Free eGuide: Scrum or Kanban for Agile Development: Which is Right for Your Team?

Title: Scrum or Kanban for Agile Development: Which is Right for Your Team?

Primary Category: Information Technology

Short Description: By now you've likely heard of Agile development and building products in small incremental pieces, so you can get real feedback along the way. In fact, you may even be considering using Agile on your next project. But where do you start?

Long Description: Agile can take a lot of forms, with Scrum or Kanban being two of the most popular. Each form has advantages and disadvantages, but both will help your team get the right feedback they need to build great products. So which one is right for you? Let's find out.

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Free eGuide: The Essential Agile Adoption Cheat Sheet: Reducing Cost

Adopting Agile methods in your projects is easier than you think. This DZone Refcard series focuses on building software faster, better, and cheaper. Learn how specific Agile methods like evolutionary design, refactoring and automated testing will help you reduce costs and eliminate risks. Other topics covered include how to adopt Agile practices successfully, as well as what’s next in Agile and a wealth of references.

Contents Include:

• About this Agile Adoption Refcard
• Four Strategies to Reduce Cost
• The Practices
• How to adopt Agile Practices Successfully
• What’s Next

References and more …

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Free eGuide: "The Agile Business Analyst: How Much Is Enough?"

"The Agile Business Analyst: How Much Is Enough?"

How much requirements documentation, planning, and communication is “just enough” to be an effective business analyst?
The principles in this white paper help you introduce greater predictability into your own Agile requirements activities, both individually and across your organization. As you start to apply these ideas and pose these questions, you'll likely see certain patterns emerge that will help you establish your own set of practices that make Agile work for you.

Offered Free by: Global Knowledge

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Free eBook: Agile Business - Build the Right Thing (Expert)

"Agile Business - Build the Right Thing"

Great companies build products that customers love. While this means they build valuable and useful features, it also means they don't build things that aren't valuable.
Companies that build the wrong things are easily disrupted. Understand how a unifying vision and customer-centric mindset avoids the wasted time, money, and demoralized morale that come with building the wrong thing.

Topics include:

•  Models of Agile Innovation: Explore Agile models that create an innovative, value-focused development environment.
•  The Role of the Product Owner: Filling the gap between the team building the product and the customer using it.
•  The Innovator's Dilemma: Successfully moving enterprises forward against the pull of the past.

Offered Free by: Rally Software

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Free eGuide: The Absolute Must-Do's to Build an Agile Organization

"The Absolute Must-Do's to Build an Agile Organization"

The majority of training and performance management processes don't lead to more skilled and productive employees.
So what's different about the ones that do?

Download our brief, The Absolute Must-Do's to Build an Agile Organization, and learn:

    How to increase employee productivity by 37%
    What separates world-class learning and performance from ho-hum
    Real business examples of this in action

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Free eGuide: Surviving the Transition to Agile: A Project Manager's Guide

"Surviving the Transition to Agile: A Project Manager's Guide"

Get Surviving the Transition to Agile: A Project Manager's Guide, packed with everything you need to understand about how to work in Agile environments.
If you're a project manager, you may be wondering: How is Agile different or better than traditional project management? Do I have a role on an Agile team, and if so, what is my role? How do I make Agile work for me?

This guide provides tips for using Agile approaches to plan, manage, and deliver high-value work. You'll learn more about the differences between traditional project management and Agile, find the Agile role that's best for you, understand the dynamics of Agile teamwork, and get started on the transition to becoming an Agile practitioner.

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Free eBook: Agile Business - Transform Your Organization

"Agile Business - Transform Your Organization"

Organizational culture and strategic alignment are critical to your success and business agility. Agile isn't just a development methodology. It's a whole systems way of viewing and improving your business.
Successfully adopting Agile into your organization involves organizational and cultural change to transform your organization into one that innovates, leads, adapts, and delivers. This excerpt guides you in the ever-evolving process of building a culture of continual growth and learning, with an incremental and achievable approach to organizational change.

Topics covered include:

•     A path to Agility: Discover, launch, accelerate, advance
•     Agile rollout planning for the organization
•     Building a foundation for Agile in a waterfall environment

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Free eGuide: The Seven Deadly Sins of Agile Measurement

"The Seven Deadly Sins of Agile Measurement"

With Agile scaling to larger and larger projects, programs and organizations, how can you understand the impact it's having, and how do you know what to measure to find out?
Get your copy of The Seven Deadly Sins of Agile Measurement. Find out what matters and what doesn't. This paper sets you up for success in quantifying the impact of Agile adoption. You'll gain actionable insights on avoiding the most common sins associated with using metrics to measure success. Most notably, don't use this data as a lever for change! Get all sins here.

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Free eBook: The Professional ScrumMaster's Handbook (expert)

"The Professional ScrumMaster's Handbook--Free 30 Page Excerpt"

A natural and difficult tension exists between a project team (supply) and its customer (demand).

A professional ScrumMaster relaxes this tension using the Scrum framework so that the team arrives at the best possible outcome.

"The Professional ScrumMaster’s Handbook" is a practical, no-nonsense guide to helping you become an inspiring and effective ScrumMaster known for getting results.

This book goes into great detail about why it seems like you’re fighting traditional management culture every step of the way. You will explore the three roles of Scrum and how, working in harmony, they can deliver a product in the leanest way possible. You’ll understand that even though there is no room for a project manager in Scrum, there are certain “management” aspects you should be familiar with to help you along the way. Getting a team to manage itself and take responsibility is no easy feat; this book will show you how to earn trust by displaying it and inspiring courage in a team every day.

"The Professional ScrumMaster’s Handbook" will challenge you to dig deep within yourself to improve your mindset, practices, and values in order to build and support the very best agile teams.

Packt Enterprise books can be summed up through the tagline "Professional Expertise Distilled". They take in-the-trenches knowledge from experienced software professionals, and distil it into a single, easy to follow 

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Free Cheat Sheet: Agile Adoption: Decreasing Time to Market

"Agile Adoption: Decreasing Time to Market"

This Refcard is focused on helping you evaluate and choose the practices for your team or organization when getting to market faster is of prime importance.

Instead of focusing on entire methods such as Scrum and XP, we will talk about the practices that are the building blocks of these methods such as iterations and automated developer tests. We will answer two basic questions. First, what Agile practices should you consider to improve Time to Market? Second, how should you go about choosing from those practices given your organization and context?

Refcardz are FREE cheat sheets made just for developers. It’s the easy way to stay on top of the newest technologies!

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A free guide for agile teams: The Retrospective Handbook

"The Retrospective Handbook"

A guide for agile teams.

Are you running retrospectives regularly? Perhaps you run retrospectives once a week, or fortnightly. Do you feel like you could be getting more out of your retrospectives and fuelling continuous improvement in your teams? You may already find retrospectives valuable, but suspect there are ways of making them better.

This book condenses down over eight years of experience working with the retrospective practice within the context of real agile teams. It offers you practical advice on how to make your retrospectives even more effective including topics such as:

Best methods to prepare for a retrospective
Picking just the right materials
Facilitating retrospectives with ease
Dealing with common retrospective smells
Retrospectives in different contexts including distributed, large and small groups
A checklist for preparation

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Free eGuide: Become An Agile Organization

"Become An Agile Organization"

Learn how to gain a competitive edge through on-demand budgeting and forecasting.

Increasing market volatility means that companies like yours must be able to dynamically account for change or risk falling behind your competitors. In order to stay at the forefront of your industry, you must have a clear understanding of the factors that impact your business; and you must be able to anticipate change and react quickly when it occurs.

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