enabling business agility Agile or not, every stakeholder wants visibility into his or her application development projects underway. Some questions and challenges are shared among most organizations. Regardless of which project you work on, where you work, or what methodologies you adopt, you have most likely asked yourself many questions like these at various stages of your software development process:
1. Will the project be delivered on time?
2. Is the project ahead or behind?
3. Are teams and resources fully utilized?
4. Do I need more resources?
5. How good is the quality of systems in development?
6. What is the rate of defects?
7. What is the cause of defects?
8. How critical are these defects?
9. How can I reduce the rate and significance of defects occurring in the system?
10. How much time is being spent on maintenance versus building new features?
11. Is the team working on highest priority requirements?
12. Are we able to distinguish the highest priority requirements?
13. Are issues, concerns, and blocking items visible and escalated on time?
14. Have we identified risks? Do we have an adequate plan to manage them?
15. Is the team motivated?
16. Is the team committed?
17. Is some team member falling behind, blocked, and in need of help?
18. How can I balance the workload instead of having to deal with peaks and valleys?
19. How do I align external teams and maintain transparency?
20. Am I spending money on right priorities with best long-term returns?
21. What is the customer response to what we are building? Are we delivering value?
The list of questions can go on and on. And even though such questions and challenges are well known, it is surprisingly difficult to get clear answers and good solutions that would increase your level of confidence in your application development work.
In the upcoming posts, we will take these very questions one by one and start paving the road to answers and solutions. We will go over processes, tools, people issues and best practices.
To make these discussions most relevant to your current needs, we invite your comments and contributions – what application development challenges and questions are bothering you today?
Bringing Agility
In: Uncategorized
19 Jan 2010At the beginning of the new year, WoodRanch Tech (WRT) team of seasoned professionals has opened new series of blogs to identify, analyze and address many software development challenges experienced today by project managers, product managers, developers, and other stake holders. We will open discussions about YOUR challenges and experiences. And we will guide you to solutions through exploring best and worst practices seen at organizations of all sizes.
WRT’s blogs in 2010 will be about people, teams, ALM, agile project management, SCRUM, XP, systems, engineering best practices, ideas from other disciplines, ways to improve, program management and all related fields. We will contribute a wide experience in various agile methodologies, RUP and waterfall to our blog discussions. Your ideas for additional topics are always welcome!
We have been successfully running agile scrum and XP projects for more than a decade and helped management and engineers at many large companies like Yahoo, IBM, PricewaterhouseCoopers, Digital Insight (Intuit), Tata and many startups like Webvan to improve their processes and meet their objectives - while being lightweight and agile. We have also helped a company gain ISO 9000 and CMM level 5 certification.
We are not just consultants and trainers that simply convey concepts and discuss problems experienced by others. We are practitioners who have faced the same challenges as you do. Each of us have led engineering teams, architected highly advanced distributed software systems, coded, built, implemented the systems in production, managed support and QA teams, taken products to market using agile, lean and other management and engineering best practices for over two decades.
We look forward to sharing the principles we apply daily in our work with you – our own software development practices and the most successful practices of other organizations.
About this blog
A blog from Woodranch Technnology, Inc. and WoodRanch Agile Projects - Bringing Agility and Lean to your enterprise.
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