Your developers are already working feature-by-feature in iterations, but your testers are stuck with manual tests. How do you make the leap to agile testing when the nature of agile's iterative releases challenges testers to test working segments of a product instead of the complete package? In this column, Johanna Rothman explains that the key challenge resides in bringing the whole team together to work towards the completion of an iteration. Only then will the testers—and the entire team—know how to transition to agile.

The definition of a "good project manager" varies depending on what skills you value most of this person. In this week's column, Payson Hall explores the root of the definition, highlighting the key characteristic he believes is the true hallmark of a good project manager.

In the 2010 article, ThoughtWorks consultant Tiffany Lentz pens the speech a successful CIO might write ten years hence in 2010. She talks about the ways that agile principles had become the norm in development and spread beyond software teams in into IT and corporate planning and project execution.

Agile embraces the concept of self-organizing teams but they are inherently unstable and are only successful when the ‘Leadership – Self-Management’ dilemma is understood and dealt with. Too much central control destroys agility, inhibits creativity and resists change. Too much self-management leads to chaos and anarchy and destroys a team. A successful Agile Team needs to operate as far along the continuum towards self-management as it can, without tipping over into chaos. You can’t just eliminate the PM role and say to a software development team, “OK, you’re now an Agile Team – you need to self-organize”. This is a recipe for failure, and one of the reasons why many organizations resist the Agile approach.