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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
topic or writer.
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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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From the Editor
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 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 depth in large-scale and global projects and a disproportionate number of ISVs versus IT shops sharing their stories. Overall, though, I found the conference to be rich with ideas and enthusiasm; an acknowledgement of a quickly maturing market.
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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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 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 Development, explore the rationale
behind it, and introduce Open Source tools, some new, some familiar, that you
can use to get you started.
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 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 leadership agility.
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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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 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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The Agile Manager
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 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 application lifecycle management (ALM) 2.0 capabilities in
Agile project management tools will make it possible to scale Agile practices into
very large and complex development initiatives.
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