Welcome to the March 16th, 2006 edition of the Carnival of the Agilists. This is a biweekly roundup of the most interesting and helpful blog posts about agile methodologies, techniques and practices.

New voices wanted

If you write any blog posts that you’d like to see show up in the next carnival, send email to Agilists.Carnival@gmail.com.

Individuals and interactions over processes and tools

• We’ll start off with Dean Leffingwell writing in the Agile Journal about Seven Agile Practices that Scale.
• Are there things that you should be doing to make yourself and your organization successful? Skip Angel writes about the book Good to Great, and provides a list of things you may want to stop doing.
• Steve McConnell (of Code Complete fame) states that Agile development seems to be focusing more on processes and tools than on individuals and interactions.. Do you agree?

Working software over comprehensive documentation

• Is the term “agile” being diluted? Mishkin Berteig shares his thoughts.
• “What is the list of documents produced when you are implementing a pure Agile project?” – Ron Jeffries provides his thoughts on the subject.

Customer collaboration over contract negotiation

• If you’re going to collaborate, you will probably need to facilitate. Mishkin Berteig points to this primer on facilitation.
• Sometimes you have to say no. Esther Derby has some suggestions on how to do it well.
• Are we hard-wired for command-and-control models? Is the drive to collaborative “team-focused” a fight against nature? Deb Hartmann shares her thoughts.

Responding to change over following a plan

• Glen Alleman wants to know if you are Scheduling or Planning, and tells us why they are different, and why you should prefer one over the other.
• What do you do when your manager makes unreasonable demands?. Johanna Rothman has some suggestions based on her own experience.
• Mishkin Berteig writes another great (but very long) article on The Art of Obstacle Removal.

Fun

Agile Development With Rails won a Jolt Award.

Books, Magazines and More

• Check out the Agile Journal for a new take on agile software and agile businesses.
• Book review: Agile Project Management with Scrum
• Book review: Agile Estimating and Planning (warning, PDF!)

Next Edition

The next edition will be on March 30th, 2006. If you would like to participate, please send us a link to your post at agilists.carnival@gmail.com. Or, if you prefer, use this handy dandy carnival submission form.

Previous Editions

All previous editions of the Carnival are referenced at the Agile Alliance website

Want to help?