From The Editor
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Written by Amr Elssamadisy
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Tuesday, 09 September 2008 |
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 I wish there was a book entitled "How to Write Your First
Letter as an Editor", unfortunately there is none that I am aware of, so please
bear with me. As the new Editor-in-Chief
of the Agile Journal, I would like to introduce myself and tell you a little
about where we will be going with the Agile Journal over the next few months.
I have been in the Agile field as
a practitioner since 1999 when I was in a team that learned about a little known
process called eXtreme Programming to save a death march project. I've been infected with the Agile bug ever
since and have been sharing my knowledge ever since. Throughout the years I've been lucky enough
to learn from many talented people and teams learning about, adopting, and
adapting Agile techniques to build better software. A little over a year ago, I co-founded Gemba
Systems and have been focusing exclusively on helping teams select, adapt, and
adopt Agile practices to transition to a more effective software development
process.
When the Agile Journal started up a little over two years
ago, I became an avid reader and an occasional contributor. The Agile Journal was one of the mainstays of
my reading to keep up with what others were doing in the field; what was
working, and just as importantly, what was not.
I've also written two books focused on adopting Agile practices: Patterns of Agile Practice
Adoption: The Technical Cluster and Agile Adoption Patterns: A Roadmap to Organizational
Success.
To summarize, I am a hands-on
practitioner of Agile software development techniques actively helping
organizations leverage Agile practices in context to build better software. I
also have been and continue to be an active participant in the Agile community. And now, I am also Editor-in-Chief of the
Agile Journal.
The Vision for the
Future of the Agile Journal
There is currently no one
place online that I can recommend when one of my clients wants to start reading
about Agile development. My vision for
the Agile Journal is to be that one
place to visit when thinking about Agile software development. The only way to realistically achieve that
goal is to do one thing really well, and link to other sites for those issues
that we don't cover.
The Agile Journal's main focus is to provide our readers
regularly with insightful articles; that's what we do well and what we will
continue to improve upon. Furthermore,
we are planning a redesign of our site to make the wealth of information more
accessible. Finally, we plan to add and
regularly maintain several reference sections to help our readers find other
useful resources online.
What to expect:
Over the next few months we will be incrementally
introducing the following changes to the Agile Journal, think of it as a
backlog for the project of taking things to the next level:
- Starting next with the month of October 2008, we
will be publishing articles throughout the month instead of all at once. This will keep things fresh and give our
readers at least one new article to read every week.
-
We will be going towards a column format, where
every issue will have a variety of topics covered instead of one issue per
topic. This will give everyone something
that is of potential interest and value in every edition. Here are the different columns that we have
in mind to more accurately reflect the current state of Agile development and
serve the needs of the community:
- Business
case: "Business value" is an all too easily promised result of adopting Agile
practices, but we have yet to build an effective vocabulary with executives
with responsibilities vastly larger than the success of one or two software
teams. We will be bringing you articles
that you can give to your boss, or your boss's boss, to help them understand
how Agile development can help and why they should seriously give it a try.
- Human
aspects: There is a growing body of knowledge in the community that
examines human dynamics and
relationships that underpin all successful teams. Much of this work is taken from other
disciplines and will be translated into Agile-ese for our readers.
- Basics:
Introductory materials for those who want to learn the basics of Agile
development and practices. For example,
in this month, we have an article that goes over the basic responsibilities of
the Product Owner role.
- Adoption:
How-to articles that examine the process of successfully using Agile practices.
- Principles
and values: Agile practices derive from a set of core principles and
values. Understanding of these
principles and values enable teams to adapt Agile practices to fit their
contexts.
- Large
organizations: More than ever, Agile software development is being adopted in
large organizations that have completely different contexts and constraints
than the smaller projects and companies where Agile development got its
start. To get the promised benefits from
Agile, practices are changed, adapted, and sometimes dropped all together to
survive these different environments.
- New
ideas: We will also be bringing you regular articles that might not fall in the
accepted definition of Agile development.
This is very important as practitioners mold their understanding of
Agile development to increasingly diverse situations, and address an ever-growing
set of issues and problems.
Just as importantly here's what we won't be doing at the
Agile Journal:
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We won't be reinventing the wheel. There are several publications and resources
currently available that address issues that are not in our core offering:
provide our readers regularly with insightful articles. We will create a resources section to link
out to those other sites, but will not be directly recreating their work.
- We won't be accepting all submissions, in an
effort to keep the quality of the articles high. At the same time, we will be working with new
authors to help hone and polish their messages to bring them to the public.
- We won't be focusing solely on accepted,
mainstream, definitions of Agile. We
will be coloring outside the lines to help the community evolve and make sure
the next ten years of the Agile community are as successful and productive as
the last ten.
Getting Involved:
As the new Editor-in-Chief of the
Agile Journal I'll leverage my experience and ties to the Agile community to
bring you, our readers, the highest quality articles to help you with your
real-world issues in understanding, adopting, and adapting Agile principles,
values, and practices.
Now, here's the catch, we don't
have a team of writers at the Agile Journal working hard through the night to bring
you these articles (although a few of us do pull the occasional
all-nighter). All of our articles are
contributed by members of the community who share their thoughts, experiences,
successes, and - yes - failures. I
invite each and every reader of the Agile Journal to consider sharing their
experiences with the rest of the community by contributing articles on any of
the subjects listed above. For those of
you who are not up to, or are not interested in writing full articles, I invite
you to leave comments on the articles - both positive comments and constructive
criticism.
Amr Elssamadisy
Editor-in-Chief
Agile Journal
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