Previously, Rally was only available as a SaaS offering, but this new on-premises version is designed specifically to enable companies that operate globally to plan, prioritize, manage, track, and measure the value they are delivering to customers while still maintaining security and compliance. 

Rally Anywhere provides data sovereignty, meaning that data stays within the physical borders of where it originated, which allows companies to comply with international data protection regulations and alleviate data residency concerns.

It also provides the flexibility and scalability that is necessary for teams that are split up across multiple time zones and geographic locations to work together collaboratively. 

According to Broadcom, with this announcement, the company’s entire ValueOps Value Stream Management Solution is now available as either a SaaS or on-premises option. 

“We are committed to empowering enterprise teams with the tools they need to succeed, and Rally Anywhere exemplifies this commitment. With its focus on enterprise security, data sovereignty, and support for global value streams, we are confident that this new product will be a game-changer for organizations looking to elevate their collaborative efforts while maintaining control and security,” said Serge Lucio, general manager of the Agile Operations Division at Broadcom.

The post Broadcom adds on-premises version of its enterprise agility platform Rally appeared first on SD Times.

Broadcom is integrating its Clarity investment planning software and its Rally Agile management software to provide visibility and metrics to all stakeholders tasked with ensuring the organization is delivering value.

In an interview with SD Times, Serge Lucio, vice president and general manager of the Enterprise Software Division at Broadcom, said the integration expands the view of value stream management from flow — how efficiently the organization is delivering product — to accounting for value. “For most everyone, value stream management is about velocity and predictability,” Lucio said. “Integrating this with flow is at the core of our announcement.”

Lucio also noted in the company’s announcement that Broadcom’s implementation of value stream management provides executives “with a major leap forward in how they can understand and analyze priorities, capacity, progress and results within their organizations.”

Highlights of the capabilities of ValueOps include digital product management features that visualize programs, teams and other investment objects in ways that the business can best understand. ValueOps also provides context-aware insights by aggregating organizational data in real time to give a full picture of delivery, performance and return on investment. Organizations, Lucio told SD Times, need to “think about your systems as a collection of digital services,” and apply business metrics that go along with flow metrics.

The solution now also helps technical leaders by connecting the work to strategic investment plans, business goals and OKRs, to ensure “resources are efficiently delivering the highest priority and most valuable initiatives,” the company said in its announcement. Further, ValueOps now maps value streams to investment decisions, creating better transparency.

To learn more about this innovative approach to value streams, Broadcom is hosting a Value Stream Management Virtual Summit on June 23.

The post Broadcom adds investment planning, Agile management to its ValueOps solution appeared first on SD Times.

The swing took us to today’s reality where large global organizations, traditionally manufacturing titans or insurance household names, are now software businesses at their core. According to Greg Gould, head of product for Rally at Broadcom, “These transformations were inevitable for companies to stay relevant in the landscapes of digital shifts and disruptions that upended entire industries. Companies have the increasing need to stay relevant and visible to end customers that have a wealth of options and information at their fingertips.” These transformations have also caused a shift in the industry from the days of expansive IT organizations that owned all of the tooling decisions across monolithic engineering groups, to a world of modular R&D organizations that are nimble and performant. These types of modern engineering organizations require the exact right set of tooling for each team’s particular needs.

Next the advent of Agile, and Agile specific tooling, contributed to huge gains to what we now know as modern product development practices. With a focus on team autonomy, small dollar value purchases were decentralized and could be made online with the development managers P card without requiring long procurement and approval processes. It was awesome. Teams could use whatever tools helped them be the most productive and new and upcoming startups offered slick solutions that could be purchased and implemented in no time.

However, there was a realization that teams of 7-9 people that were highly empowered and autonomous could only take a product and an organization so far. There was a need to scale Agile beyond the single team to effectively plan and execute at a large scale. Some tooling options took the challenge of scaling Agile in stride, gracefully bringing capabilities to the market to address the needs of not just the development team, but also the needs of Agile release trains, program and portfolio teams, product teams, QA teams, and DevOps teams. Some did not, but were already incumbents at the team level, and hard to replace without significant disruption to productivity in engineering.

Organizations were struggling to maintain dozens of implementations of various tools, typically highly customized to each group and discipline. While the teams were effective at the team level, it was complete spaghetti for anyone even one layer above the day to day of a team. Large organizations also faced increasing challenges in attracting and retaining engineering talent and attempted to solve the issue by forcing tooling onto developers, causing mutiny in the ranks. At the cost of hiring a new engineer, this was creating a situation organizations could not afford.

