Summer is here! That means that the internet will be awash with lists of ‘fun outdoor activities’ that you can do in and around your city, from the fairly unimaginative ‘spend a day at the beach’ to the very weird, there’s no end to the suggestions on what to do with the extra hours in your day. But what about while you’re in the office? Here at Tasktop we’ve put together a summer reading list and list of activities you can do this summer that can help make sure your Agile transformations don’t take a break as well.
Beyond the Scrum Team: Delivering “Done” at Scale
Join us for next week’s webinar where Dave West, CEO and Product Owner of Scrum.org will join Betty Zakheim, VP of Industry Strategy at Tasktop to discuss the successes and challenges of Scrum at scale. We’ll cover techniques that organizations can employ when they have a large IT shop an how they fit into the broader software delivery lifecycle.
Register Today to Learn More
Analyze Time Spent On Manual Updates
Shorter sprints are designed to increase velocity and get your products to market quicker. But when you move from 6 month cycles to 4 week cycles, the requirements around updating other teams and management during each cycle often stay the same. Say your teams spend a combined total of 40 hours reporting in your 6 month cycles – not such a big deal. But 40 hours in a 4 week cycle? It’s worth doing the math to see if your velocity is actually decreasing because of this.
Need a Better Way? Download this white paper and see how you can reduce manual effort.
SAFe & Requirements Management: Oxymoron or Practical Reality?
Agile and requirements management aren’t exactly a match made in heaven. But, in many industries, there is a practical reality that mandates some successful marriage between true requirements management and Agile. If you are writing surveillances for regulating Wall Street or building the software for a pacemaker or the automated brake system for cars that have to meet standards in different countries, you have to make them work together.
Watch this Webinar to Learn More
Find out if Agile is Enough
Any initiative to improve software delivery will involve a combination of people, processes and tools. In theory, Agile strives to streamline and simplify software delivery by providing a clear set of principles to improve performance. But in reality, things today are more complicated than ever. Many organizations use a combination of approaches that allow for a more practical adoption of new methodologies within large enterprises.
Learn More: http://www.slideshare.net/tasktop/a-quick-intro-to-agile-devops-lean-development-in-the-enterprise
Find the Missing Piece to the Scaled Agile Puzzle
Lots of organizations are trying to scale Agile, but few are successful. Even those that do get traction, run into issues because a piece of the puzzle is missing. Trevor Bruner, Product Manager for Tasktop dives into that missing piece here: https://blog.tasktop.com/scaled-agile-puzzle-youre-missing-piece/
Identify Your Bottlenecks
Finding and diagnosing your delivery pipeline delays is crucial if you’re to succeed with an Agile transformation. Aggregating data across teams, projects, domains and tools is essential. This will help answer questions that can improve your processes such as:
What teams are producing the most severe defects?
Why are those defects happening?
How quickly are they fixed?
Are teams getting project requirements on time?
Which teams need more resources to meet their deadlines?
What type of features result in the most customer complaints?
Watch this Webinar to Learn More
Attend Agile 2016
July 25 – 29, Atlanta
https://www.agilealliance.org/agile2016/
Join active and influential Agile Developers, Executives, Managers, Teams, Coaches, and Consultants. Take away the actionable knowledge, valuable contacts, and inspiration to achieve your objectives and make your Agile initiative a success. Swing by the Tasktop booth while you’re there and say hi.
See if Continuous Planning and Workflow Makes Sense For You
The Agile Scrum process can help reduce waste, provide predictability and visibility, but it’s not always a pain free process. For exploratory development projects, end of sprint deliveries can become unpredictable with stories that are ‘almost done’ being pushed into the following sprint, reducing apparent velocity. A Kanban process can help – see how Tasktop’s engineering team improved their process: https://blog.tasktop.com/continuous-planning-and-workflow/
Assess Your Maturity
How mature is your Agile program? The Forrester Modern Application Delivery Assessment Tool helps organizations evaluate where they fall on the spectrum of modern software delivery and offer insight into what needs to happen next. Complete the online questionnaire and you’ll get a scorecard with Forrester’s diagnosis and recommended next steps and a Forrester report “How to Build Better Software, Faster”.
Start Now http://go.tasktop.com/forrester-mad-assessment.html
Connect Your Agile Tools with Your DevOps Tools
Integrating your Agile tools goes a long way towards improving visibility and traceability, but what about your IT automation/DevOps tools? By connecting these DevOps tools into the integration fabric you can enable full traceability across business initiatives, requirements, user stories, test, defects, change sets, builds, releases and more.
Learn More: http://go.tasktop.com/Scaled-DevOps-New-Tasktop-Sync-Data.html
