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In most projects, testers are the keepers of quality. Sharing the vision of quality with the entire team helps everyone involved in a project play a more active role in determining the state of quality in a product. In this column, Jeff Patton shares several innovative ideas he's seen in practice lately that have helped an entire team own up to the quality of its software.

A prerequisite to any of the Agile SCM practices, such as integration build, private build, unit tests, and the like, is being able to set up a developer’s private workspace with the right code and tools so that you can code, build and test. In this article, we discuss the important, and often overlooked process of creating a development workspace, which is to say, getting started.

A lot of heated debate is going on topics such as "Can we develop software using an offshore model with agile methodologies?" This article is my humble attempt to give more insight on this question using a story to describe a real scenario with some assumptions and with not so real people.

Ask any Scrum trainer and they'll tell you the same thing: Adopting Scrum is hard. There are many reasons for this. Chief among them is that Scrum is so dramatically different—in terms of practices and principles—from traditional project management paradigms that it requires team members to truly reorient their attitudes and working behaviors. One common way to initiate a Scrum transformation is through a pilot project. But even then, how does a team that's never used Scrum before tell if a project is a strong candidate for a successful pilot?

An Exercise in Agile Facilitation

A leader is best when people barely know he exists, when his work is done, his aim fulfilled, they will say: we did it ourselves. Lao Tzu, Chinese philosopher (604 BC - 531 BC).

The project manager leads. The project manager directs. The project manager plans. The project manager manages. These are the expectations set upon, and sought out by those that take on the responsibility for delivering software projects to the Business. While unquestionably a critical role in the overall delivery mechanism, a project manager who becomes the central figure in the team can unnecessarily place the team in a position of risk. In fact, the project manager should approach the process with a less intrusive style, facilitating the team towards success from within and figuring out ways to develop systems that will survive any one person, themselves included.

Twenty years ago, Clarke Ching fell in love with programming. Then he got a job doing just that and fell out of love within five years. Fifteen years later, Clarke sought the help of a well-known programmer for advice on how to rekindle his dormant passion for programming. The advice Clarke received led to a greater discovery.