This conundrum continues to haunt large scale organizations and has been doing so for as long as Agile has been around. The concepts of interoperability in a tooling ecosystem were never new, but they were not applied up-front to this challenge. How could they have been? Disciplines have continued to evolve even after the arrival of the market standard tools that govern Agile development. Organizations are trying to run their companies and anticipate the shifts market without a holistic view of the data needed to make informed decisions. Companies struggle with poorly bolted on tools as a result of acquisitions and team preference for flashy options to suit every need. Gould has said of some of the largest Agile organizations in the market, “They manage financials and budgeting in one tool, Roadmapping and Agile program and portfolio level planning in another, and development and execution in multiple others. And while all of these tools are daisy chained together, the manual effort to pass data between them is cumbersome and a full-time job. That is what we sought to solve in our recent product the Rally Adapter for Jira”

However, there is light at the end of this tunnel, and we are beginning to see cohesion in at least some of the major players of these spaces. Notably, Broadcom’s suite of products including Rally, Clarity and the newly released premium add-on that brings visibility from the entire execution layer, even if it exists in Jira, has hit the market and found traction. These early and tangible solutions from a major player in the market demonstrate that with the right product and customer focus even a decade plus of silos in tooling can be tamed to provide a highly valuable set of data to drive a business’ decision making to achieve their overall goals and objectives. Gould noted that “Data normalization isn’t sexy, but the Adapter we provide between Rally and Jira is instrumental in the organizations that use it, driving visibility across silos in their value streams to make confident data driven business decisions.”

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Easy Agile is an Australian software technology business focused on helping teams be more effective. We create agile apps for Atlassian’s Jira platform; Story Maps, Roadmaps, Programs and Personas. Easy Agile is built on strong values of work/life/community balance. We pledge 1% of our time and profit back into the community.

RELATED CONTENT:
What’s standing in the way of achieving “true agility”
How these companies are solving the pain points of Agile

Agility CMS is a headless content management platform that allows developers to work in their preferred technology stack, framework and language. It supports RESTful and GraphQL APIs for easy integration with any system and enables non-technical users to make changes without coding. 

Atlassian offers Jira Software, the #1 software development tool used by agile teams. As an agile project management tool, it helps teams plan, track and move work forward. Atlassian’s Jira Align extends the power of teams working in Jira by connecting business strategy to technical execution while providing real-time visibility at enterprise scale. It allows enterprises to aggregate team-level data and makes all work visible across the organization in real-time.

Axosoft’s agile project management software is based on the Scrum methodology and designed to help teams plan, track and release software. It features a release planner to view capacities of the sprint, team and team members; interactive Kanban boards to customize and edit item cards and work logs; and custom dashboards with an overview of velocity and projected ship date. 

Azure DevOps is Microsoft’s suite of DevOps tools designed to help teams collaborate to deliver high-quality solutions faster. Agile teams can utilize the solution to plan, track and discuss work as well as use Scrum-ready and Kanban-capable boards. Other features include Azure Pipelines for CI/CD initiatives, Azure Boards for planning and tracking, Azure Artifacts for creating, hosting and sharing packages, Azure Repos for collaboration and Azure Test Plans for testing and shipping.

Blueprint Storyteller helps make sense of complex agile software development initiatives by aligning business strategy and compliance with IT execution. According to the company, this enables teams to drive innovation, reduce risk and waste and unlock unrealized value. The solution tackles app development, regulatory compliance, requirements management and software modernization. 

Digital.ai is a leading platform provider for Value Stream Management, Agile planning, DevOps and source code management. Its offerings provide global enterprise and government industry leaders a cohesive solution that enables them to ideate, create and orchestrate the flow of value through continuous delivery pipelines with measurable business outcomes. 

GitLab is a single application built from the ground up for all stages of the DevOps lifecycle for Product, Development, QA, Security, and Operations teams to work concurrently on the same project. Agile teams can use GitLab to plan and manage projects with features like issue tracking and boards, task lists, epics, roadmaps, labels, and burndown charts. GitLab supports SAFe, Spotify, Disciplined Agile Delivery and more. 

Inflectra’s enterprise agile program management solution SpiraPlan enables teams to plan and manage projects, set goals, and deliver on time and on budget. Features include one place to keep track of all activities, trackable planning boards and dashboards, a test management platform, and customizable workflows. In addition, the company offers SpiraTeam for bringing teams together and enabling them to manage the entire project life cycle from requirements and tests to tasks and code.

Jama Software centralizes upstream planning and requirements management in the software development process with its solution, Jama Connect. Product planning and engineering teams can collaborate quickly while building out traceable requirements and test cases to ensure development stays aligned to customer needs and compliance throughout the process. 

Micro Focus ALM Octane is an enterprise DevOps Agile management solution designed to ensure high-quality app delivery. It includes Agile tools for team collaboration, the ability to scale to enterprise Agile tools, and DevOps management.

The Perforce Helix ALM suite provides end-to-end traceability across the life cycle. It includes modules dedicated to requirements management, test case management and issue management. In addition, it works with popular Agile methodologies like Scrum, Kanban and XP and supports traditional methodologies such as waterfall. 

