• James Shore: Successful Software - "Technical debt sucks, and it's a particularly common problem for the teams I work with. Technical debt affects everything they do. It disrupts plans, kills productivity, and creates defects. There is much wailing and gnashing of teeth, but strangely, these teams put very little effort into paying off the debt. (That's probably why they got into this mess in the first place.)"
• Lab Safety, Grainger combining supply lines — GazetteXtra - "In an effort to prop up an underperforming Lab Safety Supply, company officials said Wednesday they will combine the business with another that operates warehouses across the country."
• InfoQ: Agile Usability - "Jakob Nielsen, usability guru and author of Usability Engineering, raises the concern that Agile methods are a threat to traditional approaches to designing usability. He says that Agile’s greatest threat to usability is that “it's a method proposed by programmers and mainly addresses the implementation side of system development”. Alistair Cockburn counters that this claim just isn’t true"
• InfoQ: The Generic SOA Failure Letter - "There have been quite a few articles recently on the subject of whether or not SOA should be considered a failure. Gartner analysts have entered the debate with a mock letter supposedly written by Project Manager, EA Artchitect or Lead Developer "To the CIO, CEO, CFO, CTO and shareholders", indicating why the writer admits that SOA is certainly a failure"
• The 7 Deadly Linux Commands - "If you are new to Linux, chances are you will meet a stupid person perhaps in a forum or chat room that can trick you into using commands that will harm your files or even your entire operating system. To avoid this dangerous scenario from happening, I have here a list of deadly Linux commands that you should avoid."
• The Decline and Fall of Agile - "Scrum is undeniably the winner of the agile method wars. Thanks to the Scrum Alliance's vast (and lucrative) network of Certified Scrum Trainers and Certified ScrumMaster courses, when people say "Agile," they usually mean Scrum. So when "Agile" fails, it's generally Scrum that's failing. And Scrum is incomplete, purposefully so."

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• Cutting I.T. Costs – And We Do That How? - Phurnace Software - With already limited staff and expectations on IT going up - how do you continue to cut costs? Automate.
• InfoQ: Presentation: Reaching Hyper-Productivity with Outsourced Development Teams - "In this presentation filmed during Agile 2008, Jeff Sutherland, co-creator of Scrum, and Guido Schoonheim, CTO of Xebia, present an actual case of reaching hyper-productivity with a large distributed team using XP and Scrum."
• The Evolution of Ideas and the Role of the SAP Ecosystem - SAP submits proposal to join Apache Software Foundation to increase its innovation beyond its own community.
• Ned Batchelder: Deleting code - "There's plenty of information out there about how to write code. Here's some advice on how to delete code. "

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• Zend Studio for Eclipse - No file extension as PHP - Good example of the use of Twitter for technical support of a product. Way to go Zend!
• Balsamiq Studios, makers of plugins for Web Office applications | Balsamiq - "Create software mockups in minutes, iterate over them with your team, then embed them in your specs!"
• Ontic Oren » Living the ultimate online agile workflow - "Over at my job, we’re just two weeks away from our first release! I thought this would be a great time to look back a little at our tools and process."
• Wikinomics » Blog Archive » Multi-tasking vs. Flow - "It’s an ongoing battle of epic proportions taking place in every office of every company in the world – completing tasks efficiently by multi-tasking or effectively by staying “in-the-flow.”"
• Distributed source control options - Stack Overflow - Stack Overflow.com has a conversation on Distributed Version Control Tools that I found interesting.
• Optimize Your Web Connection - Wired How-To Wiki - "Your broadband connection screams compared with the dial-up days of yore, but it could be faster. These days, your internet connection can't be fast enough. That is why we're here — to show you the way to a faster internet connection by tweaking the hardware and software you're using. "

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I found two excellent lectures on IT Conversations that I would like to recommend to people looking at how to learn (or justify) agile development methods. The first lecture was given by Ken Schwaber, the creator of the Scrum project management methodology, called You Thought it was Easy: Wrestling Gold from Today’s Software Projects. In this 40 minute discussion, Ken explains what Scrum is and how it works. Its a very informative lecture that has helped a lot in giving me additional ways to try to explain the advantages of Scrum as a project management methodology.

One of the interesting points that Ken brings up is that when you introduce an empirical model like Scrum, all of the things that have been wrong in your environment for such a long time come to the surface and have to be dealt with. We have definitely seen this in our environment and it has caused some discomfort on the team. For me, its very nice to have a lecture like this that I can refer team members to that explains that this is a normal part of the process. It is, however, extremely difficult to explain to some that the problems we are seeing have been around for quite a long time, but that we have been unable to quantify them until implementing Scrum.

The second lecture was given by Scott Ambler and is called Are you Agile or are you Fragile in which Scott tries to explain the advantages of Agile methods and answer some of the arguments one would get in justifying using Agile methods on actual projects. There are a couple of interesting things about this lecture. First, he runs it as an agile project, eliciting “requirements” or topics from the audience and having them prioritize them. Secondly is the passion in which Scott talks about Agile methods and his no nonsense way of explaining the advantages.

This lecture gave me a great quote that stuck with me. “A new requirement is a competitive advantage - if I can act on it”. I found this to be a brilliant reframe of the common objection to changing requirements that happens on teams which have been “raised” on the waterfall type of approach where requirements are finalized and cannot change without having been “wrong” in the first place. This lecture is a long one, weighing in at one hour and 55 minutes.

For those teams out there that are attempting to implement agile methods in an environment that has been historically waterfall and “predictive planning” based, these two lectures are definitely something you should check out.

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