consider external regulatory compliance. In these situations you may face the need to undergo an audit by an external regulatory body with consequences for non-compliance ranging from anywhere to a warning to a fine or even to legal action. Sometimes even a warning may be a grave thing. A few years ago I was working with a pharmaceutical company which had discovered that a warning from the FDA for non-compliance with their CFR 21 Part 11 regulation, when reported in major newspapers, resulted on average in a half-billion dollar loss to their market capitalization as the result of a dip in their stock price. There are financial regulations such as Sarbanes-Oxley and Basel II, informational regulations such as HIPAA which focuses on health information privacy, technical regulations such as ISO 27002 for security practices, and even life-critical regulations such as some of the FDA regulations.
External regulations are typically managed by a government organization or industry watchdog will range in complexity and can have a myriad of effects on project teams. For example, you may need to be able to prove that you had a documented process and that you followed it appropriately; you may need to produce extra artifacts, or more detailed artifacts, than you normally would; you may need to add extra features to your solution, such as tracking financial information, that you wouldn't have normally implemented; you may need to produce specific reports to be submitted to the regulatory body; or you may even need to submit your team to audits, sometimes scheduled and sometimes not, to ensure regulatory compliance. Interestingly, even though many of those requirements go against the agile grain, the 2009 Agility at Scale Survey found that organizations were successfully applying agile techniques while still conforming to external regulations. So yes, it is possible to scale your agile strategy to address regulatory compliance.
Second, let's consider compliance to internally adopted, or sometimes even developed, "regulations" which you will be potentially evaluated/appraised against. Perfect examples of these are process improvement frameworks such as CMMI and ISO 900x. Similar to external regulations, the 2009 Agility at Scale Survey found that some agile teams are succeeding in situations where they have chosen to adopt such frameworks. It's important to note that frameworks such as CMMI aren't primarily about ensuring the compliance of development teams to a standard process, regardless of what CMMI detractors may claim, but instead about process improvement. Process improvement at the IT department (or beyond) is an enterprise discipline issue from the point of view of ASM, implying that frameworks such as CMMI affect more than one scaling factor.
When you find yourself in a regulatory situation, whether those regulations are imposed or willingly adopted, the best advice that I can give is to read the regulations and develop a strategy to conform to them in the most agile manner possible. If you let bureaucrats interpret the regulations you'll likely end up with a bureaucratic strategy, but if you instead choose to take a pragmatic approach you will very likely end up with a very practical strategy. Part of that strategy is to treat the regulatory representative(s) within your organization as important stakeholders whom you interact with regularly throughout the project.


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Yahoo! joins tablet craze with digital newsstand
Yahoo! is building a digital newsstand called "Livestand" that will turn tablet computers into personalized magazines rich with stories, images and video suited to individual tastes.
Livestand will launch by July with content from Yahoo! websites along with an undisclosed array of partners, chief product officer Blake Irving said on Thursday.
"The magazine knows what type of story you are reading; it privately knows where you are and where you've been," Irving said while briefing reporters on Yahoo!'s plans.
"What we are building is really device and operating system agnostic," he said. "Tablets allow beautiful execution, and we will bring it into smaller forms down to mobile phones and then port it to PCs (personal computers) and TV."
Livestand is intended as a platform for magazine or newspaper publishers big or small to deliver content matched with the interests of people who log into the Yahoo! online venue.
"It's a digital newsstand, your digital newsstand," Yahoo! vice president of mobile product management Irv Henderson said while demonstrating Livestand.
"The more you use this, the better it is at telling what you are interested in."
Livestand will focus on tablet computers at launch, with Yahoo! keen on the soon-to-be released Honeycomb operating system that Google is developing for those types of devices.
Digital magazines will be ad-supported, with Yahoo! sharing in the revenue with publishers, according to Henderson. The platform will eventually allow publishers other money-making options, including subscriptions, he said.
News Corp.'s Rupert Murdoch last week launched "The Daily," a digital newspaper created for Apple's iPad, in the latest move in his drive to get consumers to pay for news online.
Murdoch, an enthusiastic fan of the iPad, said there will be no print version of The Daily and it will only be available on Apple's touchscreen tablet computer for at least this year.
The publication will eventually be available on other tablets.
Murdoch is not the only publisher looking to the iPad for revenue, and most major US newspapers and magazines have created paid or free versions of their publications for the iPad.
Livestand will launch on iPad and Android Honeycomb tablets, according to Henderson.
"The PC is a great place to advertise, but you don't curl up with a PC," Irving said. "The tablet is something you curl up with."
People will be able to log into free Yahoo! accounts to view personalized publications in Livestand "libraries."
"This will be open to everyone," Henderson said. "We see a future where two people in a garage can publish a magazine with tools that we enable."
Yahoo! is hoping that newspapers suffering from declining real-world circulation will use Livestand to ramp-up digital distribution and online advertising opportunities.
Yahoo! said that while personalization is key to Livestand, it is being "savvy and super-sensitive" about letting people control their privacy.
Yahoo! chief executive Carol Bartz has been recreating the Sunnyvale, California-based company after being eclipsed by Google in the Internet search market.
Bartz has said that the goal is to be a digital media company that personalizes online content to each visitor.
Yahoo! made a deal to have Microsoft's Bing handle search queries at its websites, leaving Yahoo! to concentrate on tailoring content to the interests of its more than half billion users around the world.
Explore further
(c) 2011 AFP


