Expert Guidance to Ensure Business Agility & Top-notch Systems & Software
Make your software, systems, and software organization a source of sustainable competitive advantage in an era characterized by constant change. Cutter’s community of international experts provides a steady stream of alerts, updates, reports, and virtual events to keep your teams on the cutting edge of new developments in software engineering excellence, product management, and enterprise agility.
Driving Toward Agile: Build Abilities that Allow for Visions
The main value of being increasingly agile is to allow the organization to realize its potential visions more quickly, with less investment, and with greater chances of success. To realize those visions, one must have abilities — both non-digital and digital. Digital abilities are information systems–enabling abilities that allow for agility. In this Advisor, we define digital abilities through a partial list of key abilities in the form of technologies, attitudes, and approaches we should adopt to become agile.
An Agile Development Framework for Business Analysts: Part VII — Verification and Validation Examples and the Assurance Layer
In Part VII, we continue to illustrate the concept of “assurance” for ADF artifacts and how it might be implemented using verification and validation. We make reference to a set of example artifacts and propose a more detailed assurance layer, which implements the ADF assurance view and reflects the ADF perspectives and views discussed thus far in this series.
Riding the Next Wave of Cloud Computing — Opening Statement
We hope the insight provided in this issue gives you an enlightened perspective on the current and future cloud computing market and the guidance required to make well-informed decisions on the strategies and technologies that will provide your organization a competitive edge.
Cloud Lessons Learned
This article tries to take a very pragmatic viewpoint about cloud computing: what are the things we have learned? What do most reasonable analysts and users now agree on, as opposed to questions to which the jury is still out? What should you spend time worrying about, and what should you consider settled, for good or for bad? Finally, with various lessons learned, what should you educate your managers or clients about, so they don’t waste their time or yours?
The Product Is Dead. Long Live the Service!
A truly successful digitization project will change a company to its core. Thus, product-to-service transformation is probably the best example of the pervasiveness of digital technologies.
The Case for Vulnerability in Scrum Retrospectives
For a scrum team to be successful, it is important to learn of and solve problems as they occur. As we work together, we express how we’re doing, what’s in our way, and our concerns so they can be addressed. It’s an ongoing process of improvement from sprint to sprint. There are as many team dynamics as there are teams, so sometimes getting started is awkward if people feel uncomfortable opening up. As we explore in this Advisor, sustained success demands a brave willingness to be “all in.”
The Age of Complexity
The simple reason we cannot see (or perhaps refuse to see) a paradigm shift upon us is because we tend to look at the world through the old paradigm. So perhaps all we need to do to meet tomorrow’s problems is to stop using yesterday’s thinking. This Executive Update is a call for the acceptance of complexity and the introduction of interdisciplinary thinking to all aspects of life, starting with software engineering as the guinea pig. By seeking to understand complexity instead of hiding it, we can build better-quality software with less stress.
Misunderstanding the Origin of “Value” in Value-Stream Mapping
Value-stream mapping is a useful tool that forces tech teams to focus on activities that add the most value for the customer, rather than those that are recommended in some textbook, or that employ a hot new technology a senior person happens to want to learn, or that use a development method that will look good when reporting to the CIO. However, too often advocates of this laudable technique have been operating on long-discredited ideas of which economic activities “add value” and which ones do not.