confessions of an agile activist http://www.paulklipp.com I apologize to those of my listeners who enjoy having a power point presentation for reference. I do not believe in using PowerPoint unless it is necessary to express something visually. I think it's distracting and too many speakers use it as a crutch. Instead, I have every agilist's favorite tool - index cards. Here is the text of the cards I was working from. http://www.paulklipp.com/site/blog.php I read Bruce Tate's new book From Java to Ruby this weekend and I won't say that I was inspired, because I've run a Ruby shop for over a year, but I was validated. Anyone who hasn't investigated Ruby and Rails is risking missing the boat. This is a great read. http://www.paulklipp.com/site/java2ruby.php For a decade now, agile processes, lead by eXtreme Programming, have been gaining wide acceptance among developers, but many customers are still in the dark. Agile sounds good, but what does it mean? This is a quick and dirty preview of what you can expect when you choose an agile process. http://www.paulklipp.com/site/2bagile.php Welcome. We're delighted to work with you. If you've read my previous article on choosing the right customer and you're feeling stressed, read on. Here is what you'll need to do in order to ensure the success of your project. It's not so difficult. http://www.paulklipp.com/site/customer2.php There are many benefits to using an agile process, including lower costs, faster delivery, improved product quality, and drastically lower cost of change. Many of the benefits can be easily undone by weakening any part of the fragile chain of processes which combine to form a highly efficient but precariously interdependent development strategy. Luckily, most of the process lies in the hands of experienced and expert practitioners like the staff of Lunar Logic Polska who know how to maximize the benefits and mitigate the risks of an agile process. The weak link, in my opinion, is the customer. The goal of this essay is to assist clients in the appointment of the one team member who is most critical to the success of an agile project. My next article in this series will offer specific advice to the person who finds them self in that role. http://www.paulklipp.com/site/customer1.php There are several agile process that are very well documented, of which the best known is Kent Beck's eXtreme Programming. Others include Crystal, Scrum, and Feature Driven Development. They all share the same basic principles and have their own strengths and weaknesses. It is not my intention to compare and contrast or to criticize or praise. That has been done ad infinitum and is easily researched on the web. What I would like to do is to contribute my first agile experience to the current body of knowledge. http://www.paulklipp.com/site/1sttaste.php Choosing an offshore software vendor is a difficult task. There are countless options suited to very different types of projects, needs and relationships. The costs range from astronomically high to impossibly low. Between you and the right vendor lies a fog of doubt created by (mostly true) horror stories of projects run amok. Pressing you forward is the hope that you could be on the verge of creating one of those (very real) dream relationships with a vendor that will make you the hero of your company or clients. What I am going to elaborate on in this article is the decision-making technique that I was taught in my MBA program so many years ago at the University of Illinois. The course was titled "Decision Making Under Uncertainty" and its principles are very applicable to the task of choosing an offshore software development partner. http://www.paulklipp.com/site/partner.php I have proven to myself that I can hand-code a CMS, but not as good as WordPress. So, I've migrated the site to WordPress and the new feed is at http://www.agileactivist.com/feed/ http://www.agileactivist.com/feed/