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Agile Knowledge Free Download CenterWelcome to Rally’s Agile Knowledge portal, where you can access free white papers, presentations, webinars and articles about Agile project management, product management, requirements management and test and defect management. |
Project Management |
Product Management |
Requirements Management |
Test & Defect Management |
Project Management
- Mastering the Iteration: An Agile White Paper
By: Dean Leffingwell
The heartbeat of Agile development is the iteration – the ability of the team to create working, tested, value-delivered code in a short time box – with the goal of producing an increment of potentially shippable code at the end of each iteration. In this white paper, Dean describes the basic iteration pattern and the activities that a team engages in to meet this key challenge.
- Five Levels of Agile Planning: From Enterprise Product Vision to Team Stand-up
By: Hubert Smits, Rally Agile Coach, Certified ScrumMaster Trainer
Existing agile methods often focus on small, single-team projects and overlook the broader impact of large, multi-team and multi-year projects. This paper outlines a distinct planning framework that has been used successfully in large-scale agile projects and relies on five levels: product vision, product roadmap, release plan, sprint plan and daily commitment.
- A Project Manager's Survival Guide to Going Agile
By: Michele Sliger, Agile Coach, Certified ScrumMaster Trainer, PMP
This paper focuses on re-defining the job of project manager to better fit the self-managed team environment, one of the core Agile principles. Special emphasis is placed on the shift to servant leadership, with its focus on facilitation and collaboration.
- A CIO's Playbook for Adopting the Scrum Method of Achieving Software Agility
By: Rally, Ken Schwaber and ScrumAlliance with Dean Leffingwell and Hubert Smits
The authors of this whitepaper have helped many hundreds of teams adopt Scrum. Here they share how CIOs can implement Scrum on an organization-wide basis - the challenges they will face as well as the rewards - and provides a playbook for adopting Scrum in enterprises where software, and lots of it, is the key to competitive success in the marketplace.
- Tactical Management of Agile Development: Achieving Competitive Advantage
By: Dean Leffingwell
This whitepaper provides an invaluable Agile development overview full of techniques, best practices and educational materials.
Project Management White Papers
- Tooling in an Agile Environment and the Acorn Case Study
By: Ryan Martens & Torsten Weirich
To explore the role of tools as a change-enabler in adopting Agile, this presentation introduces an organizational change model from waterfall to Agile. Using this model, Ryan and Torsten will show how changes in the “dev-build-test-fix” cycle along with project/program visibility, tracking and signaling tools can help lead the change effort, especially in medium to large teams.
- Five Levels of Agile Planning
By: Hubert Smits & Zach Nies
This slide presentation guides participants through Agile practices when applied to large-scale projects, which can broadly be defined as projects that involve over 50 people and take months or years to complete. Hubert and Zach will walk through the five levels of Agile planning – from yearly planning conducted by the product owner to the daily stand-up meetings of the delivery team.
- Implementing Agile at the Team Level
By: Jean Tabaka, Rally Agile Coach, Certified ScrumMaster Trainer
Experience has shown that successful Agile adoptions often begin at the team level and must be guided by a clear, step-wise approach. In this slide presentation, Certified ScrumMaster Trainer, author and professional facilitator Jean Tabaka concentrates on Agile guidelines that emphasize Flow at the team level.
- Intro to Scrum
By: Hubert Smits
During this presentation, Hubert Smits will introduce the audience to Scrum, one of the most popular Agile methods. He will explain the process details of this project management method, the place of Scrum in the Agile world and talk about the roles within Scrum. Throughout the presentation and during the Q&A, he will share his experience as an international Scrum coach with the audience.
- I Don't Like Mondays
By: Jean Tabaka
How can teams hold effective, decisive meetings? How can Agile coaches ensure useful, goal-focused meetings? And what flows and patterns of meetings can help teams, product owners, and stakeholders derive greater and greater benefits from adopting an Agile process? With the right culture and good meeting management, teams won't dread Mondays anymore.
- From Analyst to Owner
By: Ronica Roth
For many Business Analysts, Agile provides a perfect, and ultimately more rewarding, role – Product Owner. Many BAs will need to rethink their role and their talents to succeed as Product Owner. In some organizations, BAs support the Product Owner rather than holding that position themselves. In this facilitated workshop heavy on exercises and discussion, we will explore how BAs fit on an Agile team.
- Planning with Distributed Teams
By: Huber Smits and Tamara Sulaiman
In Hubert's work as an Agile coach, he regularly facilitates planning sessions, including a few where part of the team was only available through a phone or video link. These were the hardest sessions to get to results. The aim of this session is to discover practices for teams that have to plan while not being able to be together. Hubert will prepare a project description and (using Scrum terminology) a backlog with priorities and estimates.
- Agile Enterprise Rollout – The Greening of the Software Industry
By: Ryan Martens and Jean Tabaka
To stem this model of waste and poison for a more sustainable 21st century model, the software industry has an opportunity to lead in the greening of the high technology industry. But to do so, it must recalibrate its definition of product development, delivery and marketing. This translates to the following three software-based trends of a zero-waste model: deliver Software as a Service (SaaS), apply Agile software development for sustainable flow of value and rely on social networks for product uptake.
- Distributed Agile Experience Report
By: Hubert Smits and Guy Pshigoda
The BMC Identity Management organization is based in Israel, and has offices in France, the USA and India. Over the past years, the organization has grown through organic growth and acquisitions into a successful business unit within the global BMC organization. Five hundred people are successfully using Scrum to deliver monthly product increments, and the success of this implementation combined with the uncertainty of the product requirements formed the basis for the decision to use Scrum in this project.
- Successfully Managing Agile Projects in the Waterfall Enterprise
By: Michele Sliger, Agile Coach, Certified ScrumMaster Trainer, PMP
In this presentation, Michele Sliger outlines how to: factor your company's business needs into existing agile processes, streamline requirements and activities and identify specific points where agile and waterfall teams must plan, coordinate, and review progress.
- Overview of Agile
By: Hubert Smits
This presentation provides a broad introduction to concepts of Agile software development and Agile methods. The talk is based on the speaker’s experience as an Agile coach and Certified Scrum Master. Traditional concepts from waterfall or plan-driven development are transformed to an Agile perspective. Examples are release and iteration planning, progress reporting, meeting formats and scaling projects from 10 people teams to 300 people teams.
:: Presented at Agile2006
- A Tale of Two Writing Teams
By: Stacia Broderick, Rally Agile Coach, Certified ScrumMaster Trainer and PMP, and Melody Locke, BMC Software
Sometimes considered an "afterthought" in the product development lifecycle, technical writers often struggle to become part of a performing Agile team and can become lost when trying to transition from waterfall to Agile. This presentation provides insight and experience related to technical writers' transition to and scaling with Agile teams.
:: Presented at Agile2006
- The Agile/Waterfall Cooperative
By: Michele Sliger, Agile Coach, Certified ScrumMaster Trainer, PMP
In this tutorial, attendees will learn to factor their company's business needs into their existing Agile procedures, and management will learn how to begin the investigative work of determining how to streamline these requirements and activities so that they don't hamper the project.
:: Presented at Agile2006
- Homer's Odyssey or My Year Living Dangerously in Agile Development Consulting
By: Jean Tabaka
In this offbeat presentation, Jean compares the impediments and obstacles encountered by an Agile mentor with those detailed in Homer's classical reference. Through the presentation and dialogue, you will discover who plays which classical roles in an organization's effort to adopt Agile practices: Cyclops, the Sirens, Poseidon, Circe, Cicones, the Lotus-Eaters, and even the good-and-faithful dog Argus.
:: Presented at Agile2006
- DSDM – Go for the Nine
By: Jean Tabaka
This presentation reviews the benefits, principles and history of DSDM (Dynamic Systems Development Method).
:: Presented at Agile2006
Project Management Presentations
- From Agile Development to Agile Delivery
By: Ryan Martens & Jonny Scarborough
This webinar discusses the best practices and incremental adoption strategies that enable teams to take advantage of SaaS based delivery models that rely upon Agile development practices.
