April 20, 2007 in Software Development by Mark Levison

I often struggle to tease themes out a bunch of excellent posts (Pete and John do a great job of this)

I will start with one of my favourite topics – the use of Agile methods outside of Software Development.

Scrum for Wedding Planning was a post by Mike Sutton to Scrum Development which cause me to discover Chris Sterling’s older post Scrum for the home.

In a pair of posts: Software Development as a Collaborative Game and Software
Projects as Rock Climbing Jeff Atwood
relates Alistair’s analogy that Software Development is cooperative
game like rock climbing. If you’ve not read Alistair’s Jolt Award
winning book: "Agile Software Development: The Cooperative Game" – stop reading this post, do yourself
a favor run down to the nearest bookstore and buy a copy. Don’t bother
wasting your time waiting for Amazon. In my mind this book more than
any other helps explain how the Agile principles work.

How to successfully Adopt Agile methods? Skip Angel (is that your real
name?) discusses an An Agile Approach to adopting Agile
and Joe Little hits the same subject in his Fourth posting on Lean
Software Development.
Finally Simon Baker has a succinct reminder Put Customers First and everything else follows.

Not another book to read – Pete Behrens reviews Dean Leffingwell’s:
Scaling Software Agility: Best Practices for Large Enterprises.
Help that will be the third book I have stacked up on scaling.

In a very Different Team Event Jiri Lundak
talks about a how his team moved from depression and lack of progress
to being energized and having a deeper shared understanding of their
problem domain. Along the way they solved some business problems too.

Henrik shows pictures of the pair programming environment at
Crisp.

Fixing problems.

Not everything goes as well as we would like in Agile software
development. George "Sherlock" Dinwiddie studies The Case of the Recalcitrant
Customer.
Chris Sterling looks at problems in the Daily Scrum.
While Esther Derby asks When is it time to move someone off a team.

In a column at StickyMinds Johanna Rothman reminds of the importance
of creating a good product vision
something that can get overlooked in the rush to code.

Reminding us of the value of transparency, Ed Gibbs tells a story where
saying no improved his relationship with a customer.

Via Mishkin Berteig, Dale
Emery’s Resistance as a Resource – a toolset
we all need.

Brad Appleton (maintainer of some most useful lists of resources) comes
through again with a great list of resource for Lean Software
Development.
Hint my reading list just grew longer again.

Kevin Rutherford has a great story about an Agile mini conference held
over the web. Very
cool – I still prefer seeing other people in person

Finally – I would like to invite you join Agile Tangents:

This list
is for all the messages that are off topic or tangential to the purpose of the
other Agile mailing lists: Scrumdevelopment, Agile Project Management,
extremeprogramming. Often this is most of the content on these lists, even the
most interesting.

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