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New Forums at AgileSoftwareDevelopment.org
Agile veteran Ron Jeffries is a believer in the value of dialogue. So he's offering the Agile community a new resource, an Agile Forum, hoping it will be a brand-neutral, consultant-neutral place, open to and shared by everyone who is interested in advancing him- or herself in Agile, or in bringing Agile to the world. In XPmag, Ron's made an open invitation to both participants and volunteers.
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Agile Coach = Agile Secret Police?
Software engineer Paul Tyma, in a recent blog entry, tells us "I don't get this new craze of a job called 'Agile Coach'. I mean, everything I've read about Agile and XP seems dead simple." Though not a proponent of Agile, Tyma has done XP, so perhaps there's a basis for his view that an Agile Coach is not so much a 'coach' as "a hall monitor or a secret police officer."
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Does Agile Dispense with Project Managers?
Agile does away with many of the tasks by which Project Managers formerly measured their own performance. The Product Owner and Dev Team take on these activities, leaving PMs confused and wondering: "Am I redundant?" Agile coach Michele Sliger offers some reassurance, mapping PMI PMBOK practice areas to new Agile practices in her whitepaper "A Project Manager's Survival Guide to Going Agile".
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Leveraging the Wisdom of Project Newcomers
Experienced newcomers can't be onboarded like programmers just out of school. The experienced professional will have specific but difficult-to-anticipate gaps that will impede their performance. In addition, this provides a great opportunity to get a fresh but experienced feedback on your processes. Gannthead.com offers some pointers wrapped in three fictional Dr. Phil episodes... (really?)
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19 Pitfalls of Technical Leadership
Hacknot's list of Great Mistakes in Technical Leadership, while not particularly intended for an Agile audience, contains some sage advice - good leadership is not restricted to Agile teams. As always, Agile teams still need to balance advice from traditional sources against Agile values and principles.
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Sowing Organic Change
Kevin Rutherford blogged recently on fostering change, rather than imposing it, this latter strategy being more likely to backfire. He's provided three tools useful to get the ball rolling and keep it moving.
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Submissions wanted for Agile Leadership Summit 2006
Deadline is May 31 for submission of Experience Reports for the APLN Leadership Summit, to be held at the Agile2006 conference in July. This is an amazing opportunity to talk all day with Agile leaders in the setting of a small conference.
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Should Architects Code? Agile Ones Do!
One of the "religous" issues within the architecture community is whether or not architects should code, at least this is still being debated within the traditional community. For agilists, the answer is a resounding YES.
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"If you can't say something nice..."
David Anderson reflected recently on one simple tool for building trust in the workplace. What a difference a few words can make.
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Meeting the Challenge of Collective Code Ownership
The challenge: find the balance between pure practice and local compromise. Martin Fowler has brought us a story of a team in trouble, which took a step back to improve coding discipline and brush up on the basic practices that support collective ownership. In addition to the short-term gains of increased velocity and improved morale, the overall quality of the team's output improved as well.
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Thirty Days to Better Software
J.T. King describes the idea that you can slowly improve the way that you work over time by trying something for 30 days, giving it a fair chance, then assessing how well it worked for you.
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Agile Rollout - a Considered Approach
What's the best way to introduce Agile into the enterprise? Start at the bottom, with individual practices? Start at the top, obtaining upper management's buy-in? There's no one recipe for success, but there's likely to be less dissonance if the stages of adoption are understood and addressed. Kane Mar outlined steps to help an entire organization become Agile in stages in his 4-part blog series.
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The Art of Performance Feedback
The Agile approach, with its emphasis on "people over process" and "face-to-face communication", requires that managers pay attention to developing their communication skills. This is particularly important when helping employees improve their performance at work. Paul B. Brown has reviewed three recent books on the subject.
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Article: Being Agile Without Going Overboard
Author Venkat Subramaniam speaks from experience in this exclusive InfoQ article, on how to incrementally introduce agility into a project which is in trouble and not currently agile.