This book shows you how agile approaches work with images that illustrate the core components of the agile mindset and agile team behaviors. It covers the Agile Mindset, the four Agile Manifesto Values, and the twelve Agile Principles. It shows each of the six principles from the Declaration of Interdependence for Agile Projects and illustrates each of the 62 Servant Leadership Tasks covered in the PMI-ACP exam.Ideal for executives looking for a quick overview of what it means to create and foster an agile mindset. Perfect for Scrum Masters and servant leaders looking for a summary of the desired behaviors and everyday tasks required to support teams as they deliver exceptional customer value. See Agile in action. "Agile Illustrated: A Visual Learner's Guide to Agility" shows the agile mindset and behaviors in use on agile teams. Servant leadership traits are illustrated through mind-maps and cartoons, accompanied by short descriptions. A soup-to-nuts illustrated overview of agile in 85 colorful pages.

Project retrospectives help teams examine what went right and what went wrong on a project. But traditionally, retrospectives (also known as “post-mortems”) are only held at the end of the project—too late to help. You need agile retrospectives that are iterative and incremental. You need to accurately find and fix problems to help the team today. Now Esther and Diana show you the tools, tricks and tips you need to fix the problems you face on a software development project on an on-going basis. You’ll see how to architect retrospectives in general, how to design them specifically for your team and organization, how to run them effectively, how to make the needed changes and how to scale these techniques up. You’ll learn how to deal with problems, and implement solutions effectively throughout the project—not just at the end. This book will help you: Design and run effective retrospectives Learn how to find and fix problems Find and reinforce team strengths Address people issues as well as technological Use tools and recipes proven in the real world With regular tune-ups, your team will hum like a precise, world-class orchestra.

All of the agile cards have been pulled, and nonetheless new products still do not get faster to the market. If this situation seems familiar, you should read this story about a company that prepared their agile transition in exemplary fashion: 600 employees reorganized into cross-functional teams, their work visualized and practically perfect Standups and Retrospectives held. The result: Time-to-Market for the products became worse - and not a trace of business agility.This book shows you what goes wrong with many agile transitions and why the desired improvements fail to materialize. You also learn how to get out of a dead end and what can be done before starting a transformation in order to prevent heading down a dead end to begin with.A little preview: Do not start by making teams agile - this will save your nerves and lots of money!

Agile Estimating and Planning is the definitive, practical guide to estimating and planning agile projects. In this book, Agile Alliance cofounder Mike Cohn discusses the philosophy of agile estimating and planning and shows you exactly how to get the job done, with real-world examples and case studies. Concepts are clearly illustrated and readers are guided, step by step, toward how to answer the following questions: What will we build? How big will it be? When must it be done? How much can I really complete by then? You will first learn what makes a good plan-and then what makes it agile. Using the techniques in Agile Estimating and Planning, you can stay agile from start to finish, saving time, conserving resources, and accomplishing more. Highlights include: Why conventional prescriptive planning fails and why agile planning works How to estimate feature size using story points and ideal days–and when to use each How and when to re-estimate How to prioritize features using both financial and nonfinancial approaches How to split large features into smaller, more manageable ones How to plan iterations and predict your team's initial rate of progress How to schedule projects that have unusually high uncertainty or schedule-related risk How to estimate projects that will be worked on by multiple teams Agile Estimating and Planning supports any agile, semiagile, or iterative process, including Scrum, XP, Feature-Driven Development, Crystal, Adaptive Software Development, DSDM, Unified Process, and many more. It will be an indispensable resource for every development manager, team leader, and team member.

Ready, set, liftoff! Align your team to one purpose: successful delivery. Learn new insights and techniques for starting projects and teams the right way, with expanded concepts for planning, organizing, and conducting liftoff meetings. Real-life stories illustrate how others have effectively started (or restarted) their teams and projects. Master coaches Diana Larsen and Ainsley Nies have successfully "lifted off" numerous agile projects worldwide. Are you ready for success? Every team needs a great start. If you're a business or product leader, team coach or agile practice lead, project or program manager, you'll gain strategic and tactical benefits from liftoffs. Discover new step-by-step instructions and techniques for boosting team performance in this second edition of Liftoft. Concrete examples from our practices show you how to get everyone on the same page from the start as you form the team. You'll find pointers for refocusing an effort that's gone off in the weeds, and practices for working with teams as complex systems. See how to scale liftoffs for multiple teams across the enterprise, address the three key elements for collaborative team chartering, establish the optimal conditions for learning and improvement, and apply the GEFN (Good Enough for Now) rule for efficient liftoffs. Throughout the book are stories from real-life teams lifting off, as seasoned coaches describe their experiences with liftoffs and agile team chartering. Focused conversations help the team align, form, and build enough trust for collaborating. You'll build a common understanding of the teams' context within business goals. Every liftoff is unique, but success is common!

“We need better approaches to understanding and managing software requirements, and Dean provides them in this book. He draws ideas from three very useful intellectual pools: classical management practices, Agile methods, and lean product development. By combining the strengths of these three approaches, he has produced something that works better than any one in isolation.” –From the Foreword by Don Reinertsen, President of Reinertsen & Associates; author of Managing the Design Factory; and leading expert on rapid product development Effective requirements discovery and analysis is a critical best practice for serious application development. Until now, however, requirements and Agile methods have rarely coexisted peacefully. For many enterprises considering Agile approaches, the absence of effective and scalable Agile requirements processes has been a showstopper for Agile adoption. In Agile Software Requirements, Dean Leffingwell shows exactly how to create effective requirements in Agile environments. Part I presents the “big picture” of Agile requirements in the enterprise, and describes an overall process model for Agile requirements at the project team, program, and portfolio levels Part II describes a simple and lightweight, yet comprehensive model that Agile project teams can use to manage requirements Part III shows how to develop Agile requirements for complex systems that require the cooperation of multiple teams Part IV guides enterprises in developing Agile requirements for ever-larger “systems of systems,” application suites, and product portfolios This book will help you leverage the benefits of Agile without sacrificing the value of effective requirements discovery and analysis. You’ll find proven solutions you can apply right now–whether you’re a software developer or tester, executive, project/program manager, architect, or team leader.

For those considering Extreme Programming, this book provides no-nonsense advice on agile planning, development, delivery, and management taken from the authors' many years of experience. While plenty of books address the what and why of agile development, very few offer the information users can apply directly.