Carnival of the Agilists for Apr 20

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.