Posted on August 24th, 2010 in Agile by siddharta || 6 Comments
When confronted with the task of scaling agile teams, most people go down a familiar path – scrum of scrums. But did you know that there is another method of scaling, a method that uses a single team and no scrum of scrums?
Continue reading ‘Feature Teams: An alternate method for scaling agile teams’ »
Posted on August 12th, 2010 in Agile, Management by siddharta || 4 Comments
Ichak Adizes, in his 1976 paper on Mismanagement Styles, identified four roles that a manager needs to play. A good manager is able to play all four roles (with some roles better than others). A mismanager is only able to play one of the four roles. Based on this, Adizes arrives at various styles of mismanagement. In this post, I’m going to take a look at these mismanagement styles in the context of managing an agile team.
Posted on August 6th, 2010 in Agile, CMMI by siddharta || 9 Comments
Many people new to agile have misconceptions about agile. The same way, many people in the agile community have misconceptions about CMMI. In this post I want to highlight five of these misconceptions.
Continue reading ‘5 CMMI misconceptions in the agile community’ »
Posted on August 5th, 2010 in News & Updates by siddharta || 1 Comment
If you go over to the tools for agile pricing page, you’ll notice that we’ve introduced a new pricing model. We’ve moved to a new user based pricing model from the previous project based model.
Since this is a fairly big change, I thought I should explain the rationale behind it.
Why did we change the model?
We wanted a model that we could extend to Silver Stories, which is coming up. Since Silver Stories doesn’t have the concept of projects, we couldn’t use the same model. Either we needed to introduce a different pricing model for this tool, or we needed to move to a common model.
We decided to change to a user based pricing model which could be easily extended to Silver Stories as well.
What does it mean for existing customers on a project based model?
Nothing. If you are a customer, you will continue with the old model, just as before. However, if you upgrade you will have to transition to the new pricing model.
What about reduced visibility due to a per user model?
We have previously blogged about why per user models are harmful for agile teams. The short summary of that article is that user based pricing encourages teams to reduce the number of manager and stakeholder users in the tool, reducing project visibility. We definitely don’t want to reduce visibility so we thought hard about what we could do about it.
The result is that observer users will not count under the user limit and are not charged (observer users can view projects, but not edit – typically managers and stakeholders). You only pay for the participants and administrators in the workspace. This way you can have as many observer users as you need – increasing project visibility in the organization.
Further questions?
Feel free to ask in the comments below, or on our support site, or via the contact page.
Posted on July 28th, 2010 in Agile, Mindmap by siddharta || 4 Comments
I facilitated a discussion on “Agile in the Indian context” at the AgileNCR conference a few weeks ago. The image below is a mindmap of the discussion.
If you look at the mindmap you’ll see that only a few of the challenges are specific to Indian contexts (specifically the bit on service companies). Most are universal across the world.
What challenges did you face when adopting agile? What did you do about them?
(Click the image to view the map in full size)
