Recently I’ve read an article in German Computer Woche which was titled ‘Are ERP systems too slow for business?’. It is about complex ERP systems that are not able to adopt to the fast changing business needs. There was one interesting word by an Ernst & Young partner I had never heard before: Agile Enterprise.
As we do agile software development for our customers I was curious what agile enterprise means. So I asked Google and read some articles about it. A good definition can be found at the Business Dictionary:
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There are many ways to do a good sprint retrospective, so we decided to try a new one every now and then.
This time we took the role of a painter, painting out impression of the last sprint into a formidable piece of art.
It might look strange at the beginning, but it quite nicely captures the impressions and feelings about the last iteration and provokes different thoughts than a simple list of items which could be improved. Lets see if we will use this method some time again.
As an example I am going to present you my painting. The ones from my team mates are interesting as well, but I would not dare to show them without permission 
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The Daily Scrum just takes fiveteen minutes and is the central tool for every agile team, to coordinate and structure the day. You should expect that every minute counts and everybody values the meeting with the priority and usefullness it deserves. Still, experience shows, that it happens that team members show up late for Daily Scrum. What’s the best way to deal with that situation?
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We at codecentric have hundreds of automatic builds run every day, sometimes they … fail. This post is not about lame excuses. “nah the build shouldn’t fail, that was a trivial change…” does not count. But there are situations where a build fails because … well nobody really knows.
Some people say: cosmic rays! But we know that is not true. To efficiently utilize a CI system without the need to troubleshoot a long time here some common issues we encountered and ideas how to mitigate them.
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On the robotframework-users mailing list was a question about how radio buttons can be properly handled with the SeleniumLibrary. There was apparently a problem somewhere in the generated xpath expression, and the user found it difficult to debug where things went wrong.
Since I failed to explain to the user in a private e-mail conversation how to debug the situation with the selenium IDE, I made a short screencast. At the end, I had to briefly pause the cast, since I was getting close to the 5:00 restriction, but I hope you’ll catch everything. (read more…)
In the environment of the agile method „Scrum“ I would like to contemplate more closely one important aspect of the project management: The composition of the project team. In the conventional project management this is one of the basic tasks of the project manager. The ideal case is that he can assemble his project team on his own and that he can change the composition during the ongoing project. In the real daily routine he naturally is subject to many external conditions, like for example a limited choice of potential team members or competition through other projects and budget limits. However this does not affect that the project manager should have this authority. (read more…)
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