This article focuses on branching and merging. We present some background for branching and merging, and consider some of the implications for agile development in particular. We also hope to reduce some of the suspicion that many agile developers have of branching. The article assumes some overall branching knowledge and yet revisits some particular details that often seem to confuse people. This is a fertile area which we will continue to expand on in future articles.

Do you think that by removing deadlines from a project a team will have enough time to create perfect software? Theoretically, it's possible, but in this column Mike Cohn explains that this theory might not hold against ingrained behavior. He recalls how several teams reacted when deadlines were lifted from the projects they were working on. Their only goal: to produce perfect software. But that goal inadvertently brought something to the surface, that old habits die hard.

At the Agile 2005 conference in Denver, Ward Cunningham and Rick Mugridge talk about Fit, an acceptance testing tool that took the conference by storm.

Scheduling a project can become a comedy of errors if you don't remember to plug in all the necessary pieces. In this week's column, Peter Clark takes us to a project kick-off meeting and shows us how to spot several common mistakes people make when creating project schedules.