Agile methodologies enable teams and organizations to support the dynamic nature of business. Short, focused iterations are ideal for accommodating changing requirements and environments. Planning and tracking is low overhead using units like features, stories, or tasks providing high-level visibility into status. While this visibility is better than nothing, there are certainly limits in the depth and breadth of insights this provides. This article will investigate techniques for blending more finely-grained tracking with conventional agile techniques.

There's a vicious game being played daily in the lives of software developers. The rules to this game are not clear cut, and it can change its structure rapidly. If you're not careful, the game will end up controlling your work schedule for quite some time. In this column, Johanna Rothman gives a referee's point of view of this game and reveals the secrets to winning.

Health and well-being (HWB) services provider vielife has taken an agile approach to upgrading its Web-based HWB service and management information tool, with the help of Agile consulting firm Valtech. Due to the nature of the agile process, the team was able to make adjustments to development of the next generation portal along the way, adapting to changing business requirements and ensuring that each phase met expectations. As a result, vielife has been able to increase flexibility of the service, has the capacity to deploy more interactive health behavior change programs, and has gained better overall management of the system. This article discusses the project and how vielife has benefited from using agile processes.

As more and more people move towards adoption of agile practices, they are looking for guidance and advice on how to adopt Agile successfully. In this article the author presents a way to share knowledge that is more specific than full methodologies and processes, more general than war stories, and will help new agile adopters get beyond "It Depends!"