Agile Journal

Agile Journal is an online magazine and e-newsletter focused on providing readers with the need-to-know information and resources they need to develop software for an agile business. For over three years Agile Journal has delivered thought leadership and pragmatic advice from a wide range of industry experts, as well as direct feedback from hands-on developers and project managers.

Review Previous Editions | Subscribe | Contact the Editors --  Read the Current Edition Below

Collaboration and Reuse - Sept 2006 Reuse and Collaboration

Collaboration and reuse lie at the heart of every Agile project. To deliver quality software, teams must rely on each others' knowledge and feedback. Of course, there's never time to start from scratch - refactoring and leveraging existing assets are mandatory parts of an effective process. It's also great to see reuse truly be a means to an end, rather than seeing companies just promote a "reuse initiative" as a general goal. What's most interesting to me, however, is how distributed Agile projects implement collaboration and reuse. In this issue, we'll hear some experiences from highly distributed onshore and offshore Agile projects and how they've succeeded.

read more>>
Featured Articles...
Agile Survey Results: Solid Experience And Real Results
This summer over 700 developers and managers responded to an Agile development survey conducted by VersionOne and sponsored by the Agile Alliance. The results are in with some very interesting results. Above all, this survey shows that Agile practices deliver on their promises and can deliver significant ROI across many types and sizes of organizations.   I'll start by saying that the intention of the survey was to determine how Agile processes are being implemented - not to determine the size or penetration of the Agile market. Thus, the survey participants do not represent average developers. The survey was distributed specifically to "Agile aware" or "Agile practicing" developers including VersionOne's customer base and newsletter list, most Agile Alliance members, readers of the Agile Journal, and some other technology sites such as theserverside.com.
Read More >>
  
The Agile Matrix
The software industry does a very poor job of learning from its history. In 1968, Melvin Conway gave us Conway's Law, which states that organizations that design systems are constrained to produce designs which are copies of the communication structures of these organizations.[1] In other words, the design and architecture of software is a reflection of the team or teams that built it. Agile practices speed software delivery and increase software quality by increasing communication and sharing valuable information. The team structure and collaboration methods in place are critical aspects in ensuring the development team delivers resilient, adaptable, and high quality software.
Read More >>
  
Combining Agile Processes in Offshore Software Development
In modern software development there are two trends that allow people to get more for less: agile development and offshore outsourcing. Agile processes are traditionally implemented in one site, where customers and developers can meet face-to-face and communicate easily. Offshore development projects, on the other hand, are traditionally implemented as fixed-bid consulting agreements, executed either using waterfall processes or at best in iterative way. However, it is possible to use agile software development process when working with offshore teams. Our successful projects have employed a mix of agile techniques and organizational models.
Read More >>

More articles...
Driving Agile Adoption Through Audits Driving Agile Adoption Through Audits
Before the first "agile" methods were formalized, industry reports such as The Chaos Chronicles confirmed collaboration and reuse as significant contributors to IT project success.[1] Agile methods conspicuously bring their importance into focus. On an Extreme Programming (XP) team, for instance, an absence of collaboration could manifest as non-implementation of pair programming, a core XP practice. Similarly, any self-proclaimed agile team lacking an actively engaged customer-user wo...
Read More >>
ALM 2.0: Application Development On The Cusp ALM 2.0: Application Development On The Cusp
Why The Industry Is Readying Itself For Radical Change The first sign of trouble is the unusually long time it takes for your IDE to start one morning. Maybe you can't access the trouble tickets any more or the team members cannot build their applications or run the automated test suite. There's a tipping point in our industry: it's happening now and the signs are all around us. The very fundamentals of developing applications are being overhauled, the priorities by which we ...
Read More >>
FEATURED BOOK: Practices of an Agile Developer: Working in the Real World FEATURED BOOK: Practices of an Agile Developer: Working in the Real World
by Venkat Subramaniam & Andy Hunt Are you a developer who wants to improve your personal development habits in a way that helps not just yourself, but also incrementally improves your project and your team? If so, then run, don't walk, and get your hands on Practices of an Agile Developer: Working in the Real World by Venkat Subramaniam & Andy Hunt. ...
Read More >>
CASE STUDY: Band XI Distributing Agile Development CASE STUDY: Band XI Distributing Agile Development
Software development organizations have evolved to meet the challenges put forth by ever increasing complexity in both the problem spaces and the technologies applied. Unfortunately, the right people for a project may not all be located in the same city or at the same time. The skill, experience, and ethics of personnel have risen to the top of our list of essential factors when assembling teams. Our search for optimal teams has gone global and we need to find ways to work together in the face o...
Read More >>