Any organization that produces software can only realize value from that software if it is consistently available to its users. The movement that is now known as DevOps, which emphasizes that Development and Operations are equal partners, rather than siloed organizational functions, started to coalesce in 2009, when Patrick Debois founded and organized the first...Read More

Organizational decision-makers can benefit from taking lessons from other disciplines, such as complexity science and systems theory. Using the Cynefin Framework, or “Cynefin” for short,  leaders can determine which organizational context they are in, so that they can make better decisions and avoid problems that might arise if they continue with “business as usual.” Dave...Read More

Some teams choose to have all their developers work on solving the same problem simultaneously. Mob programming, or “mobbing” for short, extends the notion of pair programming, often leveraging the driver/navigator pattern to guide the nature of the interaction. A significant difference is that in pair programming, there is one driver (at the keyboard), and...Read More

A hallmark of Agile software development teams is the notion that any developer can contribute to the code base. Collective code ownership is a practice that originated in eXtreme Programming (XP), and one of its many benefits is that no one person can become a bottleneck when it comes to making the code better. A...Read More

In Kanban systems, a key measure is to determine how many finished work items a process produces over a given time frame. Throughput is central to Little’s Law, which focuses on how predictable flow is through a work queue. In software development, throughput, also known as flow rate, is a count of  finished user stories...Read More

Any team can benefit from having a shared understanding about the work they need to do, and there is a long-standing pattern in the agile community that serves as a guide when articulating requirements as “user stories.” The name for the pattern is the Three C’s, and credit for the concept goes to Ron Jeffries,...Read More

Working at a pace that is reasonable over the medium to long term makes it easier to plan releases and iterations and helps avoid putting teams in a situation where they feel burned-out and can’t do their best work. The notion of Sustainable Pace originated in eXtreme Programming (XP). Arriving at a pace that is...Read More

Many organizations have recognized the wisdom behind the concept of ensuring that their workplace is safe for all of their employees. Anzen, a Japanese word for safety, has also come to be used as a term for giving workplace safety that level of elevated importance, in every aspect of human endeavor. Joshua Kerievsky, CEO of...Read More

One of the attributes of high-performing teams is that team members have a shared belief that they can openly share what’s on their mind, in a spirit of transparency, trust, and continuous improvement. Psychological safety is a term for the presence of this form of interpersonal risk-taking, in any group or team context. Amy Edmondson,...Read More

Among the most important things for an effective retrospective is to have psychological safety, and there is a statement that serves as a reminder of what that looks like in practice. That statement is known as the “Prime Directive,” and it was articulated by Norm Kerth in his book Project Retrospectives: A Handbook for Team...Read More