A lot of the open source projects for Scrum tools have been abandoned recently. In a recent article, the ScrumExpert web site has published an article listing the commercial scrum tools that you can use for free, either after downloading them or on a hosted base.

In a recent article on ScrumExpert.com, Nancy Nee, VP Global Product Strategy at ESI International, discusses "How Organizations Transition to Agile and Scrum". She give her viewpoint on Agile and Scrum adoption in large corporation, both on the "soft" (values) and "hard" (best practices" sides of Agile. She also explains her “proof point” concept and discusses how flexible Agile change agents should be with request like having a Gantt chart for their project.

Read the complete article on http://www.scrumexpert.com/knowledge/how-organizations-transition-to-agile-and-scrum/

Agile software development is designed to thrive within even the most dynamic business and technical environments. In fact, according to an article on the Web site of Martin Fowler, a well-known Agile industry leader,  the name “Agile” was chosen because its founders viewed “adaptiveness and response to change” as the most essential concept of the methodology.

Agile development is the future of modern software engineering.  Companies that have implemented it successfully have seen great improvements in their software—both in cost, stability, and in the utility of the software itself.  However, some companies have struggled, finding it difficult to adapt their processes and culture to work in an Agile environment.  One of the areas that best highlights the cultural shifts required to become an Agile organization is Continuous Integration (CI).

Author: Micah Hainline, Asynchrony Solutions, http://www.asolutions.com/

At the recent Jazoon conference in Zurich, Ken Schwaber talked about the lack of technical practices in Scrum projects that lead to technical debt. However, the end of the talk made me thinks that this topic could have been chosen only to promote its Scrum.org certification courses.

This article  presents how to lead the transition to an Agile process.

This article presents what are the Scrum Product Owner activities and how he has to keep the balance of interests between the Scrum team and the other stakeholders.

Author: Marion Eickmann, CEO of agile42, www.agile42.com, first published in German in the IX-Magazin 8/2009 

As we always say, every new training is a new experience, and you never stop to learn something, which is the exciting part of the job... at Ericsson has been another very interesting experience, and again we learned something together

Scrum gets more and more common as an agile method for the management of projects. Those who want to use the model of Scrum successfully should first take a closer look at the description of the three roles and not mistake the Scrum Master with a Team Leader.

Author: Marion Eickmann, CEO of agile42, www.agile42.com, first published in German in the IX-Magazin 9/2009

Methods & Tools is the sponsor of a large number of software development conferences, but I cannot find the time and budget to visit them. This year I managed to find some time after the publication of my summer issue to visit Wednesday the Jazoon, an important Java event located in Zurich. Besides the global morning keynote, the conference has five parallel tracks, so the first thing in the morning is to make your choice between 30 presentations. This is easier for me, because I am not a Java specialist and so I focused on talks with content that could reach outside the Java community.