The authoritative guide to DAD, IBM's disciplined approach to applying agile practices in enterprise scale projects. Integrate enterprise discipline with powerful, widely-used agile practices into a proven solution for the entire software lifecycle. Scale agile strategies for complex development challenges, without compromising agile's advantages.

Becoming lean in wholesale distribution is more important than ever in today's challenging economic market. Applying lean concepts makes sense because becoming lean means becoming a more effective distributor. And becoming lean will lead to higher profitability. This book discusses the steps distributors must take to design and manage a lean culture. It deals with one lucrative area: Operations, which includes all aspects of the order processing system-from the time you seek an order, to order entry, and all the way through to delivery of products and services. Apply the tools and techniques in this book to your company so that it will operate with minimal waste and few errors, while at the same time meet your primary goal of adding value to the products and services you provide.

Globalization, rapid technology churn, and massive economic shifts have made it more difficult than ever to deliver high-value enterprise software. In Enterprise Software Delivery, IBM Distinguished Engineer Alan W. Brown guides decision-makers in understanding these new challenges, choosing today's best solutions, and successfully anticipating future trends. Alan presents detailed, actionable techniques for building software supply chains that improve agility and innovation while responding to growing cost pressure. Using real-world case studies, he introduces the modern global software factory, demonstrating how to integrate and leverage global outsourced teams, collaborative application lifecycle management, and cloud-based virtual infrastructures. Drawing on his extensive experience leading IBM Rational software strategy, and consulting with IBM enterprise customers, Alan illuminates everything from software R&D to metrics. Coverage includes Understanding recent dramatic changes in enterprise software delivery requirements and practices Overcoming false assumptions, outdated data and delivery models, and inexperience with strategy, innovation, education, or research Incorporating integrators and partners in centers of excellence that specialize in delivering business value Establishing team-based practices that encourage agility, scalability, and quality Building adaptive software factories that integrate real-time feedback and respond rapidly to change Using virtualized collaborative infrastructure to connect worldwide teams for developing software, assembling solutions, and delivering results Transcending barriers related to geography, organization, skills, and culture If you're an enterprise software leader, strategist, or practitioner, this book can help you improve every facet of performance you care about, including agility, quality, predictability, innovation, and value.

AGILE SOFTWARE DEVELOPMENT A unique title that introduces the whole range of agile software development processes from the fundamental concepts to the highest levels of applications such as requirement analysis, software testing, quality assurance, and risk management. Agile Software Development (ASD) has become a popular technology because its methods apply to any programming paradigm. It is important in the software development process because it emphasizes incremental delivery, team collaboration, continuous planning, and learning over delivering everything at once near the end. Agile has gained popularity as a result of its use of various frameworks, methods, and techniques to improve software quality. Scrum is a major agile framework that has been widely adopted by the software development community. Metaheuristic techniques have been used in the agile software development process to improve software quality and reliability. These techniques not only improve quality and reliability but also test cases, resulting in cost-effective and time-effective software. However, many significant research challenges must be addressed to put such ASD capabilities into practice. With the use of diverse techniques, guiding principles, artificial intelligence, soft computing, and machine learning, this book seeks to study theoretical and technological research findings on all facets of ASD. Also, it sheds light on the latest trends, challenges, and applications in the area of ASD. This book explores the theoretical as well as the technical research outcomes on all the aspects of Agile Software Development by using various methods, principles, artificial intelligence, soft computing, and machine learning. Audience The book is designed for computer scientists and software engineers both in research and industry. Graduate and postgraduate students will find the book accessible as well.

Succeed with Scrum in Even the Largest, Most Complex Distributed Development Projects Forewords by Ken Schwaber, Scott Ambler, Roman Pichler, and Matthew Wang This is the first comprehensive, practical guide for Scrum practitioners working in large-scale distributed environments. Written by three of IBM’s leading Scrum practitioners—in close collaboration with the IBM QSE Scrum Community of more than 1000 members worldwide—this book offers specific, actionable guidance for everyone who wants to succeed with Scrum in the enterprise. Readers will follow a journey through the lifecycle of a distributed Scrum project, from envisioning products and setting up teams to preparing for Sprint planning and running retrospectives. Each chapter presents a baseline drawn from “conventional” Scrum, then discusses additional issues faced by distributed teams, and presents specific best-practice solutions, alternatives, and tips the authors have identified through hard, empirical experience. Using real-world examples, the book demonstrates how to apply key Scrum practices, such as look-ahead planning in geographically distributed environments. Readers will also gain valuable new insights into the agile management of complex problem and technical domains. Coverage includes Developing user stories and working with Product Owners as a distributed team Recognizing and fixing the flaws Scrum may reveal in existing processes Engaging in more efficient Release and Sprint planning Conducting intense, brief daily Scrum meetings in distributed environments Managing cultural and language differences Resolving dependencies, performing frequent integration, and maintaining transparency in geographically distributed environments Successfully running remote software reviews and demos Brainstorming what worked and what didn’t, to improve future Sprints This book will be an indispensable resource for every team leader, member, product owner, or manager working with Scrum or other agile methods in any distributed software development organization.

This book contains the refereed proceedings of the 12th International Conference on Agile Software Development, XP 2011, held in Madrid, Spain, in May 2011. The year 2011 marked the 10th anniversary of the Agile Manifesto. In this spirit, the XP conference continued its fine tradition of promoting agility by disseminating new research results in a timely manner and by bringing together researchers and practitioners for a fruitful mutual exchange of experiences. As introduced for XP 2010, there were again two different program committees, one for research papers and one for experience reports. Regarding the research papers, 11 out of 56 submissions were accepted as full papers; and as far as the experience reports were concerned, the respective number was 4 out of 17 submissions. In addition to these papers, this volume also includes the short research papers, the abstracts of the posters, the position papers of the PhD symposium, and the abstracts of the workshops.

Rather than deciding whether or not to get involved in global sourcing, many companies are facing decisions about whether or not to apply agile methods in their distributed projects. These companies are often motivated by the opportunities to solve the coordination and communication difficulties associated with global software development. Yet while agile principles prescribe close interaction and co-location, the very nature of distributed software development does not support these prerequisites. Šmite, Moe, and Ågerfalk structured the book into five parts. In “Motivation” the editors introduce the fundamentals of agile distributed software development and explain the rationale behind the application of agile practices in globally distributed software projects. “ Transition” describes implementation strategies, adoption of particular agile practices for distributed projects, and general concepts of agility. “Management” details practical implications for project planning, time management, and customer and subcontractor interaction. “Teams” discusses agile distributed team configuration, effective communication and knowledge transfer, and allocation of roles and responsibilities. Finally, in the “Epilogue” the editors summarize all contributions and present future trends for research and practice in agile distributed development. This book is primarily targeted at researchers, lecturers, and students in empirical software engineering, and at practitioners involved in globally distributed software projects. The contributions are based on sound empirical research and identify gaps and commonalities in both the existing state of the art and state of the practice. In addition, they also offer practical advice through many hints, checklists, and experience reports. Questions answered in this book include: What should companies expect from merging agile and distributed strategies? What are the stumbling blocks that prevent companies from realizing the benefits of the agile approach in distributed environments, and how can we recognize infeasible strategies and unfavorable circumstances? What helps managers cope with the challenges of implementing agile approaches in distributed software development projects? How can distributed teams survive the decisions taken by management and become efficient through the application of agile approaches?