Agile Software Development

Dear readers,

AgileSoftwareDevelopment.com just got a new permanent author - Jurgen Appelo.

Jurgen Appelo is Chief Information Officer at ISM eCompany, recently rated as the #1 fastest growing technology company in The Netherlands. He leads a horde of 50 software developers, development managers, project managers, consultants, quality assurance managers, service managers and kangaroos, some of which he hired accidentally.

During more, than three years of its life AgileSoftwareDevelopment.com gathered plenty of posts, comments and ideas. There is already quite some valuable content that that deserves to be visible even though it might be not posted last week. I decided that simple stream of posts isn't good enough anymore and reshuffled the design, trying to make it less cluttered and more useful.

It is now official. Since the beginning of the year I moved from the Chief Engineer role in a department doing speech recognition and synthesis to product management in the my company internal tools department.

Reasons

For the last couple of years I was more, than full-time focused on making the agile software development methods work for our team, our company and myself (heavy amount of practical scrum mastering and teaching included). It was a fascinating story full of learning, excitement and success though not without some failures and disappointment. I still believe that at the moment Agile and Lean Thinking are one of the top topics many SW development organizations should invest into.

I am leaving in Finland and I am trying to follow the local agile community news. There is a local Agile Finland website, some free seminars with the world-class speakers and quite active discussion group. This week something significant happened there

Somebody nicknamed kopious couple of hours ago submitted Agile Manifesto to Digg. Join and digg on this page! Let's see how many votes we can get.

Ever wanted Google to return poppendieck.com, when you search for Mary?

I was a bit tired of seeing a lot of rugby results, when I search for Scrum related sites and created the Agile Web Search engine. It is built on top of the Google Co-op technology and searches the whole web, while boosting the agility-related sites a bit. It helps me search faster, it might be useful for you as well.

Give Agile Web Search a try. Details and proposals on how the search results are/should be boosted up can be found on the forum.

Performancing.com lately launched a beta of the very cool blog statistics service. It is created especially for bloggers with the AdSense click and comment counter. I don't like modifying the theme templates just to include the yet another statistics counter. So I created a small and simple Drupal module for PMetrics. And decided to share it with everybody interested :)

If you are running Drupal, simply upload the PMetrics module to your modules directory and enable it in the admin/modules. That's it. No extra settings required. Register at Performancing and analyze your logs.