Agile Articles

Jeff Patton presenting at AgileIndy 2024
Agile | 18 min read

Agile Indy 2024 Trip Report

Agile Indy 2024 From the AgileIndy site: AgileIndy is a user group devoted to raising awareness, acceptance, and support to people who explore and apply agile values, principles, and practices to make building software solutions more effective, humane, and sustainable. This year’s conference took place on Friday October 18th at 502 E Carmel Dr, Carmel, […]

Agile Indy Kickoff
Agile | 17 min read

AgileIndy is Back! A 2023 Conference Experience Recap

I was able to attend the AgileIndy conference again this year. What I will do here is give a summary of the content of the talks I attended. Or at least some notes that I took. These notes do not entirely capture the talk itself. If you want more information, hopefully, that will be a […]

Agile | 6 min read

Five Strategies for a Happy and Healthy Software Maintenance Team

Software Maintenance Teams provide a broad array of services, customized to the industries they support. As a software development consultancy, our portfolio includes industries like energy, aerospace, healthcare, medical devices, precision agriculture, and others. The products we build live on Desktop, Embedded, Mobile, Web, and Cloud platforms. With such a diversity of industries and platforms, […]

Focus your Perspective
Agile | 8 min read

Focus Your Product Perspective

Have you ever tried to work with someone with the best of intentions, but it ends in a shouting match? Or walking away with the same or more problems than you started? A colleague was dealing with helping their client with upcoming milestones, and it felt like a similar situation was inevitable. He wanted to […]

Agile2023 Conference Closing Party
Agile | 8 min read

Agile2022 Conference Reflective

While attending Agile2022 this year, I couldn’t help but reflect back on my long history with this conference. I attended my first Agile conference in 2008 in Toronto. The following year in 2009, I was a speaker. Since then, I have presented or attended nearly every year since. I’ve been a reviewer, helping review and […]

Agile | 4 min read

A Matter of When, Not If

Prologue You are enjoying a brisk December evening by the fireplace. The tea in your cup warms your hands and fills your nose with fragrant aroma. Then you realize that Christmas is in a week. The Stories in our Heads Are you anxious? Maybe you don’t have time to get presents shipped in time. Maybe […]

Agile | 8 min read

One Lead’s Journey to Successfully Improving My Software Forecasting With Monte Carlo Simulation

What is this? Forecasting is not a skill I use frequently, which means it takes me time to remember each of the steps and the small details I’ve forgotten. There’s a lot of great information out there, but reading it and refreshing my memory takes longer than I’d like it to. My goal here is […]

Agile | 1 min read

SEPTalks: The Principles of Empowered Teams

We all strive to create products that customers love and teams that are excited to come to work every day. Actually achieving this in practice is a surprising challenge. Humans and products are naturally complex, and pulling off these feats require a special blend of psychology and systems-thinking. Products are outcomes of the systems used […]

Agile | 9 min read

Title Goes Here

Creating something brand new is hard. No matter if it’s a painting, a system architecture, or a conference talk, the creative effort of conjuring up something from nothing is difficult. Take me for example, staring at a text editor, trying to figure out what to type next and think up a clever title. Writers know […]

Agile | 1 min read

SEPTalks: Delivering in Bets: How Betting Will Improve Your Delivery Strategy

Defining a delivery strategy can be difficult. We tend to underestimate the risk, aren’t explicit about our assumptions, and don’t involve the delivery team early in the process. Chris Shinkle, our Director of Innovation, recently introduced the idea of delivering in bets to several clients. The idea is that each delivery is a series of […]

Agile | 4 min read

The Pregnant Scrum Master

My slightly satirical, stream-of-consciousness take on scrummy pregnancy. First Trimester Scrum Master You were a developer before you became a scrum master, so you’ll get a kick out of calling your baby a monad, because – like – “generically automating away boilerplate code” and something about “a thing that creates side-effects.” I mean, come on […]

Agile | 3 min read

2 Practices We Adopted Since Going Remote

My team of five has been working together on a cloud-based learning system for nearly a year. Since going remote, we needed to find a way to keep us connected just as if we were working next to each other in the office. We decided to try two new things: – End of the Day […]