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Google has been number one in search for quite some time. This article explains three things that an alternate search engine could do to take the search game to the next level. It proposes that Microsoft Live Search could be the next big search engine, however if Google implements these three key features, one would think they would be unstoppable.

Once you know who you are building the product for, the next step is to create a list features which will excite your customers and get them to use and buy one of your products. Which functions should you put into the system, and why? This user story workshop creates the initial product backlog.

How much software will you deliver in the next Sprints/iterations?" - do you often hear such questions? I do. And this question is really valuable especially for the project/product sponsors. But not only management likes knowing how much software they will deliver in the upcoming Sprints. Everybody (including development team members) likes to know the answer for questions like: "Where we will be in three months from now?". Let me now explain how you can compute how much software your team will deliver in the next Sprints basing on the current team's Velocity.

In the previous parts of this series, I went into a lot of the initial issues of how we ran our project and some of the things we did wrong. For Part 5, I'm going to focus on the 5 big mistakes we made in the project before I move onto another phase of the series.

Have you been wondering how to get your CEO's attention long enough to have a conversation about agile? Here are 8 questions, inspired by Rob Thomsett, long time Agile Evangelist and keynote speaker at this year's Agile Business Conference in London.

How do you manage a geographically distributed team when doing agile development? Jeff Sutherland (Scrum co-founder) and Serge Beaumont (Xebia) has several nice suggestions in this video.

Agile software development methods tell you how to run your projects. But they all do that from a single-project perspective. What if your organization runs multiple projects at the same time? Do the agile practices still hold in such a case? Our organization consists of 220 people, spread over two locations. We specialize in doing small fixed-price projects, most of them web-based. At any time we have at least fifty different projects running simultaneously, with lots of other projects in "sleep-mode"ю

The IT industry is notorious for its high turnover rate of employees. Fortunately the power is very much in your hands when it comes to creating the kind of environment where employees feel happy and never want to leave and I am going to tell you exactly what you can do to achieve this in 7 “easy” steps.

In a recent article, Martin Fowler is trying to explore the applicability of evolutionary design - a practice commonly used in Extreme Programming (XP) - to SOA implementations. He starts by discussing two common design paradigms, planned and evolutionary:

Helpful guide whether or not to use outsourcing agency for your software development project.

This time, I'll be talking about every introverted programmer's favorite part of Scrum, the end-of-sprint Demo. More specifically I'll talk about how we cracked wise, showed internet videos, heckled each other, annoyed our management, and occasionally showed off the work we had completed during the previous sprint. Getting your demo right is much more important than we initially thought.

I've always thought that delivering small pieces of software is easier than delivering the BIG BANG product at once. Small software package is easier to manage than the big one, you can expect smaller amount of defects there, it is much easier to integrate it with existing software. Isn't that obvious? On the other hand working on the new version for, let's say, six months without integration in the production environment (if integrated at all) will bring you much more problems. Defects will accumulate and just before the release someone will discover them. No surprisingly developers would have to work overtime to fix them.

Some true gems of wisdom for hiring hackers (in a good way) that won't disappoint.

An inspiring story about a vegetable vendor, explaining programming and experiencing how programming doesn't come naturally... As the college season is in full flow, I'm back to my philosophical self and I've something for my students... Last week, I was conducting the regular Assembly Programming practicals, where I'm supposed to teach students 8085/8086/8051 ASM programming.

Some people think that agile and budgeting are incompatible. The product is ready when the product owner says it is. But before starting a project, most managers want at a least budget. So the product owner puts together his wish list and asks the ScrumMaster what it will cost to build. The answer comes back – usually a long time and whole lot of money! Then the customer turns pale as he tries to decide what it will really cost, whether he can afford it and whether it’s worth it. But there is a better way: the product owner can perform a double worst case analysis. This quick and easy tool uses the project’s business value to determine a reasonable price for the software investment.