A methodologically sophisticated, comprehensive approach to applying the Agile fixed-price contract to IT projects while maximizing customer and supplier relationships "Interesting and necessary for IT managers and IT lawyers." —Walter J. Jaburek, Dipl.-Ing., Dr. iur., Dr. techn. Approximately 50 percent of software developers use Scrum, an iterative and incremental development method for managing software projects and product or application development, in their work. The benefit of Scrum and other Agile methods is that they can address shifts in a large project that traditional managerial methods cannot. Written by pioneers and leaders in the field of Agile and Scrum, Agile Contracts is the only book dedicated exclusively to the legal, procurement, and project management considerations of Agile contracts. Providing templates, a toolbox, and examples of Agile fixed-price contracts, the book presents an alternative option to fixed-price, time-based, and supply-based contracts—reducing the risk for both the supplier and the customer with a contract that offers the possibility of flux and flexible scenarios as a project progresses. Agile Contracts features in-depth chapter coverage of: The Agile Manifesto of 2001 Agility from the perspective of procurement and the software provider The problems with traditional fixed-price contracts and time material contracts What the Agile fixed-price contract is and how it is set up Tendering based on the Agile fixed-price contract How to negotiate an Agile fixed-price contract Special guidelines for the legal framework of an Agile fixed-price contract Adaptable Scope System The Black Swan scenario Contracts and procedures for the featured methodologies Especially applicable within highly structured business organizations, Agile Contracts is a must-read for project managers, agile practitioners, procurement representatives, and IT lawyers.

Digital transformation is reshaping the business arena as new, successful digital business models are increasing agility and presenting better ways to handle business than the traditional alternatives. Industry 4.0 affects everything in our daily lives and is blurring the line between the physical, the biological, and the digital. This created an environment where technology and humans are so closely integrated that it is impacting every activity within the organizations. Specifically, contracting processes and procedures are challenged to align with the new business dynamics as traditional contracts are no longer fitting today's agile and continuously changing environments. Businesses are required to facilitate faster, more secure, soft, and real-time transactions while protecting stakeholders’ rights and obligations. This includes agile contracts which are dynamically handling scope changes, smart contracts that can automate rule-based functions, friction-less contracts that can facilitate different activities, and opportunity contracts that looks toward the future. Innovative and Agile Contracting for Digital Transformation and Industry 4.0 analyzes the consequences, benefits, and possible scenarios of contract transformation under the pressure of new technologies and business dynamics in modern times. The chapters cover the problems, issues, complications, strategies, governance, and risks related to the development and enforcement of digital transformation contracting practices. While highlighting topics in the area of digital transformation and contracting such as artificial intelligence, digital business, emerging technologies, and blockchain, this book is ideally intended for business, engineering, and technology practitioners and policy makers, along with practitioners, stakeholders, researchers, academicians, and students interested in understanding the scope, complexity, and importance of innovative contracts and agile contracting.

Lean Development and Agile Methods for Large-Scale Products: Key Thinking and Organizational Tools for Sustainable Competitive Success Increasingly, large product-development organizations are turning to lean thinking, agile principles and practices, and large-scale Scrum to sustainably and quickly deliver value and innovation. However, many groups have floundered in their practice-oriented adoptions. Why? Because without a deeper understanding of the thinking tools and profound organizational redesign needed, it is as though casting seeds on to an infertile field. Now, drawing on their long experience leading and guiding large-scale lean and agile adoptions for large, multisite, and offshore product development, and drawing on the best research for great team-based agile organizations, internationally recognized consultant and best-selling author Craig Larman and former leader of the agile transformation at Nokia Networks Bas Vodde share the key thinking and organizational tools needed to plant the seeds of product development success in a fertile lean and agile enterprise. Coverage includes Lean thinking and development combined with agile practices and methods Systems thinking Queuing theory and large-scale development processes Moving from single-function and component teams to stable cross-functional cross-component Scrum feature teams with end-to-end responsibility for features Organizational redesign to a lean and agile enterprise that delivers value fast Large-scale Scrum for multi-hundred-person product groups In a competitive environment that demands ever-faster cycle times and greater innovation, applied lean thinking and agile principles are becoming an urgent priority. Scaling Lean & Agile Development will help leaders create the foundation for their lean enterprise—and deliver on the significant benefits of agility. In addition to the foundation tools in this text, see the companion book Practices for Scaling Lean & Agile Development: Large, Multisite, and Offshore Product Development with Large-Scale Scrum for complementary action tools.