Pivotal Tracker is a Agile project management solution that provides a single view of all team priorities to make sure everyone is on the same page and can smartly manage projects. It offers stories to define projects, automatic planning to keep teams moving, workspaces to organize projects, and analytics to see how teams and projects are functioning. 

Planview’s Enterprise Agile Planning solution enables organizations to adopt and embrace Lean-Agile practices, scale Agile beyond teams, practice Agile Program Management, and better connect strategy to Agile team delivery while continuously improving the flow of work and helping them work smarter and deliver faster. With Planview, choose how you want to scale and when. We’ll help you transform and scale Agile on your terms and timeline.

The Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe) is the leading framework for scaling Agile across the enterprise. It is designed to help businesses deliver value on a regular and predictable schedule. It includes a knowledge base of proven principles and practices for supporting enterprise agility. 

Targetprocess: To connect portfolio, products and teams, Targetprocess offers a visual platform to help you adopt and scale Agile across your enterprise. Use SAFe, LeSS or implement your own framework to achieve business agility and see the value flow through the entire organization.

Tasktop Integration Hub connects the network of best-of-breed tools used to plan, build, and deliver software at an enterprise-level. As the backbone for the most impactful Agile and DevOps transformations, Tasktop enables organizations to define their software delivery value stream, and enables end-to-end visibility, traceability and governance over the whole process.

TechExcel recently announced the release of Agile Studio, a new Agile development platform that empowers organizations to mix Agile methodologies with traditional development methods. It provides out-of-the-box support for all major Agile methods and consists of three major Agile development tools: DevTrack, DevPlan and KnowledgeWise. 

The post A guide to Agile development tools appeared first on SD Times.

“That means they may start with a whiteboard, and in the times of COVID graduate to a digital story mapping solution like Easy Agile User Story Maps. Then in later years once they’ve mastered that level of Agile they may shift to Easy Agile Programs which supports a scaled agile transformation,” he explained. 

When deciding to put a tool into the mix, that tool should be able to easily and natively integrate with the platform developer teams are comfortable with and already using.

RELATED CONTENT: What’s standing in the way of achieving “true agility”

According to Dan Rice, executive advisor for ValueOps/DevOps at Broadcom’s Rally Software, an Agile tool, to be really effective, needs to offer capabilities needed by teams, teams of teams, programs, portfolios, governance and leadership. So it has to provide a way to visualize work, drive data decisions and minimize the work. “Keeping engineers doing what they love, in the tools they love to do it,” he said. “Tools that require custom views and plug-ins, in addition to many clicks to accomplish a task, may appear to save you money up front but you will spend significantly more in the end in lost productivity.”

Tools can also support teams by enabling them to visualize plans and see whether or not they have unrealistic expectations, and track progress against release plans, changes and community risks. “Your tool should be flexible enough to allow your teams to work the way they want without constraining visibility of progress across the organization,” Rice said.

The Broadcom Rally solution is an enterprise platform built for scaling Agile development practices, while Easy Agile provides Agile applications for building user story maps, personas, roadmaps and programs. 

Each solution is designed to solve different pain points of Agile:

Muldoon explained Easy Agile is “customer-focus made easy.’ That’s our mantra.

Collaboration is so important with distributed teams and Easy Agile apps for Jira solves the problem of ‘taking it off the wall.’ That is, taking the Agile Post-it’s, string and paper off the physical wall and digitizing it in Jira.

There is a lot of pain with Agile in that Agile ceremonies are isolated from the delivery of value. However, with Easy Agile Apps for Jira, Story Maps, PI Planning, Roadmapping and Personas can all happen in Jira where the team is already tracking their work.

We aim to make common agile practices remarkably simple. So simple that anyone on the team can get involved.

We’re not creating one monster app to cover many different customers and problem spaces; we are creating apps that focus on one area at a time, and that fit together nicely like a jigsaw puzzle to provide a solution that is greater than the sum of its parts.

According to Broadcom’s Rice, Rally is used as organizations look to scale Agile beyond the development team. Rally helps reduce the complexity of planning and execution across teams from the entire organization.  Some examples include:

Rally enables organizations to easily visualize and track all of the work being delivered without the need for custom boards and views. With Rally’s Organizational Hierarchy, it is easy to quickly tie strategic initiatives to program and agile team planning and execution, allowing for a clear understanding of priorities and progress.

Rally’s Capacity Planning functionality allows an organization to easily model team and delivery group capacity against planned work so that organizations can create achievable plans and feel confident in commitments, building trust while identifying and understanding risks and issues that could have an impact on those commitments.

Rally’s robust Dependency and Risk Management capabilities help you quickly visualize and understand cross-team, program and portfolio dependencies, including misalignments and potential impacts to your plans without the need for complex plug-ins, queries or views.  

