Welcome to the November 16th, 2006 edition of the Carnival of Agilists. This edition brings us controversy, thought leadership and pratical advice. You know, the simple things in life.

Individuals and interactions over processes and tools

• We had another big controversy in the Blogosphere re: Agile. First, Dimitri Zimine wrote about “How Two Hours Can Waste Two Weeks.“
• Joel Spolsky responded in his usual style “You call this Agile?“
• Mishkin Berteig provided his thoughts on Joel’s critique in “The Case for Context Switching” (sounds like a techno-mystery novel)
• And Keith Braithwaite shared his thoughts on the Agile Forums “agile * flexible / consultancy = ?“

Working software over comprehensive documentation

• Ken Schwaber, one of the two fathers of Scrum, presents a video lecture about code quality in “The Canary and the Coal Mine“. Deb Hartmann follows up with a summary of the topics covered in the video, along with her own analysis.
• Scott Ambler has been spending a lot of time thinking about software architecture, and how you align it with agile development. He writes about these thoughts in “Scaling Agile via Architecture.“

Customer collaboration over contract negotiation

• Ryan Cooper shares his thoughts on the difference between Camaraderie and Trust

Responding to change over following a plan

• Oliver Azeau writes an interesting article about how he views project management as a black box.
• If you haven’t heard, Britain’s Dept. of Health is having a rough time delivering a big project. If only they’d used agile development methods…
• But we Americans have our own examples of giant failed projects as well. Nicholas Carr spells them out.

Thoughts and Ideas

• Simon Baker lists what he learned from the Agile Business Conference. Wish I could have gone!
• Frequent Releases - another chapter from James Shore’s upcoming book.
• What is Agile Testing? Keith Ray shares some insights he’s gleaned from others.
• Amr Elssamadisy shares his thoughts on Using Patterns to explain and teach Agile Practices (thanks, Deb!)

Agile Tutorials

• How to test private methods, by Ed Gibbs.

Agile Fun

• A very useful process, but is it agile?
• Having problems getting your agile methodology on track. Here’s a book of spells that might be useful during agile projects. (If you’ve played D&D or other Role-Playing Games, this will make more sense)
• Simon Baker uses South Park Studio to create fun tracking charts for his team.

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

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