Agile Software Development

Manually filtered top of the most interesting writing published since last Saturday. Of course, most interesting from my personal point of view.

Top writing of the week

• Function to Function Pointer Refactoring - Bas Vodde, one of the Nokia agile gurus presents simple yet effective tip for refactoring the legacy C code for testability
• Morning Cuppa - Dave Nicolette explains how agile software development is similar to drinking a good coffee. Not exactly a humorous post
• Technical Debt Decision Making - Steve McConnell, one of the most known figures in the whole SW industry explains what exactly differs quick and dirty way from proper and slow way. The main point is that there is actually a quite measurable third path - quite quick, but not that dirty way
• The NokiaTest: What Does It Mean Really? (1) - Joe Little from "Agile & Business" starts a series of posts that discuss the Nokia Test for Scrum. The first post covers the importance of the timeboxed iterations of less than six weeks length

See also

• Weekly Agile Reading. Pack 8
  
• Weekly Agile Reading. Pack 7
  
• Weekly Agile Reading. Pack 6
  
• Weekly Agile Reading. Pack 5
  
• Weekly Agile Reading. Pack 4
• Weekly Agile Reading. Pack 3
• Weekly Agile Reading. Pack 2
• Weekly Agile Reading. Pack 1

If you happen to encounter another interesting content published since last Saturday, please, post links in the comments.

Manually filtered top of the most interesting writing published since last Saturday. Of course, most interesting from my personal point of view.

Top writing of the week

• The Nokia Test - Joe Little discusses the usefulness of the Nokia Test for whether a team s really using Scrum. By the way, in my opinion, it is an excellent, short and clear criteria.
• Is Distributed Agile Development as Hard as it Looks - Dean Leffingwell claims that, when scaling agile, the problem of distributed teams is far not the most important.
• Test Cancer - Martin Fowler describes a situation with the tests are not taken seriously after SW is delivered to the client
• Unconsciously Agile - Damon Poole claims that most of software houses periodically work in the agile mode. When delivering the maintenance releases or patches.

See also

• Weekly Agile Reading. Pack 7
  
• Weekly Agile Reading. Pack 6
  
• Weekly Agile Reading. Pack 5
  
• Weekly Agile Reading. Pack 4
• Weekly Agile Reading. Pack 3
• Weekly Agile Reading. Pack 2
• Weekly Agile Reading. Pack 1

If you happen to encounter another interesting content published since last Saturday, please, post links in the comments.

Manually filtered top of the most interesting writing published since last Saturday. Of course, most interesting from my personal point of view.

Top writing of the week

1. Nokia Foundation award to Pekka Abrahamsson.I don't usually write much about my day job company and my academic life, but this is a special case. My company gave its main award to a truly exceptional person in the agile world. Pekka Abrahamsson is one of those who brought agile to Finland and made Finland an "island of agile" as Alexey Krivistsky once called this northern country. Pekka continues bringing agile to the whole world and I am happy to be his PhD student.
2. Integrating Scrum with the Process Framework at Yahoo! - Karl Scotland published slides from the Yahoo! Europe presentation at this Fall Scrum Gathering
3. Return of the Naked Agilists! - Kevin Rutherford announces the second Skypeference on agile. The only thing you need to participate is a working Skype connection. Mark Saturday 19-Jan-08 20:00 GMT - 21:30 GMT in your calendar
4. Everything you Need to Know about Agile - an excellent Dilbert comic on quite an typical (?) agile adoption story
5. Agilistas on LinkedIn - Chris Spagnuolo created a new group on LinkedIn. There are 90 people already including Mike Cohn and Jean Tabaka to mention a few.
6. Code Emphasis for Tests that Teach - Brian Marick claims that since one of the main test purposes is to teach us how to handle the tested piece of code, the test code should be refactored by the different standards

See also

• Weekly Agile Reading. Pack 6
  
• Weekly Agile Reading. Pack 5
  
• Weekly Agile Reading. Pack 4
• Weekly Agile Reading. Pack 3
• Weekly Agile Reading. Pack 2
• Weekly Agile Reading. Pack 1

If you happen to encounter another interesting content published since last Saturday, please, post links in the comments.

Manually filtered top of the most interesting writing published since last Saturday. Of course, most interesting from my personal point of view.

