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Four short links: 6 April 2012

FBI Uses Agile (Information Week) -- The FBI awarded the original contract for the case management system to Lockheed Martin in 2006, but an impatient Fulgham, who was hired in 2008 to get the project on track, decided to bring it in house in September 2010. Since then, the agency has been using agile development to push the frequently...

Top Stories: March 26-30, 2012

This week on O'Reilly: We looked at a four-step approach for designing great data products, Andy Oram shared the lessons he's learned about health care, and we learned about a competitive advantage that publishers aren't seizing.

Agile for real-world publishing

Several overriding themes permeated this year's Tools of Change for Publishing conference. The first in a series reviewing five major themes, here we look at agile publishing, in terms of workflow, work environment and practical publishing applications.

Agile for real-world publishing

Several overriding themes permeated this year's Tools of Change for Publishing conference. The first in a series reviewing five major themes, here we look at agile publishing, in terms of workflow, work environment and practical publishing applications.

There's Plan A, and then there's the plan that will become your business

Drawing from the Lean Startup and other methods, "Running Lean" helps entrepreneurs transform flawed Plan A ideas into viable companies. "Running Lean" author Ash Maurya explains the basics in this interview.

How agile methodologies can help publishers

Bookigee founder Kristen McLean explains how lightweight development, flexible teams and other agile methods can help publishers with content development and workflows.

How agile methodologies can help publishers

Bookigee founder Kristen McLean explains how lightweight development, flexible teams and other agile methods can help publishers with content development and workflows.

The Watering Hole - Captive Audience

Turner's Paradox: Stakeholders are your most important participants. Important people get invited to lots of meetings. Meetings tend to conflict with each other. Therefore, you can never get stakeholders to come to meetings.

The Watering Hole - Missing Inaction

Like any project development methodology, Agile and Scrum are only as effective as the least common denominator of team participation. Unfortunately, that's usually the stakeholder.

Why Aren't You Agile?

If you aren't currently practicing scrum (or any other agile methodology) - why not? Throughout my career I've worked at many different companies that all struggled to be agile. They all wanted to be agile but for one reason or...

Why Aren't You Agile?

If you aren't currently practicing scrum (or any other agile methodology) - why not? Throughout my career I've worked at many different companies that all struggled to be agile. They all wanted to be agile but for one reason or...

The Best and the Worst Tech of the Decade

With only a few weeks left until we close out the 'naughts and move into the teens, it's almost obligatory to take a look back at the best and not-so-best of the last decade. With that in mind, I polled the O'Reilly editors, authors, Friends, and a number of industry movers and shakers to gather nominations. I then tossed them in the trash and made up my own compiled them together and looked for trends and common threads. So here then, in no particular order, are the best and the worst that the decade had to offer.

David Hoover's Top 5 Tips for Apprentices

If you're a senior developer with years of experience under your belt, it may be hard to remember what it was like coming out of college with a newly minted CS degree, and entering the workplace. But as David Hoover argues, helping these newcomers to the workforce to succeed can be the difference between effective, motivated developers and confused, discouraged ones. Hoover is the author of the new O'Reilly book Apprenticeship Patterns, and he says that people coming right out of college may, in fact, be less motivated than someone who has been working for a while.

Agile's Next Challenge: Selling it to the Business

Agile's next challenge is selling executives on the idea of rapid iterative development without rigorous up-front planning. As Agile becomes a default mode of the development for most technology departments, it will need to be properly positioned in the Board room. How will Agile's evolution affect the way that the business views technology as a "profession".

Agile testing and Beautiful Teams (giveaway)

Testing -- especially on agile projects -- has been coming up a lot lately. Jenny and I have have spent a lot of time talking and writing about the basic ideas behind testing. So we were really excited when Abby...

Review: "Scaling Lean & Agile Development", by Craig Larman and Bas Vodde

I've managed a group that ran software projects using Scrum but also provided Scrum support to the wider R&D organization by developing Scrum templates and procedures, developing and delivering Scrum training and providing coaching and mentoring for groups taking their first steps down the Scrum path. So, to be honest, I pretty much figured I had Scrum licked. Then I read "Scaling Agile & Lean Development" by Craig Larman and Bas Vodde. I'd yet to scratch the surface of lean and so the excellent treatment lean gets in this book was expected to be new to me, but it was pretty embarrassing how much I learned about Scrum and agile development along the way. If anything it left me feeling a bit of an agile fraud. In the introduction to "Modern C++ Design" by Andrei Alexandrescu, Herb Sutter talks about how reading Alexandrescu's work made him realize that his understanding of C++ templates was still at the "container of T" level while Alexandrescu's work opened his mind to the vast possibilities offered by C++'s generics. This book leaves me feeling similarly abut agile methods. The book presents a great treatment of agile and lean development methods, places them in the context of queuing theory and lean thinking and provides a road map for configuring the organization in what will be a novel manner for most of us but a manner which has led Toyota and others to remarkable improvements in efficiency, employee satisfaction and responsiveness to market needs. If you're an agile practitioner and proponent, go get this book - you'll be glad you did. Note that a companion volume, "Practices for Scaling Lean & Agile Development" is due out soon also.

Welcoming Eric Ries to the Radar Team

The Radar blog is a community of thinkers organized around the O’Reilly mission to change the world by spreading the knowledge of innovators. Some of the folks with posting privileges on Radar are O'Reilly employees: Brady Forrest organizes the ETech, Where 2.0 and Web 2.0 Expo events, Mike Loukides, Andy Oram, Brett McLaughlin, and Mike Hendrickson are editors of many...

Applying Lean to Software Development, an Excerpt from The Art of Software Development

Just checking out The Art of Lean Software Development, which is based on the techniques that revolutionized Japanese manufacturing. Written by Curt Hibbs, Steve Jewett, and Mike Sullivan, this concise new title shows you how to adopt Lean practices one at a time. And in this excerpt the authors discuss the importation relationship between Lean and Agile.

Analysis 2009: Government Gets Into the Software Business

The incoming Obama administration has, even before taking office formally, pledged between $650 and $800 billion dollars worth of public works initiatives, a massive shift away from the laissez faire approach of the outgoing Bush administration. Of that, it...

Sustainability, Boxing Day, and Open Source Software

Boxing Day, celebrated on the day after Christmas, is a British holiday that's migrated to Canada, and is slowly beginning to make inroads even into the United States. It had its beginnings in the late 18th century, when the landed lords of England, after having given one another presents after Christmas Mass began an interesting custom. After having received new dresses, dress suits, hats and so forth, they would go into their wardrobes and childrens' play rooms and find those things that they no longer wore or used or played with, presenting them as gifts to their servants and staff, a custom which eventually extended to giving inexpensive gifts and trinkets to their tenant farmers and needy villagers.

Throwing Money at Problems: More Thoughts on Bailouts

Government absolutely must play a role in dealing with companies that are too big to fail ... it must prevent them from reaching that point. Until that happens, real reform in business will be slow and problematic.

Alan Cooper on Agile Software

Alan Cooper is an experienced software developer and interaction designer who's been around for a while. He runs a consulting firm, writes a lot of books, and is called the "father of Visual Basic." Alan Cooper has been on the forefront of experience design and software development for a while now. He's been in the trenches, seen what works and what doesn't, and now he's decided to share some of his experience on software process and why Agile software is best. Cooper was asked to deliver a keynote at the recent Agile 2008 conference, held in Toronto earlier this August. His slides with accompanying notes are available on his website, and make a really great presentation both for those already converted to agile methods and those who've heard the term but don't really know what it's about.