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Leaders can stifle progress when they unnecessarily interfere with team processes. However, as a leader, you don't want your project to go over the cliff and fail miserably or deliver the wrong results either. There are times when leaders should stand back and let the team work things out for themselves—and other times when leaders should step up and really lead. 

"Investigators aren't sure" is a phrase that frequently pops up in the media. Information systems workers seem to share this uncertainty. So, what's the secret to success in this "aren't sure" world?

Using the ten virtues described in Brian Price's modern code of chivalry, Martin and Mike illustrate the similarities between the best performing software team members of today and the Knights of the Round Table.

Are you bored? Do feel as if all you do is repeat heavily scripted tests and as a result you aren't learning, discovering new problems, or finding bugs? These nine heuristics can help you get out of your rut and take back control of your testing process.

The Done State practice is a definition that a team agrees upon to nonambiguously describe what must take place for a requirement to be considered complete. The done state is the goal of every requirement in an iteration. It is as close as possible to deploying software as a team can come.

At the core of all software solutions are underlying software architectures. The architectures reflect initial assumptions about how products fit together, which features are of value to customers, what are the expected integration points, with which related technologies. As software products find acceptance among customers, and technologies continue to evolve, the creators (vendors) of these solutions eventually find the need to adapt underlying architectures. Agile provides a means of doing this early in the product lifecycle and with continual review that provides the creator with the ability to adapt quickly and effectively to changes is the marketplace.

Within the Agile community retrospectives are widely seen as the mechanism for promoting learning and change. But many teams fail to hold retrospectives, or fail to act on the findings, thus they fail to learn and improve. If we are going to fix this we need to change our approach to retrospectives, and find new ways to learn and create change.