- Distributed Agile Software Development – Best Practices
By: Ryan Martens & Johnny Scarborough
During the webcast, you’ll learn about the new enablers of collaboration for Distributed Agile Development, a playbook for technology companies engaged in global software product development. Through case study examples, you’ll also learn practical tips about how distributed Agile-based methods are being employed successfully today.
- Planning and Maintaining the Rhythm of Distributed Scrum
By: Hubert Smits & Guy Pshigoda
At Agile2007, we heard the tale of a distributed Scrum project with 50 people in 4 continents. BMC Identity Management decided to build their next generation product, including architectural changes and component integration, using Scrum to handle the uncertainty of their product's requirements.
- Part 1: Implementing Agile at the Team Level
By: Jean Tabaka
Experience has shown that successful Agile adoptions often begin at the team level and must be guided by a clear, step-wise approach. In this slide presentation, Certified ScrumMaster Trainer, author and professional facilitator Jean Tabaka concentrates on Agile guidelines that emphasize Flow at the team level.
- Part 2: Five Levels of Agile Planning
By: Hubert Smits & Zach Nies
This webinar guides participants through Agile practices when applied to large-scale projects, which can broadly be defined as projects that involve over 50 people and take months or years to complete. Hubert and Zach will walk through the five levels of Agile planning – from yearly planning conducted by the product owner to the daily stand-up meetings of the delivery team.
- Part 3: Tooling in an Agile Environment and the Acorn Case Study
By: Ryan Martens & Torsten Weirich
To explore the role of tools as a change-enabler in adopting Agile, this webinar introduces an organizational change model from waterfall to Agile. Using this model, Ryan and Torsten will show how changes in the “dev-build-test-fix” cycle along with project/program visibility, tracking and signaling tools can help lead the change effort, especially in medium to large teams.
- Successfully Managing Agile Projects in the Waterfall Enterprise
By: Michele Sliger
In this webinar, Michele Sliger outlines how to: factor your company's business needs into existing agile processes, streamline requirements and activities and identify specific points where agile and waterfall teams must plan, coordinate, and review progress.
- Agile Styles: Lean and DSDM
By: Jean Tabaka and Mary Poppendieck
In this video from the Agile 2006 conference, Mary Poppendieck and Jean Tabaka, both veterans of Agile coaching and training, explain the basics, respectively, of Lean and DSDM methodologies. This InfoQ video, Agile Styles: Lean and DSDM, presents two important alternatives to the more widespread Scrum and XP methodologies.
- How to Plan Agile Projects with Distributed Teams
By: Hubert Smits, Rally Agile Coach, Certified ScrumMaster Trainer
Originally presented at Google Tech Talks, this video gives a hands-on overview of the activities involved in larger agile projects that stretch out over more then a few months and have more then a single team involved. Hubert based the talk on his paper Multi Level Planning for Agile Projects and presents a practical implementation of the planning levels.
- Agile Project Management - Reliable Innovation
By: Jim Highsmith
This webinar discusses how Agile Project Management (APM) excels on projects in which new, risky technologies are incorporated; requirements are volatile and evolve; time-to-market is critical; and high quality must be maintained.
:: Part of Rally's 'Road to Agile Series'
- Avoiding the Four Roadblocks to Agile Adoption
By: Dean Leffingwell
This webinar describes the top four roadblocks teams often face when implementing Agile development and project management practices.
:: Part of Rally's 'Road to Agile Series'
Project Management Webinars
- Scaling Agile Processes: Five Levels of Planning
By: Hubert Smits
This framework relies on five levels to address the fundamental planning principles of priorities, estimates, and commitments. The five levels can be defined as: product vision, product roadmap, release plan, sprint plan, and daily commitment.
- Agile Tooling: A Point/Counter-point Discussion
By: Ryan Martens and Ron Jeffries
It has been six years since the authoring of the Agile Manifesto, and the technology and tooling landscape has changed since then. This conversation between Ron Jeffries and Ryan Martens debates the merits and weaknesses of tooling Agile.
- The Greening of the Software Industry
By: Ryan Martens
The way Ryan sees it, the software industry can help drive a green economy and still drive profits.