Rally’s Release and PI Tracking functionality allows you to visualize progress against release and PI plans, so that you understand when scope change may put plans at risk. This helps facilitate the right conversations, enabling you to steer work effectively across all teams and delivery groups involved in a release or PI. 

The post How these companies are solving the pain points of Agile appeared first on SD Times.

The 14th annual State of Agile report found that distributed teams is the new normal with 81% of respondents citing that their team members are not all in the same location. Businesses need to be able find new ways to support and encourage team collaboration, manage changing projects and provide visibility.

“So how can we accelerate change when we know our processes are fundamentally broken?” Muldoon asked. His answer is Agile because it promotes flexibility and transparency businesses so desperately need now in a COVID and post-COVID world. The State of Agile report also found that respondents were using Agile to respond to the current business challenges, manage distributed teams, improve productivity and deliver software faster. 

“Agile gives so many companies results. It removes ambiguity from the value being delivered. Where before we couldn’t be sure when a project or new product could be delivered, we can now know with more certainty that a MVP can be shipped and we can receive feedback from customers much earlier,” said Muldoon. 

Many organizations already have had Agile practices in place for years and have continued to build upon those practices, but Muldoon explained Agile is an ongoing practice, one that will never get to a phase of “post-Agile.” Businesses will always have to manage changing priorities, to improve, and to adapt — all aspects of adopting the Agile mindset. 

The roadblocks on the path to true agility
Agile challenges are ever-changing depending on the company, team and current business needs. However, there are a few that continue to pose a problem.   

“Individuals and interactions over processes and tools” is one of the first values in the Agile Manifesto, yet people are still focused on processes over people, according to Muldoon. 

Dan Rice, executive advisor for ValueOps/DevOps at Broadcom’s Rally Software, explained in order to make agility truly work, buy-in has to happen across the entire organization — and it’s easier done when it comes from the top down. “The key areas we see that still hinder the ability to deliver value to customers are generally related to leadership teams not embracing the Agile culture or thinking Agile is just something IT or software delivery teams do,” he said. 

Leadership will continue to be a major obstacle unless people in power are willing to relinquish control to the next generation of leaders who were brought up on lean and Agile practices, Muldoon said. 

“All too often there are people at the top of companies that are protecting the status quo, the entrenched interests, and themselves. We need to see the servant leaders elevated from people managers to department leads, business unit CEOs, and then the board,” Muldoon explained. 

“Quite often the CEOs and board members don’t come from a software background; they come from finance, legal and marketing more often these days, but not IT or software. Scarcity versus abundance mindset — anything can be done in software, yet for an accountant it is very clear-cut and regulated,” he continued.

One rising trend to help the organization achieve true agility is to embrace value stream management. VSM is being adopted more and more as a way to connect people, process and technology as well as provide the ability to visualize, measure and deliver business value. According to Rice, Agile is a key enabler to making all the people and steps involved in the delivery of value a part of the product development process.

A “characteristic of Agile done well is when value streams, all of the people and steps involved in the delivery of value to a customer, are part of the product development process.  A key lean principle of Agile is connecting business stakeholders and developers so that they work together daily through the project. Value streams make this a core aspect of an organization’s culture of Agility,” Rice explained.

Another way Rice sees organizations implementing Agile throughout the organization is to incorporate agility into HR functions, encourage autonomy, hire for Agile and culture fit and provide interactive performance feedback.

Muldoon agreed, adding: “Invest in people; it’s the greatest leading indicator of sustained success. Give them the opportunities to expand the breadth of their experience / role and try new things, cross-pollinating one group with the ideas from another, and making the whole company stronger.”

Rice also sees the need to move from project-based operating models to product-based operating models with a customer-centric approach to make sure teams are building products customers actually want. 

“Agile puts the customer and the outcomes they care about most at the center of the products we build. By advocating for long-lived product teams, bringing work to teams instead of bringing teams to work, Agile enables organizations to give customers working software at regular intervals and to facilitate continuous feedback,” he said. 

Easy Agile’s Muldoon also sees a trend towards businesses being more customer-focused with the release of SAFe 5.0 for example, which “introduced language around Personas, story mapping sessions, and really bringing empathy for the customer into focus for teams.”

By focusing on the customer, organizations can react to change and respond at regular intervals, Rice added. Agile “encourages organizations to reflect regularly and become a learning organization so they can constantly improve.” 

Muldoon also stressed the importance of playing the long game. While it may be tempting to think short-term to address current needs, a transformation can’t be fast-tracked. “True agility comes after a decade of sustained commitment to the Agile principles,” he said. Thinking needs to go from annual financial goals to long-sustainable growth. 

But they also need to be able to quickly pivot based on market changes and feedback from innovators and customers. Rice explained. “Organizations maintaining traditional processes such as identifying investments multiple years in advance and locking in feature roadmaps have worked to their detriment to reaching true agility.”

