Vibhu Srinivasan shares his viewpoint on being part of an Agile team and how easily we can become tied to our processes and tools in this article.

Johanna Rothman describes how a project vision can help the delivery team understand what they are building and stakeholders what they will be getting in this article.

In the Agile community there tends to be an acceptance of self-managed teams that are self-empowered. When problems arise within the team, how do you know that it is time to remove a team member? Esther Derby describes her take in “When is it time to move someone off a team?” and Kelly Waters portrays a slightly different take in “What if an Agile team member won’t play ball?”.

This article on how Lehman Brothers came back from near extinction to become a Wall Street player again suggests 5 key leadership qualities which Richard Fuld, CEO of Lehman Brothers, points to as important in the rebirth.

A reply on the Scrum development mailing list published links to pages with Scrum smells as captured by Mike Cohn and Mark Rudolph. Here is the article “Toward a Catalog of Scrum Smells” by Mike Cohn and the other article “Scrum Smells: Loss of Rhythm” by Mark Rudolph from the Scrum Alliance web site.

If you’ve ever thought that software testing was not an exiting profession you haven’t discussed the job with Harry Robinson. Harry discusses how software quality assurance (SQA) is just as hip as computational physics in this article at Sticky Minds.

Effective conversations can be used to improve the management and performance of your projects. This is the premise behind Dennis Stevens’ article on Project Conversations: Raise the conversation above blaming and conflict. He describes 10 types of conversations that should be happening in your project.

Have you ever wondered if there are any patterns to developing effective unit tests? Marc Clifton describes many unit test patterns in his article on the topic of advanced unit testing at the Code Project.

Vasco Duarte describes in this article how the use of velocity, how much work a team was able to complete in previous iterations, can be used to estimate how much work can be done in the future iterations. His approach is potentially even more simple than story points because it only uses the number of Product Backlog items that have been completed rather than their sizes.

“Eating one’s own dog food” has become the norm in commercial software product development companies. Kane Mar describes the good, the bad, and the ugly of this practice in this article.