Agile

[Webinar Recap] Traceable Agile™ – How to Achieve Speed and Quality with Software Delivery

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This image portrays a webinar on the topic on Traceable Agile.

In this blog, we recap our webinar, “Traceable Agile™ – How to Achieve Speed and Quality with Software Delivery” – Click HERE to watch it in its entirety.

In this insightful session, Professor Paul Meadows MSc, PMP, CSM and Steven Meadows, Principal Solutions Lead at Jama Software®, explore Traceable Agile™, as well as best practices in terms of Agile processes, helping you ensure that your team is achieving the right balance between quality and speed.

You will learn about:

  • Best Practices and Tooling: Learn about the best practices in implementing effective agile processes and recommended tooling to enhance your team’s performance.
  • Balancing Speed and Quality: Strategies to ensure your software delivery is both fast and shipped with fewer defects
  • Implementing Traceable Agile: Dive deep into Traceable Agile, a methodology that promotes speed while maintaining a comprehensive historical and current view of your development process, enabling early issue detection.
  • Real-World Applications: Gain insights into how Traceable Agile is being implemented in various industries, and the benefits it has on software and hardware integration.

Below is an abbreviated transcript of our webinar.

Traceable Agile™ – How to Achieve Speed and Quality with Software Delivery

RELATED: Traceable Agile™ – Speed AND Quality Are Possible for Software Factories in Safety-critical Industries

Professor Meadows: Well, first of all, I’d like to say thank you for inviting me to the webinar. Steven, I’m looking forward to this. Just in terms of my background, I’ve first of all completed a full career in the British Army and since then I’ve over 20 years of project management experience, really based in mostly world-class, global enterprises, building and managing project management offices, developing and executing project management policies and standards. I’ve got a master’s degree in project management from Liverpool University. I’m a certified project management professional with the Project Management Institute and I’ve been a certified scrum master for over eight years.

I’ve taught project management for Columbia University in New York City and I am currently the lead faculty professor for the master’s degree in project management at NYU, also in New York City.

Steven Meadows: Great, thanks for that introduction. Just as a brief introduction for myself here, my name is Steven Meadows. I’m a principal solutions lead and I represent my company Jama Software and we’ll be touching on what Jama Software is and the solutions that we offer shortly. I also have around about 12 to 13 years experience in solution architecture, solution implementation. I’m also certified in Agile development using Jira software as well as Jira project administration too. So I’ve helped out or helped a lot of different Agile teams implement Agile solutions and implement while using tools. I do briefly want to introduce Jama Software, our company, and also solutions that we develop.

So Jama Software really provides a suite of solutions that spans the entire product and systems development lifecycle, things like capturing and managing requirements’ traceability to ensuring collaboration across different departments and different teams throughout the software development lifecycle. Also, across other verticals as well. Now you’ll see some of the verticals on this slide that we support, including regulated industries like medical device and aerospace and defense, as well as pure software development and industrial manufacturing too.

Now, some of the ways that we really help our customers realize value with our tools by reducing development cycle times, increasing process efficiency, gaining visibility and control and so on. So with that then, Professor Meadows is now going to provide an overview on Agile, the Agile Manifesto, and some of the principles as well.

RELATED: Requirements Traceability Benchmark

Professor Meadows: Thanks Steven. So here we are on the Agile overview page. We’re going to talk about some of the benefits, but as Agile development methodologies and frameworks become more and more the choice of organizations as we see here, they recognize the significant productivity improvements that can be achieved. It’s important here though, Steven, to really draw the distinction between waterfall requirements management and Agile requirements management. As we know, the strength of Agile is in the collaborative development that’s achieved with constant stakeholder and development team interaction over the more traditional approach where requirements are captured upfront largely and changes are not only unwelcome but actually considered disruptive.

And where they do occur generally they have to follow a fairly formal process of review and approval before they’re accepted. So in today’s very dynamic marketplaces, you can see clearly this is not going to help organizations achieve and maintain competitive advantage. So the four foundational values we see here were developed as part of the Agile Manifesto way back in 2001, and they’re really designed to efficiently elicit requirements and turn those requirements into functioning software. It’s about responding to change over following a plan.

And when you look at that in the context of the value placed in working software over comprehensive documentation, we really start to get to understand the challenges that emerge in trying to make sure our stakeholders and their needs are being met by what we deliver. This becomes even more complex when we start to look at the 12 Agile principles in more detail next. Before we move on to there, let me give you a little bit more detail about these values though. So individuals and interactions over processes and tools. Well this value itself emphasizes the importance of focusing on people and obviously their interactions with the team rather than solely relying on processes or tools.

But I don’t want to underestimate the value of processes and tools and we will definitely talk more about that through this webinar. This one really highlights the significance of effective communication, collaboration, and teamwork in delivering successful outcomes. Agile teams prioritize building strong relationships and that’s really one of the strengths that’s looked for as you build a team is that ability to build strong relationships and really fosters open communication, empowering individuals to make decisions that contribute really to the overall project success. Moving on to working software over comprehensive documentation.

Again, this is another one of those values we’re going to dig a lot deeper into through this webinar. But this value really underscores the importance of delivering functional software that meets the needs of the customer over extensive documentation, is the way it’s worded. And while documentation itself has its place in software development, tangible results are in the form of working software. Agile teams strive really to deliver value early and often. Today we’re seeing continuous delivery in many of the firms you’ve implemented successful Agile.

CLICK HERE TO WATCH THIS WEBINAR IN ITS ENTIRETY:
Traceable Agile™ – How to Achieve Speed and Quality with Software Delivery

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