“When new strategies are identified or experiments fail, organizations must be able to quickly pivot on their strategy, investments and roadmaps so they do not continue down the wrong path,” Rice said. 

Digital transformations will “continue forever as the company changes and adapts to an evolving market. Be prepared to stick it out,” Muldoon added. 

The post What’s standing in the way of achieving “true agility” appeared first on SD Times.

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The new age of Agile: Evolving from teams to the entire business 

Christopher Pola, executive advisor at Rally, says, “So you’re abiding by the principles of product flow and lean, agile enterprise because the reason why people aren’t getting benefits is they’re still managing the work and the people in a very traditional way. An example of that mindset is efficiency: We value efficiency foremost, right? That means everyone has to be working 100 percent. But when dealing with the knowledge economy and the front line, workers have more knowledge than their management, and there’s so much variability, nothing homogenous in terms of tasks, nothing’s repetitive. Capacity, efficiency, and utilization is a very bad metric to run your organization on.”

Enterprises need to think differently in terms of whether it manages the people, process and technology, or the people’s scope and time. It needs to allow for variability, cycle time, and innovation. Then those changes need to be brought into both planning and execution.

Laureen Knutsen, executive advisor and head of solution architects at Rally, describes an example of an actual customer: “They mentioned that they were doing resource utilization and the resource utilization people were very proud of themselves because they said they had 100 percent utilization. I asked them how they’d done that. They said, ‘We keep track of every project. We had somebody come up to us and tell us that they finished with a project, not just a task, a project, two hours early. So we gave them a two-hour task to fill their time so they were 100 percent utilized. I asked them if anyone had told them again that they were done early, and they hadn’t.”

That organization was making people less productive by trying to be 100 percent utilized at a consolidated level. The organization had a few thousand people on its team and it was trying to manage 100 percent of everyone’s time. That’s vintage resource management and an upper level of process that needs to change so the team can actually get to true productivity and predictability within itself.

Changing that methodology entails getting down to the fundamentals of where adverse practices first started. Knutsen says that at first you’re guessing and placing bets when you’re strategizing. Then you need to let the teams estimate the work and tell you what they can really get done and have your teams work on becoming extremely predictable. Not just at the team level. When the teams become extremely predictable your projects will end up becoming more predictable. Your people will get very productive in that type of environment.

Rally visualizes everything from strategy all the way through execution. There are many types of business levels that you can tie to that top-tier strategy regardless of how long that’s going to take you to complete the strategy. You can tie it all the way down to the two-week iterations. Like breaking it down through whatever steps the company normally takes. 

Another challenge that needs to be overcome is that often the people doing the planning are not the people doing the work. Pola says, “First, this is all bad in a knowledge economy because your knowledge workers are the ones that have the skills. So we do that, we put the plans in place. When we manage to go to plan, then any variance from that plan, even if there’s value in changing the plan, we deem to be bad.” The result is managers manipulating spreadsheets to show a good report. Pola adds, “People don’t have the data right. They’re manipulating the data to run their businesses, and it’s not accurate. It’s not what I like to think of, which is a principle beyond budgeting. It’s an open and ethical information system that provides one truth across the organization.”

For Knutsen it’s evolutionary, continuous improvement, constant change, constant striving to get better at an individual level, a team level, a team of teams level, and a leadership level.  She says, “It’s really hard to fail at that point as opposed to companies that are continuing to do it as they’ve always done because that’s all they’ve always done.”

Pola believes the biggest improvements will come when decentralized decision-making becomes the norm because fundamentally it will help companies realize exponential improvement in cost optimization, innovation and make for happier people.

Content provided by  SD Times and Rally

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Organizations who have implemented agile at the team level have experienced improved time to market, more predictability in costs and timelines, better ability to engage users, and high retentions of developers, and now they want to see those benefits work for the entire business, according to Andrey Akselrod, cofounder and CTO of Smartling. “Speed and quality of product development is a significant competitive advantage. Enterprises can no longer avoid being agile if they want to survive very competitive markets and very tech-savvy competitors,” he said.

According to Cunningham, although departments such as HR, finance, marketing and sales may not have the same work as the software development department, agile can still help with their daily workflows. “They are really dealing with the same things that your software organization is dealing with,” he said.

“They have more work than they can possibly do in the time they are given, things are changing, and the things that they are being asked to do are often ambiguous. They need to have some systematic way to think about their work.”

(Related: Testing needs to catch up with agile)

But scaling agile beyond the team level is a lot harder than it is implementing it into one department. According to Christine Hudson, solutions manager at Rally (a CA Technologies company), it needs everyone in the entire organization to be involved and on board, and requires a lot of time, money and resources. Organizations may shy away from the approach because of the complexity, but Hudson believes the benefits are worth the risks.

