agile development - News, Features, and Slideshows

IT and digital execs from News Corp, CommBank, and Australia Post discuss why Agile is still very much a work in progress.

The ‘keeping mum effect’, or reluctance to report bad news about a distressed project, is alive and well in our time-compressed, competitive, uncompromising and globalised business environments.

The Agile development approach to data management and business intelligence projects is seeing greater take up by CIOs as public and private sector firms demand faster, more measurable returns on their information investments.

Software developers increasingly use specialized Agile tools, such as Rally and Atlassian JIRA for individual tasks, but with many teams working simultaneously on products at every stage in the definition and development lifecycle, it's easy for information to get lost and for teams to lose sight of the bigger picture: what's being built, why it's being built and how to track progress.

Agile development methodology was key to the successful implementation of a new online equipment management tool for Coates Hire.

The idea behind the #NoEstimates approach to software development isn't to eliminate estimates but, rather, to explore other ways to solve problems without specifically asking, 'How long will it take?' Here are five real-world examples of teams that are doing just that.

In the current software development parlance, "agile" has become synonymous with innovation and speed. But many organizations limit their agile approaches to one or two siloed departments out of a mistaken belief that they're too big, too 'legacy,' too process-oriented to scale the approach across the larger business.

Release candidate testing takes too long.

By now, you know about agile methodologies and how they can help improve your software development efforts. In this series of articles, we will discuss benefits of going agile (Part 1), some traditional concerns with agile at enterprise scale (Part 2) and offer some strategies you can use to become more agile in your shop while minimizing those concerns (Part 3). We also include screencasts to show agile in real-world scenarios.

Agile projects involve close collaboration and very fast feedback loops. When it works, users' expectations are closely aligned to the project deliverables, and very little time is wasted on nice-to-haves or perfectionism that has no business impact. Agile done right is a thing of beauty, and economical to boot.

f you haven't read Nassim Taleb 'Anti-Fragile,' it's time to break out your e-reader. Big software projects are constitutionally doomed because they're fragile. Agile may be the way to go, but what can you do to make sure your agile project doesn't become fragile?