agile

For teams practicing Agile Software development, value working software over other artifacts, a feature from the release plan is not complete until you can demonstrate it to your customer, ideally in a shippable state. Agile teams strive to have a working system ("potentially shippable") ready at the end of each iteration. Release Management should be easy for an ideal agile team, as agile teams, in theory, are ready to release at regular intervals, and the release management aspect is the customer saying, "Ship it!."

Modern day reporters tend to write their articles using what is known as the "inverted pyramid" style. They start with the most important information in the first sentence, followed by the next most important, and so on. This format not only gives the reader the biggest bang for his buck as he reads it also gives both the reporters and their editors huge flexibility in their uncertain and fast-changing environments. Clarke Ching shows how modern software development techniques use the same idea to give customers the best bang for their buck—in equally uncertain environments.

One of the common misperceptions with agile software development is that agilists don't "do architecture." This completely ignores the 11th principle of the Agile Manifesto which states that the best architectures evolve over time. In this article Scott Ambler overviews an agile practice called "architecture envisioning" which enables you to gain the value from modeling without the cost of needless documentation.

Do you manage a team or a group? How can you tell the difference, and is it important to differentiate the two? In this column, Esther Derby explains that identifying your associates as one or the other is paramount to how they should be managed.