- SaaS Requires Agile Methods, Group Says
By: Application Development Trends
The way Ryan sees it, the software industry can help drive a green economy and still drive profits.
- The Daily Standup
By: Michele Sliger, Agile Coach, Certified ScrumMaster Trainer, PMP
The first and most basic rhythm of the Agile feedback cycle is the daily standup. It's just what it sounds like - a daily meeting where everyone stands up for the duration of the meeting. This article addresses the benefits of daily communication and several options to consider with your team.
- Tracking in the Agile Project, or How to Let Go of Task Completion Dates
By: Jean Tabaka
This article addresses common questions from clients and colleagues about task-level and resource-level tracking in Agile software development projects.
- Book Review: Collaboration Explained
By: StickyMinds.com
Collaboration Explained is the first book to bring together proven, start-to-finish techniques for ensuring effective collaboration in any agile software project.
- In Search of Commitment Clarity
By: Michele Sliger
When planning your workload, it's easy to bite off more than you can chew. But as Michele Sliger explains in this tale of one overachiever's attempt to take on too much work, overcommitting yourself means overcommitting your team.
- Case Study: How BMC is Scaling Agile Development
By: Ryan Martens and Israel Gat, BMC Software
Sure, Agile development works well for small teams. But what happens when you apply Agile practices to a program that involves 300-plus developers and testers spread from India to Houston to Israel?
- Relating PMBOK Practices to Agile Practices
By: Michele Sliger
Like the authors of the Capability Maturity Model (CMM), professionals at the Project Management Institute (PMI) state that the Project Management Body of Knowledge (PMBOK) is a guide to best practices and that organizations must use their own discretion when implementing the practices. This is a four-part series.
- The Best-Laid Plans...
By: Stacia Broderick
It's a fact of life that plans change, but the proper implementation of agile and release planning can get you back on track. Just be sure to keep the communication lines open and clear throughout the process.
- Ready for Agile: An Intro to Agile Principles
By: Ryan Martens
Agile is an organizational change tool that can lead to positive changes in your projects and programs. It is a very simple and different strategy for project management than critical path and waterfall.
- Daily Standup Withdrawal in Scrum Teams
By: Stacia Broderick
There’s a terrible affliction that seems to be going around many Scrum teams. Its symptoms are easy to recognize: glassy eyes, pale skin, robotic answers, and narcoleptic episodes during and immediately following daily standup meetings.
- Shopzilla Scales Software Agility with Agile Tools
By: Ryan Martens and Christophe Louvion, Shopzilla
The Agile Manifesto places value on "individuals and interactions" over "processes and tools." However, an entirely new breed of tools has emerged that requires us to take another look at the role tooling plays in Agile organizations.
- Bridging the Gap: Agile Projects in the Waterfall Enterprise
By: Michele Sliger
Although agile software development methodologies have been around for almost a decade, interest in agile approaches has exploded recently as companies seek better ways to compete with their global counterparts by getting their software products to market more quickly.
- Seven Agile Team Practices That Scale
By: Dean Leffingwell
The benefits of agile software methods, including faster time to market, better responsiveness to changing customer requirements and higher application quality are undeniable to those who have mastered these practices.
- Ready, Set, Scrum
By: Dr. Dobb’s Journal
Scrum. The word alone conjures up visions of burly rugby players fighting for control of the ball. Fortunately for software developers, our version of Scrum eschews rough and tumble tactics.
Project Management Articles
Product Management
- How Product Management Must Change to Enable the Agile Enterprise
By: Catherine Connor
As more development teams adopt Agile processes to increase their responsiveness to customer needs, traditional product managers need to change the way they work to keep up with shorter development cycles and feedback loops with their customers. This webinar will propose solutions to the challenges product managers face when moving from traditional development teams to Agile teams.
Product Management Webinars
Requirements Management
- Agile Project Management: Breaking Old Software Management Paradigms
By: Ryan Martens
This presentation discusses the business imperative for driving the cost of change out of software development processes.
