Monthly Archives: August 2010

Agile 2010 Impressions

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Agile 2010 was held in Orlando near the Disney Epcot resort August 9 to 13. I focus on agile enterprises and attended many enterprise-focused talks. If you are interested in the developer focused view, Martin Fowler provides his thoughts here. My impressions follow.

Portfolio management is being implemented in conjunction with quarterly “sprints” in other places beside Citrix Online, including Motley Fool (Max Keeler), Tektronix Communications (Brian Miller) and Progressive Medical (Ben Blanquera). The four of us are starting to share ideas and experiences. Continue reading→

Agile 2010: Enterprise Scrum

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I presented our work on Enterprise Scrum at Agile 2010 this year. The session was well-attended for a specialized talk like this one (really only suitable for software engineering teams larger than 30 people), with about 40 people in the audience.

Enterprise Scrum: Creating an Agile Company

Enterprise Scrum, a fractal extension of Scrum and XP, has organized all development at Citrix Online since Jan 2009. We estimate team months, run quarterly Sprints, reassign teams, meet in weekly stand-ups. We start or postpone whole projects that use Scrum or Scrum-of-Scrums. No other known companies yet use Enterprise Scrum. It provides extreme visibility and control for CXOs. It promotes agile thinking enterprise-wide, driving adoption outside engineering. It demands NPV justification and forces executives to prioritize decisions transparently. It makes us more profitable. Continue reading→

Facilities Planning for Agile Software Development

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I’ve helped shape the configuration of software engineering facilities lately, and reviewed literature around this area seeking to maximize productivity. You may be interested in my findings.

One of the most influential papers in agile development discusses an experiment using six 8-person software teams in an automobile company [Teasley 2002]. They compared cubicle-based teams (each engineer had a cubicle) with warroom-based teams (a single room with 6-8 engineers and no separating walls). The outcome was dramatic. Continue reading→