Welcome to the May 4th edition of the Carnival of Agilists - the bimonthly roster of the best posts from the Agile Blogosphere.

Individuals and interactions over processes and tools

• Ron Jeffries tried baseball, and it didn’t work.
• Skip Angel writes a one page memo, describing his vision for his department. There’s a lot of insightful team-oriented thought in here, well worth a read.

Working software over comprehensive documentation

• Alex Pukinskis shares his thoughts on ending an Iteration.. Acceptance, Demos, Reviews, Metrics, Lunch and more.
• Johanna Rothman insists that Architects must write code and gives a bunch of reasons why.
• Victor Lombardi provides us with early thoughts from his book, discussing how to use metrics to in big, visible ways.

Customer collaboration over contract negotiation

• In order to collaborate with your customer, you have to listen to them. Mishkin Berteig writes about Eight Barriers to Effective Listening and adds some thoughts of his own
• Ed Gibbs suggests that you don’t let the methodology get in the way of common sense.

Responding to change over following a plan

• Achilles (the BDUF software architect) and Tortoise (Ron in disguise) debate the merits and demerits of the Extreme Programming approach to software design

Case Studies and Analysis

• Kevin Rutherford provides some notes from an insightful analysis on the differences between Scrum and Lean.

Fun!

• High Moon Studios provides a video on how they use Scrum to build their games.
• How to mock a Singleton
• This product sounds really cool.. I wish I knew what it did.

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

Join in the Fun!
Have something that you think is worth sharing? Don’t be shy! We love new ideas and insights. Send us a link to your post at agilists.carnival@gmail.com.

The Carnival is published on the first and third Thursday of each month. 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.

Contributors

My thanks to all of the following for contributing!

• Kevin Rutherford
• Ron Jeffries
• Skip Angel
• Johanna Rothman
• Mishkin Berteig
• Ed Gibbs
• Alex Pukinskis
• Victor Lombardi