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When attempting to adopt best practices we often can't see the forest for the trees. We can see what we are doing wrong, but how will that help us to see what to do right? In this article, we will discuss a few common Lean Anti-Patterns. Anti-Patterns are commonly recurring practices that are counter productive. We call them "Anti-Patterns" because these anti-patterns result from violating Lean principles. Lean principles form the basis for Scrum practices. Looking at how Lean Anti-Patterns violate lean principles gives us insight into how we need to modify our practices to be more effective.

In this continuation of his June 2007 article on floating-point numbers, Chuck Allison explains why certain compilers miscalculate sin(x) for large arguments and why some get it right. He also divulges that floating-point spacing is the key to getting the most from numeric computations.

Do your team members jump into a project with both feet before they fully understand what problem they are trying to solve? We’ve all been convinced that for our customers faster is better. But is that really what they want? Jeff Patton thinks it’s time for us to slow down and focus on the quality of our products.

Many teams work on several projects simultaneously, which is a mistake. By working on one project at a time and releasing early and often, you can achieve startling improvements in value for your stakeholders.

One way to build quality in is to prevent defects from ever happening. Discover how you can avoid defects by figuring out how to test each feature or requirement before you begin to write the code. Clarke Ching offers up an easy, hands-on example you can put to use today.

Trust is invisible, but the symptoms of its absence are not. That is the theme of this column, in which Clarke Ching recounts the difficulty one of his clients went through to rebuild trust with a customer. The customer had long ago lost faith in the quality of the products provided by this client since every piece of software delivered seemed buggy. But both were determined to make the relationship work. That's when Clarke Ching stepped in and took an agile approach to relationship therapy.

Six years after the writing of the Manifesto for Agile Software Development, agile is being used more often and more ambitiously. Looking back, there are two things Brian Marick would like to have added to the manifesto: habitability and joy.