Author: Lorraine Pauls Longhurst Published: Agile Journal Date: 8 June 2010

Having troubles introducing Agile Development on your custom software development projects?

Why not try moving to it gradually?

Implementing an Agile Development methodology on a custom (or bespoke) software development project can be difficult and many organizations new to the agile methodology struggle to adopt it.  One of the big ‘problems’ with Scrum (a flavour of Agile Development) is that project-related issues come to the surface early because the team must deliver potentially release-able software within a month.  Those issues in combination can seem insurmountable to those new to Scrum.

Author: Lorraine Pauls Longhurst Published: CIO Magazine, Essential Technology Date: April 2009

Why Agile makes sense for organisations during a global downturn; based on interviews with Jon Scumniotales, the first dedicated Scrum Master and David Norton, Gartner Group Analyst.

Scumniotales outlines the key benefits of Agile development as: "Better met customer expectations, higher quality products, on-time delivery and more predictable project execution." These benefits can be gained not only by organisations that are developing sofrware, but also organisations managing other types of software-related projects.

Author: Lorraine Pauls Longhurst Published: LPLSC Blog Date: 12 March 2009

What happens when Scrum projects do not have clear user stories?  What if the Business Analyst (or Product Owner) just provides functional requirements?

The best way to communicate requirements in a way that will make the developers more productive is for the Product Owner (or Business Analyst) to write requirements as user stories. They should be worded in the following way: ‘As a’ user ‘I want to’ do the following ‘so that’ the following benefit can be met. The only way to do this is to communicate with the user frequently which is a very important part of Agile Development.

Author: Lorraine Pauls Longhurst Published: LPLSC Blog Date: 6 February 2009

Selecting and implementing enterprise software may be the best approach to solving a business problem within the organisation, but how can you ensure that you select the right solution? In my experience designing and selling software at a number of large software companies, I am very aware of the ‘tricks’ software companies play to ensure they win the deal, often at the detriment of the client.

This doesn’t mean that all software companies are ‘bad’, but it does mean you must be well-informed when going through the selection process and know exactly what questions to ask to ensure you select the right software for your organisation.

Author: Lorraine Pauls Longhurst Published: ComputerWorld Date: 1 December 2008

The original ScrumMaster, John Scumniotales, talks about the genesis of the popular agile software development methodology, the importance of incorporating stakeholder feedback and the “healthy tension” between developers and product managers.

Author: Lorraine Pauls Longhurst Published: CIO Magazine Date: 10 November 2008

Why SCRUM’s agile development framework is more effective than the traditional “waterfall” approach.

SCRUM or agile development was originally designed for “typical” software development. The goal of any software company is to release high-quality software to market as soon as possible. In my extensive experience in software product management, I can tell you that in this type of “typical” software development environment:

• Scope is often not clearly defined and changes frequently. This is because there are more “unknowns” than in most corporate IT projects.
• Rather than tracking the budget closely (as is often the case in corporate IT projects), software companies will spend as many resources as they need to, to release the software to market as soon as possible.

SCRUM works well in this scenario because it enables the software company to be flexible with the project scope by defining a prioritised list of features (called the product backlog). The developers commit to a set of features they will complete within a time period of less than 30 days, which is called a sprint.