"Agile Coach Camp is about creating a network of practitioners who are striving to push the limits in guiding software development teams, while staying true to the values and principles at the core of the Agile movement. We've invited practitioners who, like you, are passionate about their work, active in the field and willing to share what they've learned.

Do you have a technique or practice worth sharing with your peers? Or an idea you'd like to test out with some leaders in the community? Are you facing challenges and want to get some perspective from other practitioners, or hear how they do things? If you feel you’d benefit from connecting with 70-75 Open Agile Process Facilitators, ScrumMasters, XP Coaches, Trainers, Change Agents, and Mentors to talk, draw, debate, and explore ideas, then this unconference is for you."

"The product owner is breaking the tacit agreement that a boundary object requires. Not only must the team justify their request, not only must they justify it in terms of business value, they must also adopt the product owner’s definition of business value. This, I think, is an act of, well, cultural imperialism. Not only must we be useful and productive, we must be useful and productive for the right reasons. Not only must we do the right thing, we must believe the right way.

This insistence on goodthink is related to the scorn toward the stance of reaction I claimed earlier. The team cannot be a black box operating according to its own rules; it must have a visible interior that operates correctly.

I’ve done precious little reading in colonialism, but all this reminds me of the attitude of colonialist rulers towards the colonized: they must be remade. For that reason, I think learning about the strategies the colonized used to preserve their culture might be useful to us in Agile."

"Now, as Jonathan Kohl would point out, many people marching behind the Agile banner do the same: they use Agile as another club with which to beat people. I’m less worried about Agile, though, because its base rhetoric is more explicitly humanist. Lean is more likely to be an attractive nuisance because the idea of driving out waste appeals to executives who find it less work to remove waste than to convert it into value—executives who get license to act sociopathic because they have a fiduciary duty to treat business as a machine for maximizing shareholder value, externalities be damned. I worry about Lean in a business culture where we are trained out of empathy for Lear, damned fool though he surely is."

"Synchronize user stories in Pivotal Tracker with Cucumber features."

"We believe Agile software development is being dumbed down, commodified, and is losing its spirit. We seek to replace the current name with one having two virtues: first, that it capture more exactly the attitudes originally behind Agile; second, that it be obscure enough that no one will assume they already know what it means and that—amazingly enough!—they are already doing it."

"Tracker is a simple, story-based project planning tool that allows teams to collaborate and instantly react to real-world changes. It's based on agile software development methods, but it can be used on a variety of types of projects. Tracker frees you up to focus on getting things done, without getting bogged down keeping your plans in sync with reality."

"Retro-Futurist Micro-Scale Anarcho-Syndicalism"

"...Nowadays, when I go into teams, especially teams in large organizations, what I am hearing from people is “At least work doesn’t suck now as much as it used to”. Which somehow seems less of an important thing to devote your life to creating: “He helped work suck a little less, but it still sucked”. The micro scale is intended to connote that we need to re-focus our attention on the people inside the team, on their happiness and on their success, and on empowering them and in particular we should stop hoping that someone in the organization the powers that be will reach down and give us permission to do Agile, give us permission to do reasonable things, help us out, we need to focus on the individual one to one scale which is where living a useful life lies."

"A successful essay is a clear and compelling piece of writing that explores a topic important to the software community. The subject area should be interpreted broadly, including the relationship of software to human endeavors, or its philosophical, sociological, psychological, historical, or anthropological underpinnings. An essay can be an exploration of its topic, its impact, or the circumstances of its creation; it can present a personal view of what is, explore a terrain, or lead the reader in an act of discovery; it can be a philosophical digression or a deep analysis. It can describe a personal journey, perhaps that by which the author reached an understanding of such a topic."

One of the reasons I've been kind of quiet lately.

tempting.. but where's the Unit Testing chapter?

Recommended for anybody who thinks they "know" "how" to "program" and yet still expect me to hire them, ever, clueless as they clearly are.

New version of NUnit testing framework is released.