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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.

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Agile News - Sep 2008
sep08covernewssmallWe have quite a variety of articles for you in this month’s issue of the Agile Journal.  They vary from getting back to basics, to examining common success and mistakes of Agile adoption efforts in progress, to articles that cover new ground as Agile is taken into different environments.  A significant portion of this month’s articles come from authors whose experience is primarily in large organizations adopting Agile development practices; you will find many unexpected and insightful suggestions which are not yet in the mainstream.

Jochen Krebs warns us about teams trying to move too fast as they adopt Agile development practices shows us how to spot the early signs of burn-out in Finding the Steady State.  Daryl Kulak and Anita Shankar share their experiences in hiring for Agile team members within a large organization that has a non-Agile culture and give us Agile Interview Questions as a guide to hiring managers.

Building a product for what a customer needs is one of the core tenets and promised benefits of Agile development.  In this month’s issue, we have two articles that touch on this issue:  Cesario Ramos and Eelco Gravendeel continue with their advice in part 2 of The 9 pitfalls of Scrum one of which is the “defective product owner” while Tim Snyder examines the responsibilities of the product owner role in It’s a Tough Job… but Somebody Has to Be the Product Owner.

Sean Sheehan compares software projects to taking a road-trip with his family in Writing Shippable Code, the first article of a three-part series, and compares Agile software development to having a global positioning system (GPS) in your car.  He sets the stage for the next installment, which will examine loopholes in current Agile software development practices that allow a team to bypass the customer.

In the case study for this issue, Agile Using Offshore Development: The Costs and Risks, Kevin Coleman shares the costs, risks, and rewards of an Agile team working in the U.S. working with a waterfall team offshore.

In his monthly book review, Brad Appleton takes a look at Alan Kelly’s Changing Software Development – Learning to Become Agile.

Finally, in From The Editor, I give you a preview of our plans for change over the next few months as we move towards a new format and cover new areas of our evolving Agile community.

Amr Elssamadisy
Editor-in-Chief
Agile Journal
Featured articles...
Finding the Steady State
With more and more scrum'ing and sprinting going on in agile development, let's reflect on the analogy made between Scrum and sports before we take a look at what misunderstandings it may cause within organizations transitioning to agile development practices, in particular Scrum.
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How To Choose Quality Candidates/Consultants for Your Large Company Agile Initiative
We created this set of questions to help corporate managers select Agile-experienced consultants and candidate employees for project work. Assembling a team of qualified Agile people is one thing, but the fact that some Agile practices and principles mean different things to different people makes it even harder to succeed in staffing your initiatives.
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It's a Tough Job... but Somebody Has to be the Product Owner
With so many corporate developers and IT teams beating a path to Scrum adoption there seems to be a lot of ScrumMaster training (both certified and otherwise) as well as coaching going on these days.  Putting aside any worries about people receiving just enough training to be dangerous (e.g. 2-3 day ScrumMaster training is available from many sources) for moment, most of us think this trend towards Scrum and Agile Development is a very positive one indeed.  That said, what concerns me the most...
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More articles...
Top 9 Challenges of Adopting Scrum Top 9 Challenges of Adopting Scrum
Second of a three part series...In this second part of our article you'll find the next three challenges we identified. The experiences shared in this series of articles come from working in large waterfall oriented enterprises and governmental departments. In our function as hired Scrum coaches from Xebia we gathered data from projects having between thirty and sixty people. The systems all comprised multiple platforms and technologies and often had a service oriented architecture.  ...
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Writing Shippable Code Writing Shippable Code
Software systems are being delivered to our customers at an ever-increasing rate. How can we keep up with the pace whilst still maintaining the quality of our code? I will demonstrate over a series of three articles how by focusing on the customer throughout our delivery cycle we can deliver reliable working software with confidence, reduce the number of defects, reduce our delivery timescales and ultimately save money. You may think this is nothing new, and that agile development has long since...
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Agile Using Offshore Development: The Costs and Risks Agile Using Offshore Development: The Costs and Risks
With today's economic pressures coupled with a highly competitive business environment, management is aggressively pursuing ways to increase effectiveness and efficiencies at the same time as they strive to improve customer services.  For these reasons many organizations are trying to integrate offshore development into the Agile projects.  Offshore development has seen tremendous growth in recent years.  The efficiencies gained by combining these two methods could be significant, but there a...
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FEATURED BOOK: Changing Software Development - Learning to Become Agile, by Allan Kelly FEATURED BOOK: Changing Software Development - Learning to Become Agile, by Allan Kelly
Allan Kelly's book Changing Software Development: Learning to Become Agile is not what you might expect at first. It's not about the practices and techniques to use in order to adopt and adapt Agile development, nor about how to execute and master various Agile practices. This book is about how Agile development and its adoption is really the application of knowledge management, learning organizations, and organizational change management. Those seeking a deeper understanding of this connection ...
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From The Editor From The Editor
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. ...
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