Is your dev team Agile?  No, I don't mean quick or dynamic, but are you following Agile development practises?  Join me on a journey to learn more about Agile.

What does Agile mean to you? 

Does it mean you have small teams?  Are you able to ask the person who raised the bug immediately?  Are you fast on your feet to implement a new enhancement?  Do you do builds every afternoon and sometimes do a release build for people to test?  Who tests your builds?  If you are doing some or even all of these things, you might be surprised to hear you are probably not be as "Agile" as you think.

I have a friend of mine who suggested I read Ken Schwaber's book called Agile Software Development with Scrum to get a better handle on what the term "Agile" means and I'm glad I did.  It's actually a surprisingly good read!  It's written in easy to understand, not too technical terms.  Ken (and co-author Mike Beedle) do talk about languages but so far there's no code examples.  That's not what Agile is about, it's meant to be language indepenedent!  But I'm getting ahead of myself.

If you don't have the time or money to buy the book, I found a great video today which is a great overview of Agile.  Please watch and enjoy.  I know I'm learning a few things about Agile, and dispelling some of my preconceived notions about what Agile/Scrum is all about.

Joel Semeniuk's Blog Entry: Lessons Learned implementing Scrum at Google.

 

Resources:

Ken Schwaber's Book: http://www.amazon.com/Agile-Software-Development-Scrum/dp/0130676349/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1228247394&sr=1-2

Joel Semeniuk's Blog Entry: Lessons Learned implementing Scrum at Google:

http://weblogs.asp.net/jsemeniuk/archive/2008/01/03/lessons-learned-implementing-scrum-at-google.aspx