:: Presented at PMI Solutions Conference 2004
Requirements Management Presentations
- The Agile Customer Toolkit
By: Tom Poppendieck
This Webinar covers tools and practices that Agile customers can use to collaborate with the same flexibility, productivity, and quality that Agile practices afford developers.
:: Part of Rally's 'Road to Agile Series'
Requirements Management Webinars
- Kill Your Inventory Manager
By: Ryan Martens
We've all seen the "Kill Your Television" bumper stickers that encourage us to fix all of our family dysfunction by moving away from that giant time-suck called prime time. If I could create a similar bumper sticker to address the professional lives of software teams, it would be: "Kill Your Inventory Manager."
Requirements Management Articles
Test and Defect Management
- Delivering Flawless Tested Software Every Iteration
By: Alex Pukinskis, Rally Product Manager
This presentation introduces the Agile acceptance testing process. Automating acceptance testing is a big part of the picture, but even more important is agreeing as a team on key attributes of the system being built. This presentation heavily emphasizes building consensus so that by the end of the Iteration Planning Meeting, the whole team agrees on exactly what to build.
:: Presented at Agile2006
- Let's End the Defect Report-Fix-Check-Rework-Cycle
By: Richard Leavitt, Rally VP of Partners & Alliances
This presentation provides an overview of how software organizations are revamping their defect tracking work flows and project metrics in response to dramatically shortened development cycles.
:: Presented at STAREAST 2005 and PSQT Conference 2005
- Bringing Test Forward: Applying Use Case Driven Testing in Agile Development
By: Dean Leffingwell
This presentation provides an overview of use-case based testing methods and shares practical tips for application of those techniques.
:: Presented at STAREAST 2005
Test and Defect Management Presentations
- Moving from Test-Last to Test-Driven: Motivation and Strategies
By: Mike Cohn
This Webinar discusses the role of documentation, unit tests and acceptance test on a test-driven project, and how test-driven development offers teams more flexibility in dealing with schedule pressure.
:: Part of Rally's 'Road to Agile Series'
Test and Defect Management Webinars
- Case Study: Acorn Goes Agile
By: Projects@Work
Switching to new agile development software and processes in the midst of a major release was a gamble for a developer of corporate performance management solutions. But the risk paid off with reductions in testing and packaging time as well as a nearly 30 percent increase in developer capacity.
- Agile Methods Target Higher Quality
By: Test & QA Report
The ability to achieve both high productivity and high quality is a conundrum for software developers. Agile methodologies have been proposed as a solution that allows developers to solve the functionality versus defects trade-off.
Test and Defect Management Articles
Agile Resources
The AgileAlliance - A non-profit organization dedicated to promoting the concepts of Agile software development, and helping organizations adopt those concepts.
http://www.agilealliance.org- The Home of Lean Software Development - Mary and Tom Poppendieck are a great source for consulting and education on the factors which underlie the speed, agility, discipline and creativity necessary to produce software in smaller batches.
http://www.poppendieck.com - The Home of Scrum - Ken Schwaber and Mike Beedle describe Scrum, an Agile, lightweight process that can be used to manage and control software and product development using iterative, incremental practices.
http://www.controlchaos.com - Mike Cohn's Mountain Goat Software - Mike specializes in the application of Agile techniques to difficult software problems. His new book is User Stories Applied for Agile Software Development.
http://www.mountaingoatsoftware.com - XProgramming.com - Ron Jeffries' resource of XP techniques, tips, and experience reports offer a passionate - and sometimes humorous - expression of what Extreme Programming means to people who care about it.
http://xprogramming.com - Agile Denver - serves the Denver/Boulder Extreme Programming (XP) and Agile Software Development communities bringing in topical speakers on a monthly basis.
http://www.agiledenver.org - Managing Software Requirements: A Use Case Approach - Dean Leffingwell and Don Widrig focus on the application of requirements management in the context of iterative and Agile software development processes.
http://www.leffingwell.org - The Crystal Methodologies for Agile Development - Dr. Alistair Cockburn is the author of two Jolt Productivity award-winning books, Agile Software Development and Writing Effective Use Cases, as well as Surviving OO Projects, he was one of the authors of the Agile Development Manifesto.
http://alistair.cockburn.us
