Agile in the Downturn

To start us off, Allan Kelly, who previously had us thinking hard about requirements in Requirements Come Second, is back again with Agile in the Downturn. Allan examines several ways Agile practices can help in lean times and also discusses how Agile can be fragile in today's environment.

Mario Moreira takes a look at a vital issue that is rarely discussed with regards to Agile development - infrastructure setup for a new team. He looks at the challenges, especially for smaller organizations, and tells us about today's options for infrastructure - you don't have to buy and build your own datacenter anymore!

We also have a case study for you by Kumarasivan Veeramuthumoni and Ajay Bhandari from Infosys about Agile development in an offshore environment. Although this article makes many similar recommendations to others on offshore development we've previously published, it does have some unique recommendations that may or may not match your experience.

Laszlo Szalvay, of Danube Technologies, has written the first of a three-part series describing the essential responsibilities of the major roles in Scrum. Laszlo starts with the ScrumMaster in this month's issue. This is an introductory piece, so those new and/or considering Scrum will find it of particular interest.

Dean Leffingwell wraps up his three part series about the product owner in the enterprise with a collection of experiences from several organizations. Each one of the mini case studies shows a concrete example of how an organization has successfully modified the responsibility of the product owner for their environment.

Joanna Zweig and Cesar Idrovo continue their series on Group Coherence and the search for hyper productive teams. In this month's issue they review the articles they've written so far and give you a set of step-by-step exercises to experiment with group cohesion on your team.

In this month's comic Chris Matts takes a close look at the arrival of information into a software development system and how the traditional way of software development forces us to commit to decisions before we have all of the information. Don't underestimate these comic strips; they go over fundamentals that lie behind the real power of many Agile practices.

Finally, Brad Appleton reviews Clean Code by Robert C. Martin and recommends that this book be on every developer's bookshelf.

Amr Elssamadisy
Editor in Chief
Agile Journal