Silver Stripe Blog

Steve Freeman linked to this Dilbert cartoon:

Mark Levison has a neat compilation of Scrum case studies on his blog. Useful material if you are thinking about transitioning to an agile process.

This is a common question that keeps coming up in mailing lists. Teams that are transitioning to Scrum or any other agile process want to know which role is the equivalent of the traditional Project Manager role. Is it the ScrumMaster? Product Owner? Coach?

My answer is that it is none of the above!

Continue reading ‘Who are the “managers” in a Scrum/Agile team?’ »

A few days ago, I came across a paper titled Pair Programming: What’s in it for me (PDF link). Andrew Begel and Nachiappan Nagappan at Microsoft Research conducted a survey of reactions to pair programming within Microsoft and are due to publish the results at the 2nd International Symposium on Emperical Software Engineering and Measurement in October.

I found the paper interesting for two reasons. One, its pretty hard to find any data on many agile practices. Second, many studies on agile practices are classroom and student oriented, which may not easily translate into a corporate environment with experienced developers. This study surveys programmers who have used an agile process on real projects in Microsoft, which makes me take the data more seriously. Also, its not a study of a single project but across a number of projects.

So, what exactly does the paper say?

Continue reading ‘Finally some pair programming research’ »

From OSNews, via Agile in Action: