Author: Cole Cioran (Info-Tech)

Traditional accounting practices are tailor made for waterfall project management. Organizations that have transitioned to the use of standing product teams using Agile and DevOps need to transform their accounting practices as well or they will leave valuable capital expenditure dollars on the table.

Author: Scott Bickley (Info-Tech)

IBM is changing the terms of its ubiquitous Passport Advantage agreement to remove entitled discounts on over 5,000 on-premises software products, resulting in an immediate price increase for IBM Software & Support (S&S) across its vast customer landscape.

Author: Allison Straker (Info-Tech)

So you’ve gone Agile. You do daily scrums, retrospectives, and all the “right” Agile ceremonies. But still your organization isn’t quite convinced. It is now critical to balance the drivers and goals of both Agile and traditional thinking in order to achieve organizational success.

Author: Cole Cioran (Info-Tech)

Do you feel like your Agile teams are treading water – going through the motions but never going anywhere? It’s a risk, and practices such as daily standups, retrospectives, and demonstrations need to be used wisely or you risk losing discipline to meeting fatigue.

Author: Andrew Kum-Seun (Info-Tech)

Stakeholders expect the speed and responsiveness of product delivery does not come at the expense of quality. QA tools offer retailers the ability to continuously ensure both business and technical quality standards are upheld, but these tools should not be viewed as a silver bullet.

Author: Hans Eckman (Info-Tech)

No matter how good your product roadmap and backlog are, they are only as good as your audience’s ability to understand your vision and priority.

Author: Hans Eckman (Info-Tech)

The scrum master is like the conductor of an orchestra, ensuring that every piece fits together at the right time to create something greater than the sum of the parts. You don’t have to know how to play each instrument, but you do have to understand what each part contributes to the overall masterpiece.

Author: Hans Eckman (Info-Tech)

Tools are important to product teams, but only when they support solid people and processes.

Author: Hans Eckman (Info-Tech)

Aha! introduces scenario planning to give product owners the ability to create and compare multiple release approaches based on team capacity and backlog priority.

Author: Hans Eckman (Info-Tech)

If an image is worth a thousand words, a visual roadmap will save you a thousand hours.

Author: Ben Mackle (Info-Tech)

The application portfolio management (APM) tool space can be a confusing one, as many software vendors offer their own take of what APM is. Enterprise architecture, application management and project portfolio management tools offer an APM use case, but these are often quite skewed the primary function of the tool.

Author: Ari Glaizel (Info-Tech)

Kovair continues to enhance its product suite with the introduction of version 10.0. The updates cover its Omnibus, ALM Studio, and QuickSync products.

Author: Hans Eckman (Info-Tech)

ProductPlan makes a strong case for excluding features from your product roadmap. Instead, develop your roadmap using strategic themes.

Author: Ted Walker (Info-Tech)

GitHub has announced that, effective April 14, 2020, all of its core features will be free for everyone. This will include private development within organizations that have previously paid for some subscription plans.

Author: Ari Glaizel (Info-Tech) &
Nhat Tran (Info-Tech)

Almost a decade has passed since Marc Andreessen’s article “Why Software Is Eating The World” passionately defended the rise of software and its potential to disrupt every industry. The ensuing decade has proven his thesis to be true.

Author: Ari Glaizel (Info-Tech)

OpsHub, a provider of integration and migration solutions for ALM and DevOps tools, has offered a free edition of tits integration solution OpsHub Integration Manager.

Author: Andrew Kum-Seun (Info-Tech)

Rally Software has changed ownership several times in the past decade and organizations wonder what will become of the notable ALM tool. The recent updates show that its current owner, Broadcom, wants Rally to remain competitive in the ALM marketplace.

Author: Andrew Kum-Seun (Info-Tech)

The recent release of Zephyr 6.6 (Standalone Edition) focused on improvements to its administration, automation capabilities, and usability. SmartBear’s 2020 acquisition of Test Management for Jira (TM4J) from Adaptavist demonstrates its focus on building its testing capabilities.

Author: Andrew Kum-Seun (Info-Tech)

TestRail supports the coordination, management, and communication of software testing activities of QA teams. Releases 6.0, 6.1, and 6.2 enhance the testing experience with enhanced interfaces, integrations, and management capabilities.

Author: Andrew Kum-Seun (Info-Tech)

Continuous delivery (CD) requires an integrated toolchain to automatically push checked-in code into production. IBM’s Engineering Lifecycle Management solution consolidates the key capabilities needed to support CD into a single, integrated platform.

Author: Ari Glaizel (Info-Tech)

Product management should not replace project management. They are complementary and are both integral to enabling the frequent delivery of business value.

Author: Ari Glaizel (Info-Tech)

Being Agile requires a change in focus on the skills that we value. While face-to-face contact is generally preferred, it is not always possible. This does not mean that being Agile is not possible, but it does require a different level of focus.

Author: Andrew Kum-Seun (Info-Tech)

BizDevOps transforms product delivery into a team sport that is centered around collaborative and collective ownership of delivery using the best of Agile and Lean development methods.

Author: Alex Ciraco (Info-Tech)

We live in a metrics-fixated world where having more metrics is always thought to be better than having less, and Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC) metrics are no exception. But the truth is that any badly chosen or managed metric will do more harm than good to your organization. To avoid these pitfalls, take ownership for SDLC metrics away from managers and put it into the hands of those who can best manage it: your development teams.

Author: Ted Walker (Info-Tech)

Microsoft will end Support for Office 2010 on October 13, 2020. It’s now time to think hard about your next steps and put together an upgrade plan to a newer version, like Office 365 Pro+ or Office 365.

Author: Andrew Kum-Seun (Info-Tech)

Tools alone don’t make great requirements. Requirements are a team sport and the team must collectively own and commit to delivering them for BizDevOps to be successful.

Author: Ari Glaizel (Info-Tech)

“Being Agile” enables the delivery of the right value at the right time. When most people talk about delivering the right value at the right time, they think about the core technical skills required in the action of delivering software. This is only part of the Agile software delivery pie.