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With so many different entertainment options out there for your children, we at PopcornBiz thought we'd take a moment each week to dissect one piece of family entertainment strictly from a parent's perspective, so that you know what parts are appropriate for your loved ones, and which are not. This week's COVER YOUR EYES subject: "How The Grinch Stole Christmas"
Before we get into the parental considerations for this, please note that this edition of CYE refers to the ORIGINAL animated version of The Grinch, and not the Ron Howard film version that ruined Christmas forever a few years back. If you want to know if that movie is okay to show your kids, the answer is NO. NEVER. If you catch them watching it, burn your TV in front of them to let them know you mean business. Now, to judge whether or not the original version is safe for young eyes, we must consider a few factors:
The "Will Parents Be Able To Tolerate It?" Factor: YES. Like "Rudolph," the original "Grinch" is the kind of holiday special most American parents can't wait to show their children. If you're like me, you fantasize of watching it while cuddled on the couch with your little one, as you both are moved to tears at the end by the Whos singing their little Who song even though all their presents are gone. But then reality hits and your kid demands to watch "Phineas & Ferb" and you're like YOU FOOL! DON'T YOU UNDERSTAND HOW SPECIAL THIS SPECIAL IS?! Kids today don't understand great television.
Anyway, "The Grinch" still holds up, and in fact seems to only improve with time. Thanks to Chuck Jones' direction and the brilliant narration from Boris Karloff, the special has an unmistakable edge to it that never overwhelms the underlying warmth of the show. It's a perfect half-hour of viewing, and I doubt any new Christmas special will ever be able to match it.
The Dead Parent Factor: None! The Grinch may not even HAVE parents, which is so much better!
The Sexy Sex Sex Factor: None. And thank goodness for that. I suspect there's a hentai site somewhere deep in the bowels of the web that traffics in grinch porn, but I have no interest in seeing it.
The Scare Factor: The Grinch himself can be scary to your young ones, but that scariness gets blunted by the fact that the Grinch turns downright cuddly at the end. Hard to be scared by the Grinch once he ends up carving the roast beast. The only scary parts to the Grinch are conceptual in nature. Your kid may ask you if someone will steal THEIR Christmas, which is a legit concern among greedy little kids. "The Grinch" also introduces children to the idea of meanness, the idea that some people out there aren't so nice, and have bad intentions. That can be a bit of a shock.
The Violence Factor: None, though putting antlers on a little dog is never a good idea.
Age Range:1 and up. You have nothing to fear from the beloved classic, except for the alternate ending when the Grinch keeps all the stuff and burns Whoville to the ground. Look for it on the special Criterion disc!


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What role could design play in creating true quality of life? Climate change presents designers with a massive responsibility, and creative opportunity. As innovative thinkers and doers, designers are uniquely placed to review, rethink and remake the products, services and systems that will shape our future.Is it time to [re]design design?[re]design is a social enterprise that propagates positive sustainable actions through creative design. We seek out and promote Good and Gorgeous design that is friendly to both people and planet, and partner with a wide range of organisations to pioneer sustainable innovation.
Through exhibitions, workshops, seminars and publications we explore the ecological imperatives, social and political drivers, and creative strategies that help shape sustainable design. Our diverse programme engages public, education and business in fresh new approaches to sustainability.[re]design - creative, sustainable design for a better future.
Jason speaks to Sublime Magazine at 100% Design about [re]design's Why Don't You... [re]design Christmas?. Check out the GREAT VIDEO!