Posts by Mike Adler

Revisiting Organizing for Quality For Agile Teams

I’ve been blogging about our Agile Transformation at Constant Contact for almost 2 years. We applied a number of the lessons of the Scaled Agile Framework in our teams. And since February of 2015 I have blogged about focusing on our teams and their practices, instituting standard SCRUM practices. Today I am going to revisit […]

Are You Ready? How to Make Sure Your User Story is Ready Every Time

In my last blog post, I did something out of character by writing about Taylor Swift and Software Development. This time, I am going to reference something a little closer to my own music tastes. As AC/DC asks – “Are You Ready”? Besides being more inline with my rock music tastes, this question has been […]

How to Create Balance in Your Team with the Help of SCRUM and Taylor Swift

I recently found myself at a Taylor Swift concert. Yes, that’s what happens when you have teenage children. But while listening to her song “Shake It Off,” I couldn’t help but be reminded of the importance of making sure that we shake up our product development environment and culture every once in a while. As […]

Our SCRUM Metrics

Here we are, rolling out SCRUM across our teams, having teams practice the process and deliver customer value.  We needed to figure out a simple way to measure the effectiveness of our rollout.  Measuring the effectiveness has two parts: Part 1 How effective were we in changing team behaviors, making our team members and product […]

SCRUM – It’s the Team and Teamwork

As we have continued to rollout SCRUM into our organization I have been reminded how important team behaviors are for the success of SCRUM teams. It seems so simple at 50,000 feet. We employ great engineers; they are all nice people, why won’t this just work?  The reality is something far more difficult to achieve. […]

SCRUM and RACI

As we have been putting SCRUM into the organization, it has me thinking about how to help the teams understand roles and responsibilities in the new SCRUM formation.  We use RACI (defined below) internally to help dictate everyone’s understanding of who makes which decisions and why. One of the best articles on the subjects of […]

Losing the Trees through the Forest

I have written a number of articles for this blog about our adoption of the SAFe framework for scaling Agile. However, it became obvious in late 2014 that we had a fundamental problem. No matter how well we did release planning, epic prioritization, or release trains, it wasn’t getting us where we need to go. […]

From Idea to Production: Steps to Creating and Consuming APIs

Mike Adler, Constant Contact VP Engineering, discusses the history of APIs, and best practices that developers need to consider when building or consuming APIs. Mike made this presentation at the 2014 Ultimate Developer Event. Share your thoughts on what goes into building a world-class API, or, what you need from an API as a developer […]

Managing Technical and UX Debt

Constant Contact recently released one of our first release planned and executed with the Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe), known externally as our Toolkit release.  There will  be a future post about some of the lessons learned from that experience, We see  major release as an opportunity to do a retrospective on our process. This post […]

Organizing for Quality with Agile Teams

I have been writing for the last several months about our adoption of the Scaled Agile Framework at Constant Contact.   However, I was recently challenged to think about a more core Agile question of how to best organize and manage our Quality Engineers.  Working through organizational structure as a leader within an organization is always […]