Steven A. Lowe

Author Archives: Steven A. Lowe

15 signs you’re doing agile wrong

It’s easy to jump on a bandwagon and end up in a ditch. Nowhere is this maxim more evident than in agile development. Plenty of organizations jump into agile in pursuit of its advantages -- ease of embracing change, decreased cycle times, evolutionary architecture, and so on -- only to find their best agile practitioners leaving the company, and the uneasy remainder unable to fix a development process gone wrong.The problem with most approaches to agile is not a problem with agile; it's a problem with Agile, the Capitalized Methodology. Agile isn't a methodology. Treating it as one confuses process with philosophy and culture, and that’s a one-way ticket back into waterfall -- or worse.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Keep out ahead of shadow IT

It's time to face a cold, hard fact: The "shadow IT" parade is passing you by, and if you don't get out in front of it and lead it where you want it to go, you might get run over.Gartner projected in 2012 that marketing department spending on IT will surpass IT department spending on IT in the near future. True, that has yet to happen, but the scales keep tipping. Take a hard look at that future: You may not be in it.[ Navigate the modern hiring landscape with InfoWorld's special report, "The care and feeding of a rockstar developer." | Share your tech story and get a $50 American Express gift cheque if published. Send it to [email protected]. | Keep up with hot topics in programming with InfoWorld's Application Development newsletter. ] Shadow IT has been presented as a new threat to IT departments because of the cloud. Not true -- the cloud has simply made it easier for non-IT personnel to acquire and create their own solutions without waiting for IT's permission. Moreover, the cloud has made this means of technical problem-solving more visible, bringing shadow IT into the light. In fact, Continue reading