Every agilist brings his or her history to the community—agile didn’t spring from the primordial soup in 2001. While we may argue against historical practices, waterfall for example, we owe something to earlier pioneers. So while I can’t speak for other agilists, I can give a snapshot of who influenced my thinking over the years..
First, [...]

A spider is an eight-legged arachnid that has a head attached to a central body. Pull a leg off a spider and most can still walk, even if a little lopsided. Cut off the head, and the spider dies. Not so the starfish. While many people know that if you cut off a starfish’s leg, [...]

Update: Questions on Twitter about this post made us realize that more background from Jens’ call for papers would have clarified the issues in the debate over the current state of programming. In particular, on the bias that’s become entrenched over the past 40 years toward engineering that has created a “disregard for programming [that] [...]

The notion of a self-organizing team runs deeply in the agile community. However, there is a flip side to self-organization, one which agile teams often forget—self-discipline. Just as freedom and responsibility go hand-in-hand in a democracy, so do self-discipline and self-organization. Companies cannot empower teams that do not want to be empowered—those who are populated [...]

Over the last week we’ve received predictions from more Cutter Senior Consultants. Here’s a preview of the latest additions:

Rebecca Herold: Bigger privacy breaches than any that have occurred so far on social media sites will occur as a result of no information security or privacy pre-planning at many to most of these organizations.
James Odell: systems will [...]

The crystal ball gazing continues. Here are more excerpts from Cutter Senior Consultants’ predictions for 2010 and beyond.

Dave Rooney: Agile Software Development will follow the same pattern as two other game-changing trends — Relational Database Management Systems and Object-Oriented Programming over the upcoming decade.
Claude Baudoin: Expect contractors and consultants to be in demand, and many [...]

With the new year upon us, we asked Cutter’s Senior Consultants and Fellows for their business technology predictions. Their perspectives — as always — are quite thoughtful, thought-provoking, and varied. Projections cover the changing role of the CIO, what will happen in enterprise architecture, the increasing adoption of agile, the explosion of cloud computing, the [...]

“Writing is a form of thinking, whatever the subject,” says William Zinsser (Writing to Learn). If, as Zinsser says, learning to write well is critical to learning well, then agile team members might do well to work on their writing skills.
The entire results of software projects are writings. Whether the output is executable code, test [...]

The fundamental value of the agile development addressees building a great workplace, in fact, it encompasses the belief that building a great workplace precedes building a great product. Furthermore, this workplace has certain characteristics—its own social architecture: it is self-organized rather than hierarchical, it is egalitarian rather than dictatorial, it is self-disciplined rather than authoritarian, [...]

“We have seen reengineering, transformation, re-invention, new, speed, competencies, teachable points of view, destroying your business, BHAG (big hairy audacious goals)—they’re all about what is supposed to happen. But very little has been said about exactly how you do it.” This passage is from a interesting and slightly irreverent book from Phillip Hodgson and Randall [...]