December 2008

My name is Michael Dubakov, founder and CEO of TargetProcess. I am excited to present you the first issue of our "Edge of Chaos: Agile development Newsletter".

The intent is quite simple – to share with you OUR insights on Agile, what has and has not worked for us since the inception of the company in 2004, share interesting information and also keep you a little updated on the progress weare making with our development.

We respect your time, and therefore unlike most of the newsletters, our “quick-read” editions will be not so much about the product but an effort to contribute into the Agile community, help others avoid mistakes and to share our best practices.

I sincerely hope that this will catch on and some of our readers will participate by giving us your feedback and comments. Stay Tuned!

Agile Development Insight with Michael Dubakov

Edge of Chaos and Hyper Productive Software Development Teams

There are so many parallels between Complex Adaptive Systems and Software Development. It is pretty obvious that Software development is a Complex Adaptive System itself. It has almost all basic properties of CAS and it is interesting to read, for example, about adaptation in various CAS and think about its application to the software development and agile principles. In my next few posts I am going to describe CAS properties in depth and apply them to software development. In this part we will look into the Edge of Chaos and how it can lead to hyper productive software development teams

TargetProcess News

We are still working on v.2.12 and currently the release is targeted January 2009. Significant changes in Reports Engine have been made:

• We've created new skin for ExtJS that looks very good.
• It will be possible to create inner lists in reports. For example, you may create reports by user story and include sub reports to see all bugs, tasks, test cases, time records, etc for each user story. The inner lists are expandable and works pretty much like current user story list for example.
• It will be possible to use inline edit in custom reports almost like in Excel. All fields that may be changed are available in inline edit.

We have a goal to replace all lists in TargetProcess based on custom reports model in v.3.0.

TargetProcess Tip: Tags Categorization

As a Product Owner you deal with many functional requirements. You need a way to keep them categorized and find requirements for specific category quickly. The best way to categorize information in a free form is Tags. TargetProcess provides full support of tags categorization.

Check Usage Pattern or see Categorize Requirements with Tags video.

Hot Agile Topics of The Month

Scrum criticism was a hot topic this November. Here are two most interesting blog posts from Alan Shalloway and David J.Anderson:

• Trashing Scrum or Reflecting Reality? David J. Anderson thinks that Scrum in it's current state is almost opposite to agile development "My observation from the outside is that the Scrum community reflects the antithesis of our agile values. It is run from the top. The message is strictly controlled. Dissent is not permitted. It resembles a cult of personality and appears to be the very definition of command'n'control in its execution".
• Is Scrum Failing Us? Alan Shalloway does not have such extreme feeling, but believe that there are many misunderstanding in Scrum "I want to mention some misunderstandings I have seen many people in the industry have and how we, as practitioners, can get beyond them. I have also included a few things many Scrum trainers believe that I don't agree with".