There are many ways to transition to an agile process. Choosing the approach that is most likely to work best for your organization can be critical to a smooth transition. Through helping hundreds of teams make the transition to agile over the years, I have identified six core patterns that teams use to initiate the transition to agile. These patterns fall into three sets of opposing pairs. You should choose the core pattern from each set that best suits your team or organization:

• Start Small or go All In?

• Technical Practices First or Iterative First?

• Stealth Mode or a Public Display of Agility?

In this week's column, Jeff Patton sends a reminder that software developers who neglect the practices of "iteration" and "incremental" will get caught either delivering poor quality software or delaying schedules in order to make time to iterate. We kick ourselves, or others, for not "getting [software] right up front" when we all know that the hardest part of software development is figuring out what to build. But there's hope, and it comes in the form of prototypes and frequent iterations.

Over the course of the past decade, Agile software development has progressed from a grassroots, almost underground movement, to the mainstream. Early successes have paved the way for broader acceptance of Agile principles and practices, facilitating dialogue not only in IT back offices, but corporate boardrooms as well. With an ever-increasing focus on profitability, time-to-market, and customer satisfaction, the vigorous debate over Agile adoption appears to be shifting from a question of "why?" to one of "how?"

Geographically Distributed Development (GDD) is a common strategy in the software world today. Organizations are gaining experience in developing software globally and are discovering that the competitive demand for best-in-class, high quality applications requires greater agility in quality management. Unfortunately, IT budgets are not keeping up with the staff required for quality management and the response is to accelerate quality management by leveraging global teams. This article compares and contrasts agile GDD testing strategies for affecting quality management.