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Recent history has ushered in the postmodern era in all its fragmented glory. With its arrival comes the displacement of the absolute, the certain, and all that characterizes the modern age. Along with changes in art, politics, and philosophy— there are reverberations in business and technology. The societal shift from Modernism to Postmodernism mirrors and reinforces a shift in software development from traditional waterfall to non-linear Agile methods.

Open source CI tools have been immensely popular, but are they the perfect fit for your operation? Answer these seven questions to quickly assess if you should upgrade to an enterprise-class CI environment.

In this article, Lisa Crispin recalls a time when testers alone were solely responsible for software quality, and compares that to more modern thinking where collaboration between developers and testers is king. Software quality is everyone's job, sometimes it takes independence to get there.

This short book, written by Clarke Ching, is a "biztech" parable for software developers who want to survive—and then thrive—through the credit crunch. We have republished the book in a four-part series. In part one, we meet the main characters who have just found out that their jobs are on the line after discovering their major client's business is failing. Follow the story as our characters fight to keep their jobs by implementing creative business ideas and management skills taken from agile development.

Much has been written about the commonality or even the lack of it between Agile and CMM. CMM claims to be a flexible model that can be tailored and adapted to many life cycles. The continued discussion is evident enough that it is not sufficient to compare practice to practice and arrive at any reasonable conclusion about their overall compatibility. The one difference that seems to have earned consensus amongst most of the published literature on the subject is "the people aspect" of these models. 

While working with Product Owners over the years I have learned some rules of thumb that help make their Product Backlogs more manageable. Some of these rules of thumb I learned from other people and some were learned through trial and error.

Remember that the statements contained in this article are just rules of thumb intended to help guide your management of a Product Backlog. They are not rules to adhere to no matter what. Always use common sense when applying a rule of thumb to your particular context.

In this article, Michele Sliger discusses one of the more common "ScrumBut" practices that, while allowing teams to say "We suck less," isn't really in keeping with intended Scrum practices. This ScrumBut practice is the persistent failure of the team to complete the agreed-upon features in the iteration or sprint.