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The Accidental Agilist: A Personal Look Back at 10 Years of the Agile Manifesto

Johanna Rothman reflects on her journey to pragmatic agility. She discusses the way in which agile practices work together to improve project outcomes, and how this is not restricted to software development. She challenges teams to embrace the transparency that agile brings and stop talking about becoming agile and start doing it properly.

Johanna Rothman
on Mar 03, 2011
Implementation Decision Rationales – Program Comprehension in Agile

Given the fact that the bulk of a developer's work is maintaining and enhancing existing code, Fabian Kiss makes the case for a lightweight approach to documenting the rationale and decision process behind design decisions to help later developers tie the source code syntax to its meaning in the application domain. Using simple tags and clearly thought out rationale to provide just-enough value.

Fabian Kiss
on Feb 28, 2011
Reflections on the 10 Years Since the Agile Manifesto

Mike Cohn reflects on the changes in software development over the last 10 years, as agile has gone from fringe to mainstream and his hopes that we will move from seeing agile as something different or special, to being simply the way we work. In the same way that the Magna Carta influences our lives without being in the forefront of thinking so the Agile Manifesto should fade into the background

Mike Cohn
on Feb 23, 2011
The Many Levels of Planning on an Agile Project

One of the fundamental Agile values is “we value responding to change over following a plan” which has sometimes been misintrepreted to mean we don’t need to plan on an Agile project. Nothing could be further from the truth - in reality agile organisations and projects plan at many different levels. Shane Hastie discusses the different types and approaches to planning and how the work together.

Shane Hastie
on Feb 22, 2011
Agile 10 Years On

James Coplien looks from the hacker culture of the 1960s, through objects in the 1980s and forward to the future to put the Agile Mainfesto in context of the 20 year cycle of fashion and change. He argues against mindless adherence to a particular set of rules and tools and for carefully thought out application of good practices that support the production of good quality software products.

James Coplien
on Feb 18, 2011
A Personal Reflection on Agile Ten Years On

Stephen J Mellor was one of the original signatories of the Agile Manifesto. He attended the Snowbird meeting “as a spy” with but found himself agreeing with most of what was being said and became a proponent of Agile techniques and emphasizes the value of modelling in the Agile world. We rarely see the words “agile” and “model” in the same sentence, but they are not at all in conflict.

Stephen J. Mellor
on Feb 11, 2011
Agile Contracts

The traditional Waterfall model fits nicely with the way companies buy things: requirements are drawn up, a supplier quotes a price, and everyone signs a legally binding agreement. Contracts written this way seldom offer the freedom to work using an Agile approach. This article examines four separate models available to suppliers and customers for establishing contracts for Agile work.

Allan Kelly
on Feb 08, 2011
Submissions and Reviews in the Agile2011

Chris Matts who has been part of the Agile Conference submission review team gives advice to submitters of Agile 2011 candidate sessions on how improve their changes of acceptance. Chris also provides advice to session reviewers of Agile 2011, the largest annual Agile event.

Chris Matts
on Feb 01, 2011
IT And Architecture: Inside-Out Perspectives

The software industry is in disarray, costs are escalating, and quality is diminishing. Promises of newer technologies and processes and methodologies in IT are still far from materializing on any significant scale. Bruce Laidlaw and Michael Poulin - each with more than 30 years of experience compared notes on the past and present of IT and provide insights on what IT needs to make progress.

Bruce Laidlaw Michael Poulin
on Jan 03, 2011
Estimation Toolkit

No matter what kind of software you write, or the size company you work for, you probably have to provide estimates to someone. There are many techniques agile teams can use to help guide their estimation efforts. The toolkit described in this article consists of a number of novel approaches to estimating agile software projects that will help you answer the question – “When will we be done?”.

James King
on Dec 28, 2010
Breaking Down Walls, Building Bridges, and Takin’ Out the Trash

Agile Team Rooms can help double the productivity of an Agile Team. Most people are familiar with the Caves and Commons approach where the team has a common area on the inside of the room and private desks on the outside. Some teams dispense with the private spaces in the room, but few go as far as Menlo dispensing with the rooms altogether.

Richard Sheridan Lisamarie Babik
on Dec 22, 2010
Doing Kanban Wrong

Kanban as a tool to support lean software development continues to increase in popularity all the time. However, like countless tools before it, Kanban will be unfairly blamed for many project failures by people who are doing Kanban wrong. This article discusses some ways the author has tried to give Kanban a bad name. Hopefully these examples will keep you from falling into similar traps.

Tim Wingfield
on Dec 22, 2010