Allan's blog - Agile, Lean, Patterns. For a while now I’ve been convinced that a lot of “Agile” is about cultural differences. In particular I believe the canonical version of Scrum, which I often refer to as Hard Core Scrum or Scrum™ is rooted in 1990’s American software management culture. Unfortunately the role of culture behind many Agile techniques and methods isn’t really stated. This make it even more important to work out what Agile means to you and which tools work in your environment and culture. I first started paying attention to the cultural differences around teams and Agile after Steve Freeman said something along the lines of “Scandinavian teams just do this, they don’t see much new.” The teams I’ve seen in Scandinavia, and to a lesser degree Holland and the UK, don’t need big lectures in self-organization, left to themselves they do most of it. I’ve pondered on this for some time and at Agile Cambridge last month I got the chance to talk a little about this with Dave Snowden.
Bringing this back to Agile. Capability Maturity Model Integration. Capability Maturity Model Integration (CMMI) is a process improvement training and appraisal program and service administered and marketed by Carnegie Mellon University and required by many DOD and U.S. Government contracts, especially software development. Carnegie Mellon University claims CMMI can be used to guide process improvement across a project, division, or an entire organization.
Under the CMMI methodology, processes are rated according to their maturity levels, which are defined as: Initial, Repeatable, Defined, Quantitatively Managed, Optimizing. Currently supported is CMMI Version 1.3. CMMI is registered in the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office by Carnegie Mellon University. Overview[edit] Characteristics of the Maturity levels.[1] CMMI currently addresses three areas of interest: CMMI was developed by a group of experts from industry, government, and the Software Engineering Institute (SEI) at Carnegie Mellon University. History[edit] CMMI topics[edit] CMMI representation[edit] Agile and CMMI: Better Together. Organizations follow many paths in their pursuit of excellence, applying various principles, methods, and techniques along the way. It stands to reason, then, that an organization interested in adopting agile practices might also be interested in PMI’s OPM3, ISO or Capability Maturity Model® Integration (CMMI) as a means to achieve that excellence.
While I have seen some organizations that are trying to implement agile and a PMI model at the same time, none are doing it successfully. Last year, in fact, I observed two very large companies that had simultaneous internal initiatives to utilize agile and CMMI. At both companies, each group saw the other as competition. I left both organizations frustrated. Many believe that agile and CMMI are polar opposites and sub-optimize each other’s efforts. CMMI Refresher Capability Maturity Model® Integration (CMMI)1 is a process improvement approach that provides organizations with the essential elements of effective processes. Agile Sweet Spot 1. CMMI | CMMI Compatibility | CMMI and Agile. This information has moved to www.cmmiinstitute.com. As part of its mission to transition mature technology to the software community, the SEI has transferred CMMI-related products and activities to the CMMI Institute, a 100%-controlled subsidiary of Carnegie Innovations, Carnegie Mellon University’s technology commercialization enterprise.
The CMMI Institute will conduct CMMI training and certification, sponsor conferences and classes, and provide information about CMMI process improvement models and appraisals. The SEI will continue to pioneer and advance new research in the field of software process management. More information about our current work is available at. Scrum (development) Scrum is an iterative and incremental agile software development framework for managing product development.
It defines "a flexible, holistic product development strategy where a development team works as a unit to reach a common goal", challenges assumptions of the "traditional, sequential approach" to product development, and enables teams to self-organize by encouraging physical co-location or close online collaboration of all team members, as well as daily face-to-face communication among all team members and disciplines in the project. A key principle of Scrum is its recognition that during a project the customers can change their minds about what they want and need (often called "requirements churn"), and that unpredicted challenges cannot be easily addressed in a traditional predictive or planned manner.
Later, Schwaber with others founded the Scrum Alliance and created the Certified Scrum Master programs and its derivatives. Each sprint is started by a planning meeting. Scrum's Product Backlog - Agile Requirements Management. The Product Backlog: What should we make? One of the first things assembled when we embark on a new project is a list of things to do.
Everyone loves a list! Projects often start as a to-do list, jotted down on a piece of paper. For small pieces of work, this may be all you need. As soon as you have more than a trivial set of tasks you’ll need a better system than a simple list and for agile teams, we have Scrum’s product backlog. In this article, I’ll describe techniques for collecting requests relating to your product and helpful practices for managing that list of requests. Before you start Do you know what you are doing? Delivery teams are created to help a business realize a part of its vision. But why? In order for the delivery team to complete a piece of work, many small decisions have to be made to solve the problems encountered along the way. What is a Product Backlog? The product backlog is used to: capture requests for modifying a product. Product Backlog Items Visible to everyone.
ESEM11_SCRUM_Experience_CameraReady.pdf (application/pdf Object) Story Points: Why are they better than hours? Traditional Estimation Funnel Microsoft Story Point accuracy Story points give more accurate estimates, they drastically reduce planning time, they more accurately predict release dates, and they help teams improve performance. Hours give worse estimates, introduce large amounts of waste into the system, handicap the Product Owner's release planning, and confuse the team about what process improvements really worked. Interesting new research has become available. The Standish Group has updated their findings on project success rates based on analysis of the last decade of data with tens of thousands of data points. In addition, Microsoft has new research findings showing that agile estimation is astoundingly more accurate than traditional project estimation.
First, let's look at the latest data on project failures. In fact the latest Forrester Group research shows that:Common Project Management Metrics Doom IT Departments to Failure The stability of a user story is critical for planning.