“The benefits of agile at scale are beyond exceptional, and the costs of standing still greatly outweigh the costs of adoption,” she said.

Are you ready to scale agile?
If you want to scale agile, you have to have agile to scale in the first place, according to VersionOne’s Cunningham. He believes it is essential for an organization to have success at the team level before it can move beyond that.

“An organization has to first understand how agile works on a small scale, because the way I look at scaling agile is really taking those principles, those things that work at the team level, and just figuring out how to make them work on a larger scale,” he said.

In addition, since enterprise-level agile requires participation from everyone in the organization, everyone needs to embrace it, and achieving that executive support and participation is required. Executive support will help solidify that movement to agile is the right move, according to Cunningham.

“It is not only about an understanding of the agile principles and mechanics, but also the extent to which there is a demonstrative willingness to embrace it and to undergo the necessary organizational change,” he said. “Those two things are really good at indicating the extent the organization is not only ready to embark on something, but also [are] a leading indicator on how successful they might be.”

Another good way to measure how the company’s current business strategy is performing can simply be by answering these questions: “How does work flow to your teams? How far into the future do you plan? Do you include people from outside IT or engineering in your planning? What happens if the world changes after you plan?” said Rally’s Hudson. “And finally, you should ask yourself if you can afford not to adopt agile practices across your organization. Are your current methods for working keeping up with the rate of change and disruption influencing you?”

The answers to these questions can help gauge where the company is at right now, but perhaps one of the most important question an organization should ask themselves is “Do you want to keep your business alive in the 21st century? If so, then you’re ready for agile,” Hudson added.

Although Larry Maccherone, director of analytics and research for AgileCraft, argues that an organization is never really ready. “You’ll likely never be as ready as you wish you were,” he said. “The best course is to decide that you are going to do it, and then essentially do what you need to do to get ready.”

Maccherone adds that more and more organizations are seeing success with “big bang” agile transformations. A big bang agile approach consists of taking a leap and rolling out the deployment all at once, rather than the recommended small start into scaling.
“You would likely need expert help to take this approach, but it does offer the quickest path to reaping the benefits of scaled agile,” he said.

Prerequisites for agile
While Maccherone doesn’t think organizations will ever be completely prepared to scale agile, there are some basic principles and practices that can make the transition smoother.
According to Maccherone, there is a critical stepping stone organizations should use. “The first critical step is to orient around the product or service that you provide rather than the activities that the various workers perform,” he said. To achieve this, organizations should change their periodic planning activities, and eliminate organization obstacles to product or service orientation, according to Maccherone.

“If the testers, analysts, UX and Ops folks all think of themselves as working for their functional manager rather than on an agile team that is focused on a product initiative, you’ll never accomplish that first critical step,” he said.

Since agile is based on the idea of collaboration, communication is key and is not something that organizations can overlook when scaling their agile efforts, according to Baruch Sadogursky, developer advocate at JFrog.

“Agile is all about the communication and getting feedback. In order to get rapid feedback, team members and stakeholders need to be able to talk to each other to explain the work, what needs to be done, and what has already been completed,” he said.
If communication channels are not in place, then driving the agile message across the organization is going to be problematic, Sadogursky added. “Organizations need to put more efforts to make the communication channels open in order to maintain the flow of information,” he said.

Having a disconnected information flow is often the source of failed rollouts at scale, according to Steve Elliott, CEO and founder of AgileCraft. “Without a scaled agile platform in place to provide transparency from top to bottom and side to side—or said another way, without transparency from enterprise to portfolio to program to team—it is almost impossible to see progress and target coaching across the enterprise. It’s also difficult to measure the impact of the transformation or the value of the work being done during this phase,” he said.

Organizations should also make sure they are open to an agile mindset, according to Rally’s Hudson. “You need to be prepared to question the efficacy of your standard operating procedures,” she said. “And you need a willingness to inspect, adapt and improve as you go.”
Other organizational and development process changes that need to be in place before scaling include moving from a centralized command-and-control system to a decentralized system, according to Smartling’s Akselrod. A decentralized system can help teams become more in tune with their product.

“On the development side, processes like Continuous Integration, log monitoring, fully automated testing, and push-button deployment must be in place to make technology teams truly agile,” he said.

Finally, organizations need to realize that if they are going to embark on an agile transformation, the transformation will never be completed. According to Hudson, an organization will never be 100% agile because there is always going to be ways they can improve.

“The minute you’re complacent is the minute your competitors begin to close the gap,” she said. “That said, each iteration of the transformation is finished. You bite off small chunks, implement a step toward the desired change, finish, and evaluate it—then look at the results so you can determine the next right step to implement. The goals of enterprise-scale agile aren’t just predictability, performance improvements, quality improvements, and increasing customer happiness; you also need to strive to continuously improve.”

