The Three Pillars of Executive support for Agile Adoption

The March 2009 issue of the Agile Journal is an extremely diverse collection of articles that I'm sure you'll enjoy.

Esther Derby, co-author of Agile Retropsectives: Making Good Teams Great starts us off with Pillars of Executive Support where she examines what executives must do if they want to support the success of an Agile adoption initiative in their organization.  She covers important topics such as the ability to hear No from your teams.

Dave West adds to TDD, DDD, SDD, and all the other xDD methods by examining to the question of what makes software so difficult? and answering that it is the theory - i.e. the model of the real world and its mapping to the software systems we build.  Dave suggests that the evolution of Agile is theorY-Driven-Development (YDD).

Melissa Meeker and Curtis Hite tell us how their organization has implemented Scrum in the marketing department and had such positive results that they are rolling out Scrum to all of the departments within the organization.  This case study is a must-read even if you are not considering making such a drastic move in your organization.

Chris Matts continues his discussion of the last responsible moment and its importance through a comic strip.  If you haven't read one of these comics then you owe yourself the 10-15 minutes you will need to do so.  The last responsible moment is a key tool to effective Agile development and Chris does a great job of explaining it.

Dean Leffingwell continues with part 2 of a three part series on product owners in the enterprise.  Dean digs in into the responsibilities of the product owner in an enterprise setting, which are not the regular roles of the product owner as we know it.

Russell Pannone writes about the role of quality assurance has in the world of Agile.  He takes a detailed look at how an effective QA presence, and sometimes leadership, can make Agile teams even more effective.

Jochen Scheel and Stefan Meier share their organization's first Agile project experience.  They chose a mix and match of practices along with a unique toolset that has led them to significant success with their software development efforts.

As a final note, we are running a survey asking our readers to share their experiences on the importance of configuration management (http://www.zoomerang.com/Survey/?p=WEB228V96VL3CQ).  Please share your experience with us and we'll share the results in the upcoming issues.

Amr Elssamadisy
Editor in Chief
Agile Journal