A New Leader to Guide AgileConnection Forward

I am humbled to have the opportunity to follow Johanna Rothman as technical editor of AgileConnection.

I have known Johanna for the better part of two decades (gasp!) and have followed her prolific writing and consulting career ever since we first met at a software testing workshop in the mid-1990s. While she might be diminutive in size, she leaves very big shoes to fill here, and I will do my best to try.

So, what’s the plan for AgileConnection going forward? I thought I’d use this opportunity to give you my thoughts.

If It Ain’t Broke …

Johanna leaves AgileConnection in a great place. As I’ve dug through the site and the relationships that make AgileConnection what it is today, I have to say I’m impressed.

Our readership is strong and diverse. We draw an audience that is a solid cross section of agile developers, agile testers, agile managers and leaders, and agile business executives. The kinds of people who make a real difference in the agile community read AgileConnection.

We also have very talented and insightful authors who dedicate an inordinate amount of time to sharing their thoughts, ideas, lessons learned, and case studies on a wide variety of agile topics. I’ve had the pleasure to speak with many of them during the past several months, and their passion and dedication to agile is immeasurable. You can expect to see and hear from many familiar faces going forward.

Finally, TechWell strongly supports AgileConnection. They provide vision, passion, and lots of elbow grease to make sure great content gets published every week. Without TechWell, AgileConnection not only wouldn’t be as good, but it quite simply wouldn’t exist.

… Fix It!

Being a long time advocate for agile, I strongly believe that everything can be improved. So while we are in a great place at AgileConnection, I don’t want us to rest on our laurels and not seek out ways to make the content even better. Here are a couple of things I am hoping to focus more attention on going forward.

Agile engineering practices
While lots of organizations have successfully embraced agile, the area that I see teams struggle with the most is how to get architects, designers, developers, and testers working collaboratively to design, build, and test working software. So many times I see “agile mutants” that go by names like Scrummerfall, Waterscrum, Scrumbut, or frAgile that haven’t fully embraced effective agile engineering techniques.

I hope AgileConnection can provide more useful information in this area going forward.

DevOps
My view has always been that DevOps is an extension of the agile principles into operations. I believe the biggest mistake made by those who made many agile methodologies popular was excluding the roles of release manager, system administrator, production support, and operational management from agile teams. As organizations recognize the benefits of collaboration among everyone in the software delivery supply chain, this topic needs to be covered more extensively by AgileConnection.

Last but Not Least

My final comment has to do with something Johanna said in her farewell address: Everyone is a potential writer. I can tell you from my own experience that this is so true! 

I encourage each of you who feels you have something to share to reach out to me at [email protected] and discuss how you might write for AgileConnection. I’m more than happy to help mentor and guide anyone interested in contributing.