While the task can never be completed, JFrog’s Sadogursky does note that there is a point where organizations can say they are doing it correctly. “Converting or adopting agile is a process. It is not a task that can be completed,” he said. “We can definitely get to some point when we say what we are doing is correct, but it is a very long process and includes joining the new organization all the time, and making the communication channels better.”

If an organization decides to scale agile, they should expect a constant state of learning and improving from that point on, AgileCraft’s Maccherone added. “The entire concept of agile is about trying something out, and then improving based upon feedback from the real world.”

Major roadblocks standing in the way
Changing the thinking and workflow of an entire organization is difficult, and requires a lot of time, resources and money. Organizations want all the benefits of scaled agile, but not the costs that comes with it. Those costs are a major obstacle standing in the way of an organization’s path toward success, according to Smartling’s Akselrod.

“It takes time and money that you have to spend on the toolset, hiring a DevOps team, implementing all the software and practices enabling agile,” he said.

Akselrod justifies the costs by believing it is an investment that is worthwhile, and is a matter of spending the money or losing your business. “It really comes down to a very simple equation: Adopt agile or be destroyed by your competition. It is as simple as that,” he said.

In order to make the costs worthwhile, organizations need to have expectations set properly, which will help determine their readiness to move forward and guide them in terms of those expectations, according to VersionOne’s Cunningham. “The last thing that you want to happen is for a company to make a big investment in coaching, training and tooling, only to become disillusioned a few months down the road.”

In addition to investments, organizations need to remember that agile is a culture shift. Concentrating on the tools and process too much, and forgetting about how this is going to impact employees is usually what fails in a transition to agile, according to JFrog’s Sadogursky. “When organizations just blindly use the tools that were recommended by some agile book without actually explaining what they are trying to achieve and what are the end goals, that is 100% a recipe for failure,” he said. Driving the message about what’s really important—and deemphasizing what’s less important—will help the employees better understand the path they are on, he added.

“Agility requires a willingness to adapt at enterprise scale, and it takes courage to re-architect a whole business system for speed, steering, and opportunity capture,” said Rally’s Hudson.

Sadogursky also believes organizations who want to take that big bang approach will fail because it is easier to start small and then scale from there. “A more granular or step-by-step approach is more successful, because when you start with smaller teams, you can actually explain what they are trying to do, [and] you can monitor the process and get feedback,” he said.

VersionOne’s Cunningham went on to explain that an organization first needs to understand how fast they can absorb change before jumping too quickly into anything. “You are not only transforming the way people think about work, or do their work,” he said.

In the end, agile will help an organization be more responsive, more in tune with customers and competitors, and do things much more efficiently with less waste and less defects.

“You may have heard the quote that ‘Culture eats strategy for breakfast.’ Well, execution eats strategy for breakfast, lunch and dinner.” said Maccherone. “Agility means being able to change your strategy to fit your most recent understanding of the market.”

Choosing a methodology
There are many flavors of agile: lean, Kanban, Scrum, and custom-made ones organizations build from their previous methodologies. According to said Lee Cunningham, director of enterprise agile at VersionOne, there is no wrong approach; organizations just have to decide what works best for them.

“Even at the high level of the organization, they may be borrowing some practices from XP, some from Scrum and blending them and kind of putting them together in a method that works well for them,” he said.

Agile refers to methodologies built on iterative development. Focuses on collaboration and cross-functional teams.

Kanban aims to provide continuous collaboration, visualization, limited amount of work in progress, and ongoing learning.

Lean focuses on delivering value to customers, eliminating waste, and providing fast delivery cycles, rapid feedback, and continuous learning.

Scrum is a lightweight framework that focuses on short iterations and team collaboration for quickly solving complex problems.

XP, also known as Extreme Programming, is designed for communication, feedback, simplicity, small releases, simple design, pair programming, test-driven development, refactoring, collective code ownership, and sustainable pace.

Cunningham also notes that while organizations will take different approaches, a high-level approach should have more lean workflows and principles in place. “Lean agile is really more than having visibility into the workflow, limiting the work to the actual capacity, and forcing prioritization and decision-making up the line,” he said. “It also helps the enterprise as a whole have a really better feel on where they need to make investment, where they need to allocate or periodically reallocate people.”

Top reasons agile transformations fail
Every organization will have their own unique failures and success, but according to Larry Maccherone, director of analytics and research for AgileCraft, there are seven recurring themes in agile failures. They include:
1. Lack of executive commitment
2. Overly expensive or ineffective planning, alignment and steering activities
3. Inability to get a real-time single source of truth for resource management, value planning and progress reporting
4. Organizational structure obstacles to orienting around the product or service you provide rather than the activities of the users
5. Mid-level and functional managers failing to let go of their prior control and accept a new role
6. Lack of team-level agility
7. Failure to plan out and acquire the necessary training and resources to accomplish the transformation

The post Getting all hands on deck with agile appeared first on SD Times.