Top writing of the week

1. Nine Boxes - Dave Nicolette describes a simple yet effective tool for interviewing customers. In essence it is just a clever set of of questions to get the requirement captured in a dialog.
2. Estimating Testing Using Spreadsheets - Mike Kelly presents a practical approach of estimating the effort needed for testing the project. Whether we agree or not, some concrete spreadsheet examples are worth looking at.
3. QCon - Trends in Agile Development by Kent Beck - srinip's notes after the Kent Beck's keynote presentation on QCon 2007 conference. Quite a typical Kent's talk. (Kent Beck is the father of Extreme Programming method)
4. Scrum - Use More Paper - James Brett arguing for the use of simple tools in Scrum

See also

• Weekly Agile Reading. Pack 5
  
• Weekly Agile Reading. Pack 4
• Weekly Agile Reading. Pack 3
• Weekly Agile Reading. Pack 2
• Weekly Agile Reading. Pack 1

If you happen to encounter another interesting content published since last Saturday, please, post links in the comments.

Manually filtered top of the most interesting writing published since last Saturday. Of course, most interesting from my personal point of view.

Top writing of the week

• Agile Implementation - The game development company BioWare realized many benefits of agile and shared some problems & solutions they encountered on the way.
• Ask Mary Poppendieck Anything - You've got an excellent possibility to ask the author of Implementing Lean Software Development: From Concept to Cash (non-affiliated link). Submit your questions by November 25.
• Getting Off Our Tails and Onto the Rails - Ron Jeffries and Chet Hendrickson start a step-by-step series of article on how they learn and apply Ruby on Rails in an XP manner. Technically it has been published a bit earlier, than last Saturday, but is valuable enough to force me bend the rules a bit.
• Sprinting Out the Door - Chris Spangnuolo tells about how the whole team managed to leave the company without causing too much of a break. The idea was to have a transition period sprint taken together by the leaving and the covering team.

See also

• Weekly Agile Reading. Pack 4
• Weekly Agile Reading. Pack 3
• Weekly Agile Reading. Pack 2
• Weekly Agile Reading. Pack 1

If you happen to encounter another interesting content published since last Saturday, please, post links in the comments.

Manually filtered top of the most interesting writing published since last Saturday. Of course, most interesting from my personal point of view.

Top writing of the week

1. Lisp and Agile Development - an interesting view on how such a non-mainstream language as Lisp could help the team be agile. Quite unexpected as for me
2. Agile is not about Rapid Software Development - Naresh Jain claims that agile methods strive for delivering the business value rapidly and it is far not the same as delivering software rapidly

Manually filtered top of the most interesting writing published since last Saturday. Of course, most interesting from my personal point of view.

Top writing of the week

1. We're live! (a success story) - An exciting success story of an XP project that resulted in MicroPlace. The critical success points listed.
2. Trading off agile principles and practices - Dave Nicolette on the Valtech's experiences with sacrificing some agile practices in order to support the more important ones.
3. A very non-lean ER experience - Lean Blog reports on the awful visit to the emergency center. It is not exactly about the agile methods, but a very special story explored from a lean perspective (the agile methods are based on the lean manufacturing principles).
4. Automating tests vs. test-automation - Google Test Engineering Manager tells about how they perform testing on various levels of the system.
5. Those wacky agile zealots are at it again - Dave Nicolette's fascinating allegory on a software product development.

See also

• Weekly Agile Reading. Pack 2
• Weekly Agile Reading. Pack 1

If you happen to encounter another interesting content published since last Saturday, please, post links in the comments.

This week I noticed only two lately (since last Saturday) published items that are worth recommending to you

Top writing of the week

• Modifiability: Or is there Design in Agility - a video of the panel led by Martin Fowler. Features the architects working for ThoughWorks, one of the leaning companies in the agile world.
• Overview of Infrastructure Testing - insignt into the Google's view on testing. From unit-testing to the whole system testing.

See also

• Weekly Agile Reading. Pack 1

If you happen to encounter another interesting content published since last Saturday, please, post links in the comments.

I am keen on reading the software development related stuff both offline and online. Every week I read dozens of articles and posts on agile and related topics in my RSS reader and out of my RSS reader. I decided to share with you my opinion on what were the most interesting agility-related articles and posts published during a week. Consider it being a manually filtered top of the most interesting writing of a week (of course, most interesting from my personal point of view).

Ron Jeffries, a known consultant and author has launched a new online resource - Agile Forums. That's a web board devoted to developing the agile methods and discussing the cultural issues related to the agile software development methods. The site is in its childhood but there are several known experts posting there already including the Ron Jeffries himself.