Continuous Delivery – this is a great new book on what it really takes to make Continuous Integration work and beyond.  If you want to go faster, you have to automate and remove friction from the cycles and this book helps explain how.

The RSpec Book – Solid text that introduces the concepts of Behavior Driven Development using RSpec and Cucumber and drives a refocus of unit testing as a design method – a method designed to create well crafted code and to drive productive interaction between users, developers, and testers in a virtuous cycle of acceptance criteria and unit tests.

Agile Testing – There are many Agile books out there but they are about developer practices, project management and sometimes requirements.  Testers have been left hanging in the wind.  This book helps define terminology, practices and the shifts a team will go through in the transition from waterfall to agile.

Agile is still often loosely defined in many companies with the core concept being an iterative approach to development that plans the project details in monthly (roughly) chunks.  There are still wide variations as to which specific processes are being brought in beyond the planning process and reporting.  This leads to mixed results and can increase stress and chaos among team members but generally is producing positive benefits.

People look at the wrong things:
– Things that are easy to measure but meaningless
– “Checking boxes” rather than results
– Few, if any, qualitative measures
And present them in the wrong way:
– Confusing and contradictory data
– Meaningful only to specialists – and maybe not even to them!
– Unclear purpose
– Point data and not trends
– Hard to understand and use to make decisions
To close the gap, how well you are doing needs to be measured in business terms

He suggested looking at metrics that help see if we are delivering better applications, delivering faster, systems that are easier to use, cheaper to run, and leading to happier users.  These are not single dimension views but they focus on what matters.  IBM is adding a number of capabilities for improved metrics to its Team Concert ALM product (as are other ALM vendors) and while these tools do provide increased reporting capabilities it will be important to not misuse the information and to recognize that seeing bad numbers doesn’t mean seeing "bad people".  This is the real core of the use of metrics is while they may be the proverbial warning flag they don’t tell you directly how to fix the problem.  This doesn’t mean all dashboards are evil but they can’t replace Management by Walking Around and getting your hands dirty.

Generally this market has been driven by the need for: easy to get started and use, low capital expenditure, collaborative, connected as in connects to all my existing tools, and analytic.  We have captured this in many research notes and by no means see anything of a letup but an acceleration in the market.  This acceleration is driven by the need for better project transparency and the drive to improve productivity and better make use of globally dispersed teams (which may include internal and external resources). 

Rally’s acquisition of AgileZen fits into this pattern by broadening the ways that projects can be managed and measured in a tool that fits well to the current Rally platform.  We expect to see continued growth in the number of acquisitions and vendors broadening from Agile == Scrum to adapt support for a broader set of Agile techniques.