Honda becomes the first auto manufacturer to roll out a connected vehicle supporting both Apple and Google’s automotive operating systems synced with an Android or iOS device. Android Auto offers 2016 Accord drivers features such as Google Maps, Google Now, messaging, music, and access to apps compatible with Android 5.0 or above. Apple CarPlay provides largely the same functionality compatible with iOS 7.1 or later, and iPhone 5 or newer.

More information is available here.

Amazon reports 81% revenue growth for AWS
In its latest earnings report, Amazon announced year-over-year revenue growth of 81% for Amazon Web Services, its broad cloud platform business. The company shattered analyst expectations of a 50% gain for AWS. Amazon drastically reduced its AWS pricing last year, causing a brief dip in cloud revenue that has proved profitable in the long run, according to The Wall Street Journal.

CA releases latest earnings report, takes small hit from Rally deal
CA Technologies reported earnings from its most recent quarter, coming in under Wall Street revenue projections but with a higher net profit. CA announced it accrued US$977 million in revenue this past quarter, compared with $1.069 billion last year. CA’s acquisition of Rally Software, which closed this month, led to what financial analyst Daniel Ives of FBR Capital Markets called “mixed results” and a prediction that the company will maintain its flat growth in the next quarter as its investments in DevOps, the cloud and security keep the company on track.

“Recent acquisitions should help bring newer products into CA’s all-important enterprise solutions business, although we believe it has a way to go before offsetting legacy weakness, and while secular challenges in the mainframe market continue to create headwinds,” said Ives. “Ultimately, we believe CA remains laser-focused on investments in key growth areas (DevOps, management cloud, security), leaving it poised for a return to growth in the coming years through solid cross-sell opportunities/improved execution. In a nutshell, although CA clearly has more work to do as it looks to rejuvenate the top line, we believe it remains on a healthy path as it looks to expand/update its product footprint via product development and the pursuit of M&A.”

BlackBerry exhibits security products, lays out software strategy
BlackBerry has showcased a suite of security products based on software company acquisitions over the past year and a half.

The company announced the acquisition of another company, AtHoc, for secure mass communication and collaboration. According to a report from Reuters, BlackBerry CEO John Chen said the company is looking at a 12 to 18 month transition process toward a more software-focused entity as it moves away from smartphones.

Rackspace and Intel partner on OpenStack enterprise development
Rackspace has announced a new collaboration with Intel to form the OpenStack Innovation Center at Rackspace’s headquarters in San Antonio to spur feature development and enterprise adoption of OpenStack.

The Innovation Center will bolster developer participation and code contribution to OpenStack to create features and functionality, as well as debugging through upstream code contributions. Aside from the Innovation Center, Rackspace and Intel will offer OpenStack developer training and will partner on joint OpenStack engineering in collaboration with the OpenStack Enterprise Work Group to build the largest OpenStack developer cloud consisting of two 1,000-node clusters for large-scale cloud development and testing.

Additional details are available on the Rackspace and Intel blogs.

The post Honda’s 2016 Accord with Android Auto and Apple CarPlay, and earnings reports from Amazon and CA—SD Times news digest: July 24, 2015 appeared first on SD Times.

It’s on this second screen where Rally Software hopes to gain a foothold with the release this week of Flowdock Enterprise, intended to bring work management into a developer’s daily routine. Flowdock provides developers with a team ‘inbox’ through which outside messages also can flow, as well as a chat area with threaded discussions.

“Developers have a need to stay in their flow of work, and being in the developer’s daily flow and accelerate collaboration is where we want to be,” said Ryan Polk of Rally’s Flowdock product team.

He likened work management to taking one’s vitamins – you have to remember to do it. “Work management today gets developers out of their normal flow.” Flowdock, he said, “gives minute-by-minute statusing of work done, all in the same interface.”

Polk touted Flowdock’s more than 90 integrations outside tools, such as Github, Pivotal Tracker and Zendesk, to name but a few. “This is what makes Flowdock an enterprise solution,” he said. “We have enterprise in our blood. We offer scalability and integration with these other tools.”

The tool also makes collaboration easier among distributed development teams, as they can discuss issues in real time and act more quickly to get software to market, according to Ryan Martens, founder and CTO of Rally.

Martens called this new breed of collaborative development software “ChatOps,” a term he said was coined at Github to describe the interface between developers and production to keep people, tools and machines coordinated. Flowdock utilizes automated chat robots (chatbots) to respond to certain inputs and generally to keep the chat going smoothly, he explained. Automation is at the heart of DevOps, from which ChatOps derives, along with culture, measurement and sharing.

“We meet developers where they’re at,” Martens said. “It extends agility through a much longer development stream.”

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