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The Agile Journal publishes original content, articles and regular columns
from industry thought leaders, analysts and software providers on a
wide variety of topics related to agile development best practices and business adoption of agile ideas. Below you will find links directly to our columns
and articles or you may use the search box to scan for a particular
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From the Editor
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More than any other types of software development teams, success on Agile teams requires collaboration among a broad community. Note that there are really two essential points here: that the Agile community is diverse and that its collaboration is effective. Just as we cite the "better, faster, cheaper" mantra to drive development priorities, so have we talked for years about the benefits of collaboration. Of course, team members must work together to achieve common goals. The greater the collaboration, the more likely that requirements will be met and issues will be resolved in a timely manner. So what is the "so what" with Agile collaboration? With a diverse, distributed community and corporate governance mandates, an Agile team must consider collaboration a key - if not the key - requirement. In this article, we'll explore the 2007 perspective and why an Agile team must think about collaboration differently.
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Featured Books
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 Do we need yet another book about implementing Scrum? Actually, if the book is The Enterprise and Scrum then the answer is yes! We know that small and large teams have been successful with Scrum at the project level. But so many organizations seem to stumble when they try to scale Scrum up to the enterprise level. Why? What should they do differently? In this book, Ken Schwaber, the industry leader with by far the richest Scrum experiences, shares his insights and offers suggestions for those trying to use Scrum across the enterprise.
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When large enterprises experiment with agile process adoption, an agile project manager is often challenged by and compared to projects of existing systems. Often these are mission-critical applications, which have been patched, fixed, and improved over time, leading to a complexity and size of functionality which could be overwhelming. If you are in charge of replacing such a system using an agile approach or are in the beginning of new large enterprise-wide project, the bar could sit very high for project managers and the teams. But please remember, hardly any of these existing systems were initially planned and developed with such complexity in mind. They grew often over many years through bug-fixes, enhancement requests, and integration with other neighboring systems. In the same way the existing system evolved over years, so did the schedule and cost estimates. So how could it be fair to ask an agile project manager and her team to estimate a Agile project managers face another challenge in traditionally managed organizations. Senior management often expects detailed and "accurate" estimates as early as during project initiation, because at this point projects are funded and budgets controlled. For the agile project, this estimation exercise could easily turn into estimation paralysis. Just to clarify, let's assume there are no user stories, use cases, features, or any other traditional requirement documents -- just a business case or an initial idea. To be able to attack this dilemma, we need to go to the root-cause of the problem and start asking ourselves "Why are we struggling with these complex estimates?" and be honest about "Why do we feel bad about admitting that it is so difficult?" But let's challenge the question itself "Are early estimates actually difficult?" complex system in an agile fashion if we can't do it with another method either? It's not.
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 Agile processes and practices have gained enough attention that both IT businesses and product development organizations are engaging in large Agile implementations. These larger-scale products, programs, and projects are more complex, have more dependencies, and present significant challenges. According to the second annual "State of Agile Development" survey, Scrum (and Hybrid XP/Scrum) is being chosen over other Agile methods 60% of the time. For larger multi-team implementations, Scrum has an advantage of providing successful scaling techniques. For example, the Scrum-of-Scrums meeting helps teams synchronize and coordinate with the purpose of executing on the Product Backlog. When the Scrum-of-Scrums is insufficient because multiple organizational units need alignment, and consent must be obtained from high levels, the coordinating Meta-Scrum meeting adds balance because the Meta-Scrum is Product Owner focused while the Scrum of Scrums is team focused. Agile principles, including "Working software is the primary measure of progress," mean we must have a focus on releases - and releases are the primary focal point of a Meta-Scrum throughout the project lifecycle. A properly executed Meta-Scrum helps drive transparency vertically into the organization.
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 Several
forces in the software industry are combining to dramatically shorten product
cycle times for even the largest applications. These forces also shorten the
feedback loops on an application's quality, usability, and customer
relevance. As feedback loops shorten and the number of software deliveries
goes up, it becomes paramount to inform and collaborate with employees,
customers, and partners in a community setting.
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To most non-technical people, the mere
mention of "IT" can be a real turn off, or result in a roll of the
eyes.
Although traditionally  associated with geeks developing code in a back
room, IT
- in its very broadest sense - forms the backbone of organizations
today, which
begs the question: why is there still such a huge communication gap
between the
IT discipline and the business it powers? This article provides
anecdotes and advice for businesses to help them resolve the issues
between business and IT, and describes how using Agile methods might
just save
their relationship.
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Agile
teams large or small, co-located or distributed, have one very important common
denominator: the absolute imperative that a strong product owner be established
before any work begins. Arguably the strongest, or weakest, link in any Agile
team is the product owner. At odds with this basic fact is a startling
oversight of this role at the outset of many projects. Add to this a multi-site
outsourced development team and it's no wonder successful enterprise Agile
adoption is slow going. What makes a good product owner? Why is this role
critical to the success of any Agile project? How should this role be supported
within the team and organization? These fundamental questions will be addressed
herein.
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 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 Books
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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 listings,
coverage of systems using Java,
C/C++/C#, Python, Ruby, and dozens of tools and environments. No other book is
as thorough in capturing not just the concepts and the mental attitude of CI,
but also all the related practices and current technologies (including Ant,
NAnt, JUnit, NUnit, CruiseControl, Continuum, Bamboo, Buildforge, Rake,
Luntbuild, ParaBuild, Guantlet, Sin, Maven (and Maven 2), CruiseControl.NET,
AntHill, and more). You can check out this book at Amazon.com
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The Agile Developer
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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 other mundane activities that
we not only dislike, but know are counter-productive to our end goal. But agile
development, with its proven emphasis on individuals and working software, has
the ability to make software development fun again. If we're able to bring
agile to the enterprise, we just might make software development the way it
ought to be - enjoyable, productive, and valuable.
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