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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
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Featured Books
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 Most
books I read related to Lean and Agile development talk about how Agile has
roots in Lean that were then applied to the world of software development.
Preston G. Smith's latest work, Flexible
Product Development, is a bit of "switcharoo" in this regard: it takes
the ideas and principles of Agile software development and then shows how they
can be applied to non-software products.
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From the Editor
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 It is great
to end 2007 by looking back at what the Agile community has achieved. Organizations
have made tremendous strides, particularly in the areas of large, distributed Agile
projects and increased customer satisfaction. Competing Agile conferences, new
commercial and open source Agile tools, and a growing number of global Agile
consultancies all attest to the validity and benefits of Agile approaches. But enterprise-wide
Agile initiatives are still few and far between. Some of the issues on the
table for Agile teams are the same issues that have existed for software
developers for the past decade! Agility in software development emphasizes
small, frequent steps and continuous improvement; we can approach Agile
adoption in the same way. Agile approaches stress individuals and interactions,
so my suggestion for the coming year is to hone in on four core goals -- skill
development, incremental practice adoption, leverage of existing assets, and
the ever-present demand for better project visibility -- and see how far
they'll take us towards enterprise Agile adoption.
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Articles
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 Refactoring is one of the cornerstones of the technical agile development practices. It is the mechanism that allows the design and architecture of a system to evolve over time. It is one third of the red-green-refactor loop and the core of test driven development (TDD). But does it really deliver on its promises? If you and your team are diligent writing tests and refactor mercilessly will your software evolve well and easily? Is the cost of refactoring always small and affordable? Refactoring is not a silver bullet, and sometimes is painful and expensive, so we cannot rely on always refactoring with a limited cost. However, any design, no matter how appropriate today, will be inappropriate tomorrow as the requirements change, and refactoring is our best tool to evolve our designs and architectures.
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Articles
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 Geographically Distributed Development (GDD) is a common strategy in the software world today. Organizations are gaining experience in developing software globally and are discovering that the competitive demand for best-in-class, high quality applications requires greater agility in quality management. Unfortunately, IT budgets are not keeping up with the staff required for quality management and the response is to accelerate quality management by leveraging global teams. This article compares and contrasts agile GDD testing strategies for affecting quality management.
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Articles
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 Sticking
push pins into a wall map to denote Agile team member locations doesn't
translate into a productive, global development organization. Seeking out
companies that have created efficient, disbursed teams and asking how they did
it won't help you either. There are no best practices, just a few good ideas to
think about and tailor around your particular objectives. Truly connecting
those push pins means taking a critical look at three universal issues every
organization must grapple with to make a global Agile team successful: data considerations,
communications needs, and a company's Agile readiness. How you handle each of
these issues will vary widely, and there are no best practices that can help.
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The Agile Manager
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 Strategic or mission-critical application development requires developers to have more than just technical programming skills. They must also be fluent in the business context of the applications they develop, and have a working knowledge of the technical environment of the business. This makes global sourcing that much more difficult: whereas technical skills can be acquired in the classroom or from prior experience, complex business problems and esoteric technical environments are typically business-specific. As a result, they must be learned and mastered in a specific environment, and pose a challenge to global sourcing. The collaborative aspects of Agile practices - both among developers and with business partners - offer a solution to this problem. By effectively incubating high performing, globally sourced teams, Agile practices allow an organization to source IT application development not only for cost reduction, but for strategic solution development.
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Articles
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 Over the course of the past decade, Agile software development has progressed from a grassroots, almost underground movement, to the mainstream. Early successes have paved the way for broader acceptance of Agile principles and practices, facilitating dialogue not only in IT back offices, but corporate boardrooms as well. With an ever-increasing focus on profitability, time-to-market, and customer satisfaction, the vigorous debate over Agile adoption appears to be shifting from a question of "why?" to one of "how?" To maintain momentum, the Agile community must shift its focus from "spreading the gospel" to architecting effective real-world adoption strategies. Addressing institutional adoption issues requires a less rhetorical approach which recognizes that Agile methods and Agile leaders must themselves embrace change and seek compatibility if Agile methods are to find a persistent role in modern business vernacular, whether specifically in the context of enterprise software development or in settings further afield.
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From the Editor
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Over the past few years, I've been asked repeatedly for market data on Agile development. How big is the Agile market? What is its potential size? What is the penetration of Agile processes? Unfortunately, my response has been and still remains the same: "No one really knows, and if you find someone purporting to have the data, don't trust it." With so many supporters in the IT, software vendor, and consulting communities, many of whom would benefit from this data, why would these answers be so difficult to derive? The answer is actually quite simple. Agile practitioners are themselves quite Agile. The definitions of what they do, when and where they do it, and how well they do, are continually in flux. Sizing a market that can't be bounded is an exercise in futility. Of course, there are those who rely on market data in order to launch or grow their businesses. But for the majority of Agile developers and managers, the data will not be relevant and should certainly not be a barrier to progress. Rather, Agile teams should absorb the wealth of Agile experiences that are being shared in the industry (i.e., qualitative factors) and not waste their time looking for hard data.
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Featured Books
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 Whether
your projects and teams are Agile, apathetic, or just plain asleep, Johanna Rothman's
Manage It! is your pragmatic,
no-nonsense guide to deftly dealing with management reality when your project's
stakeholders are clinging to project fantasy. This is yet another top notch
book from both Johanna Rothman and the Pragmatic Programmer's Bookshelf. Rothman's
previous books Behind Closed
Doors: Secrets of Great Management
(with Esther Derby), and Hiring the
Best Knowledge Workers, Techies, and Nerds: The Secrets and Science of Hiring Technical People have both
received critical acclaim, and Rothman's
blogs have been on my regular
reading list for years. So this new, insightful, practical, and timely tome
from her on the subject of modern project management success in the real world
(both Agile and otherwise) comes as no surprise.
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Articles
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 During the past few years there has been a trend developing in the software industry toward agile development processes. Unfortunately for the business analyst (BA), much of the literature regarding agile development focuses on the perspective of the developer, largely ignoring the role of the business analyst. BAs play a key role capturing requirements on large, software-intensive projects. Yet agile methodology emphasizes face-to-face communication over written documentation. Teams are co-located where programmers and their "customers" interact directly as a means of eliciting requirements. Organizations that are moving toward agile development may wonder if a has a role in agile software development. The answer, as addressed by this paper, is a resounding "Yes."
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