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What's New in the Agile World?
Volume 2 - Number 8 - September 2007
The Agile
community is, of course, quite agile and continues to introduce new concepts
and techniques for developers, managers, and their business counterparts. This
month's Agile Journal explores some of these new ideas, from some industry
experts and also from the wealth of materials presented at the Agile 2007
conference in August.
We know
that it's the people, not the technology, that can make or break an Agile team.
Kirk Knoernschild hearkens back to the days when software development was fun,
not bureaucratic. Agile practices by their very nature have the potential to make
development an enjoyable, productive, and valuable occupation. John Puopolo urges
organizations to balance engineering talent with domain knowledge when staffing
an Agile team and to invest in cross-training. Agile concepts are being applied
throughout organizations and can be particularly powerful when applied to
management. Bill Joiner provides a framework for assessing Agile Leadership, inspired
by classic stage-development psychology.
As organizations realize greater success with Agile practices,
many seek to scale their investments to enterprise-wide initiatives. The
balance of process and tools comes to the forefront. Ross Pettit argues that "structured
flexibility" is the key to scalability. Teams can address specific practices,
such as large-scale build environments, as well as richer project management environments
that leverage teams' tools. Alan Shalloway doesn't question if Scrum works -we all know it does -
but explores why Scrum works and how
teams should implement Scrum so as to achieve scalability. Finally, Bob Cotton
promotes the concept of behavior driven development, where externally observed
behaviors drive Agile teams' testing initiatives and improve product quality.
There is much to talk about in the coming months in the
areas of collaboration, metrics, tools, and global development and we want to
ensure that we're emphasizing our readers' priorities. We invite you to take
our quick Agile Poll
and have an impact on the contents of our upcoming issues. And, if you'd like to
contribute an article on an upcoming topic, post your ideas in the "Letters to the Editor"
forum.
Liz Barnett
Editor in Chief
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What We Learned and Didn’t Learn at the Agile 2007 Conference
There is no shortage of Agile topics to write about this month! The Agile 2007 conference was a whirlwind of activity: speakers, vendors, discussion groups, and lots of networking. Participants, many of whom are professional developers, shared new ideas and best practices and were even willing to talk about some failures. The many vendors and consultants talked about customer successes as they vied for new customers. There were also some noticeable gaps in the program, including a lack of ...
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Three Levels of Leadership Agility
New, in-depth research shows that people move through distinct stages or levels as they become more agile leaders. At each new level, managers gain new capacities that make it more natural for them to lead in an agile manner. This article outlines three levels of leadership agility and shows how managers at each level of agility lead projects, lead teams, and engage in pivotal conversations. It ends with a few pointers about ways to assess and develop your own level of leadersh...
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Challenging Why (Not If) Scrum Works
Agile works. Early adopters, working largely by instinct, have seen good success. To go to the next level, instinct alone is not enough. As we face more complex and uncertain environments, as we face the need to scale to the enterprise, we need to apply intelligence and knowledge, guided by experience. Knowledge about why Scrum works.
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 | Structured Flexibility: Creating Sustainable Large-Scale Agile Adoption
As Agile practices prove successful in small project
teams, there is increasing demand to roll them out to large programs or across
entire departments. Such large-scale
adoptions demand that the practices be rapidly implemented and consistently
executed, and that they work with the most stringent corporate governance
standards. What makes this difficult is
that complex projects can strain Agile practices. New practices and tools in build pipelining as
well as emerging ap...
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 | Behavior Driven Development -- An Evolution in Testing
Behavior Driven Development (BDD) is not a revolution in testing, but an
evolution in how we software engineers think about program design. BDD was born
from the observation that most developers were not realizing the full potential
of Test Driven Development (TDD). Many people say that TDD, done well, is not
about testing but about design. However, the language of "testing"
impedes novices and journeymen from realizing its full potential. In this
article I will introduce Behavior Driven D...
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 | Make it Fun, Make it Agile
Enterprise software development isn't fun
anymore. As young geeks, we pursued a career in software development because we
enjoyed technology, especially the part where we used a programming language to
create software programs. You remember, right? Each day at work was filled with
something new, exciting, and often-times profound. But for senior technologists
with their sustainable passion for technology, software development today is
less about writing code and more about performing o...
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 | Balancing Skills For Agile Team Success
Often, our agile teams are made up of junior and senior people. Some of these people tend to be more domain focused, such as understanding financial services, while others are more engineering focused, with expertise in software architecture and programming languages. While this mix is generally beneficial from a synergistic point of view, it can also create friction during development - friction that requires active management attention and a proactive balancing of the relative "skills scales."...
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| FEATURED BOOK: |
 | FEATURED BOOK: Continuous Integration: Improving Software Quality and Reducing Risk
by Paul M. Duvall with Steve Matyas & Andrew Glover
For those
of you seeking a book on the subject of Continuous Integration (a.k.a. "CI"), what
it is, how to do it, why to do it, what the benefits are, and the details of how to do it ... look no further. The book you have
got to run out and get is here! It is Paul Duvall et.al.'s Continuous
Integration: Improving Software Quality and Reducing Risk. It
includes descriptions of no less than 40 CI practices, five dozen code...
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Latest Issues of Agile Journal
Coming Up - Editorial Calendar
- August 13 - Quality Agile Development
- September 10 - Agile News
- October 08 - Valuable Agile Practices
- November 12 - Introducing Agile to the Organization
- December 10 - The State of the Agile Community
See the full 2008 Editorial Calendar >
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