Your demo is going super-smooth. No cracks. No gaps. Everything is working according to design. A dynamite end to a flawless sprint. Then Dave, who has been absent most of the last quarter, stands up and says:
In many ways, Covid has just accelerated the evolution of software development that was already in progress. Virtual collaboration, empowered teams, new models for meeting across time and space: we are all turning a corner toward a remote-first workplace. Some developers who had already made the jump to remote work are thriving, and even designers working remotely for the first time have prospered as well. Fewer meetings, more accountability, and management by results are music to the ears of many. But overall, Covid hasn’t meant a rosier world for producing high quality software. There’s a difference between having options for how to work and having a single option imposed overnight. Here are a few of the hurdles we’re seeing our clients encounter, and how we’re helping them overcome them.
We may think the toughest challenges in an Agile project are domain-specific — how to use our distinct engineering, design and product skills to create something that’s desirable, viable and feasible. We focus on improving our process, frameworks and tools.
Your development team isn’t ready to start building things until they align on the definitions of two words, ‘ready’ and ‘done’. Think of these as the most important quality gates that you and your team can invest in that will quickly improve Sprint predictability, and overall product quality.
Showing your work and the work of your team to a broader audience uses some different skills than we might use when building products. Here are tips gleaned from a decade of doing demos everywhere from hospital beds to happy hour to executive boardrooms.
Everybody knows the mantra. ‘Build Measure Learn’. And yet we see many clients stuck in a never-ending build cycle.
Scaling Agile is a daunting task with high stakes. There are big gains to be had, but it can also fail so dramatically that a development organization can suffer years of developmental setbacks. After guiding some of the biggest Fortune 100 enterprises through this transformation, we've found a pathway that shows incremental improvements along the way, promotes confidence in the process, and that can be tuned while underway for the best results.
The last time we hosted a meeting for entrepreneurs, one of the more interesting questions asked was, “How do you know when you’re ready to build?”
No matter what process your teams are using, you still need a roadmap. It’s how you connect your strategy with execution. It guides the investment in people, tools, even acquisitions that need to be made to build the runway for your teams.
Think back to the last time you had to sign up for healthcare. Maybe it was through an online marketplace or an HR website while onboarding for a new job. Were you able to easily understand and compare the insurance plans?