The field of software engineering is characterized by speed and turbulence in many regards. While new ideas are proposed almost on a yearly basis, very few of them live for a decade or a longer. Lightweight software development methods were a new idea in the latter part of the 1990s. Now, ten years later, they are better known as agile software development methods, and an active community driven by practitioners has formed around the new way of thinking. Agile software development is currently being embraced by the research community as well. As a sign of increased research activity, most research-oriented conferences have an agile software development track included in the conference program. The XP conference series established in 2000 was the first conference dedicated to agile processes in software engineering. The idea of the conference is to offer a unique setting for advancing the state of the art in research and practice of agile processes. This year’s conference was the tenth consecutive edition of this international event. Due to the diverse nature of different activities during the conference, XP is claimed to be more of an experience rather then a regular conference. It offers several different ways to interact and strives to create a truly collaborative environment where new ideas and exciting findings can be presented and shared. This is clearly visible from this year’s program as well.

Big Agile leaders need an empirical, "high-trust" model that provides guidance for scaling and sustaining agility and capability throughout a modern technology organization. This book presents the Agile Performance Holarchy (APH)—a "how-ability" model that provides agile leaders and teams with an operating system to build, evaluate, and sustain great agile habits and behaviors. The APH is an organizational operating system based on a set of interdependent, self-organizing circles, or holons, that reflect the empirical, object-oriented nature of agility. As more companies seek the benefits of Agile within and beyond IT, agile leaders need to build and sustain capability while scaling agility—no easy task—and they need to succeed without introducing unnecessary process and overhead. The APH is drawn from lessons learned while observing and assessing hundreds of agile companies and teams. It is not a process or a hierarchy, but a holarchy, a series of performance circles with embedded and interdependent holons that reflect the behaviors of high-performing agile organizations. Great Big Agile provides implementation guidance in the areas of leadership, values, teaming, visioning, governing, building, supporting, and engaging within an all-agile organization. What You’ll Learn Model the behaviors of a high-performance agile organizationBenefit from lessons learned by other organizations that have succeeded with Big AgileAssess your level of agility with the Agile Performance Holarchy Apply the APH model to your business Understand the APH performance circles, holons, objectives, and actions Obtain certification for your company, organization, or agency Who This Book Is For Professionals leading, or seeking to lead, an agile organization who wish to use an innovative model to raise their organization's agile performance from one level to the next, all the way to mastery

Software development continues to be an ever-evolving field as organizations require new and innovative programs that can be implemented to make processes more efficient, productive, and cost-effective. Agile practices particularly have shown great benefits for improving the effectiveness of software development and its maintenance due to their ability to adapt to change. It is integral to remain up to date with the most emerging tactics and techniques involved in the development of new and innovative software. The Research Anthology on Agile Software, Software Development, and Testing is a comprehensive resource on the emerging trends of software development and testing. This text discusses the newest developments in agile software and its usage spanning multiple industries. Featuring a collection of insights from diverse authors, this research anthology offers international perspectives on agile software. Covering topics such as global software engineering, knowledge management, and product development, this comprehensive resource is valuable to software developers, software engineers, computer engineers, IT directors, students, managers, faculty, researchers, and academicians.

Many organizations are facing the uphill battle of modernizing their legacy IT infrastructure. Most have evolved over the years by taking lessons from traditional or legacy manufacturing: creating a production process that puts the emphasis on the process instead of the people performing the tasks, allowing the organization to treat people like resources to try to achieve high-quality outcomes. But those practices and ideas are failing modern IT, where collaboration and creativeness are required to achieve high-performing, high-quality success. Mirco Hering, a thought leader in managing IT within legacy organizations, lays out a roadmap to success for IT managers, showing them how to create the right ecosystem, how to empower people to bring their best to work every day, and how to put the right technology in the driver's seat to propel their organization to success. But just having the right methods and tools will not magically transform an organization; the cultural change that is the hardest is also the most impactful. Using principles from Agile, Lean, and DevOps as well as first-hand examples from the enterprise world, Hering addresses the different challenges that legacy organizations face as they transform into modern IT departments.