As we look back on the first ten years of Agile, these four dozen articles reflect PragPub’s Agile coverage.
In the two years of PragPub’s existence, we’ve touched on a wide variety of topics—mostly related to software development, but occasionally veering off into beer-making, dieting, and bad movies.
A lot of it, including the essay on dieting, has been Agile-themed. To be precise, we found forty-eight articles on Agile topics as we looked back over our two years. We thought you might like to have the opportunity to take a look at some of them, so we’ve put together this list, along with the links so that you can jump right into one if it sounds interesting.
Or to put it another way, here are forty-eight more articles on Agile for this, our Agile issue.
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Pragmatic Life: Andy Hunt Talks about Life and Everything Else
by Andy Hunt in PragPub August 2009
A pragmatic chat with Andy Hunt about life in general.
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All Your Context: You Are a Product of Your Times
by Andy Hunt in PragPub August 2010
Context is king, but context extends further than you think. There are some subtle biases that might affect your judgement.
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Guru Meditation: The Right Thing at the Wrong Time and Place is Still Wrong
by Andy Hunt in PragPub September 2010
Context is everything, especially with agile methods.
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Guru Meditation: The Programmer’s Rememberall
by Andy Hunt in PragPub October 2010
“Oh I’ll Remember That.” No, actually, you won’t.
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Guru Meditation: Avoiding the Infinite Abyss
by Andy Hunt in PragPub November 2010
Avoiding the Infinite Abyss: constraints foster ingenuity.
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Guru Meditation: The Perfect Deadline
by Andy Hunt in PragPub December 2010
The Perfect Deadline: how to avoid both cognitive shutdown and endless procrastination.
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Guru Meditation: Why Johnny Can’t Be Agile
by Andy Hunt in PragPub January 2011
Why adopting agile methods might be harder than you think.
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In Defense of Mediocrity: Is Your Personal Best the Enemy of Your Personal Good?
by Ben Scofield in PragPub August 2010
There are different levels of expertise, and it’s smart to know what level to aspire to.
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Interrupt Mood: Simple Strategies for Avoiding Dumping Your Mental Stack
by Brian Tarbox in PragPub November 2009
Are people always interrupting you with dumb questions?
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Testing as Contract: A Modest Proposal
by Brian Tarbox in PragPub March 2010
Why not use testing as a guard against changes to the design?
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The Floating Finish Line: Programmer Education Should Be Less Fair and More True to Life
by Brian Tarbox in PragPub May 2010
Life isn’t fair, information is never complete, and goals change in mid-project. So why does programmer education pretend otherwise?
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Better Tools and Training: A Different Spin on Static Analysis and Some Thoughts on Developer Internships
by Brian Tarbox in PragPub June 2010
Our current set of static analysis tools is working on the wrong level.
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The Key to Better Software: Training, not Enforcement, Is the Key to Quality in Software
by Brian Tarbox in PragPub September 2010
The approach to quality taken by most companies is misguided and based on a flawed model. This is the reason why so many companies are having such trouble increasing the quality of the software they deliver.
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Clone Yourself: Destroy Your Job Through Automation and Outsourcing
by Chad Fowler in PragPub September 2009
Thinking of your career as a system leads to some surprising conclusions.
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Writing and Performing: Thoughts on Software Development as Performance
by Chris McMahon in PragPub November 2010
Agile software development has all the hallmarks of an artistic performance like those of music, theater, or dance. It requires practice; it requires rehearsal; it requires a team to be constantly negotiating their own personal and professional relationships among themselves.
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Get a Life: Holiday Eating
by Daniel Steinberg in PragPub December 2009
Daniel gets a jump on his January diet with an agile approach.
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Pragmatic Publishing: Dave Thomas Talks about Ebooks, Agility, and the Future of Books
by Dave Thomas in PragPub July 2009
Dave Thomas talks about the decisions behind Pragmatic Bookshelf’s comprehensive ebook program, and how book publishing is undergoing a transformation, from electronic versus paper to direct sales versus the channel.
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TDD on iPhone: DIY: You Really Can Use Test-Driven Development in Creating iPhone Apps
by Eric Smith in PragPub July 2010
If you’re trying to do quality iPhone development, TDD is not optional. Fortunately, it is also not impossible.
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The Red Dirt Interview: Chatting with James and Dana Gray about the Red Dirt Ruby Conference
by James Edward Gray II & Dana Gray in PragPub April 2010
Far out in the remote red dirt country of Oklahoma—well, actually in Oklahoma City—the Red Dirt Ruby Conference, a unique experience in professional education and networking.
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Agile Flash Cards: Quite Possibly the Most Versatile Tool on the Planet
by Jeff Langr & Tim Ottinger in PragPub September 2010
Jeff and Tim have been capturing the wisdom of the Agile community and their own combined 20+ years of Agile and XP experience on index cards. Here they share a few Agile in a Flash cards with you.
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What Agile Is Not: Dealing with Cowboys, Dogmatists, and Authoritarians
by Jeff Langr & Tim Ottinger in PragPub October 2010
Jeff and Tim shuffle the Agile deck and come up with some jokers.
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Shu Ha Ri: Learn, Detach, Transcend: Steps to Agile Mastery
by Jeff Langr & Tim Ottinger in PragPub November 2010
Our well-meaning agile coach’s maturity model was based, either deliberately or subconsciously, on Shuhari, a Japanese martial arts concept involving three stages of mastery: “first learn, then detach, and finally transcend.”
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Cohesive Software Design: Cohesion Makes Code Easier to Understand, Debug, and Test
by Jeff Langr & Tim Ottinger in PragPub December 2010
Those big software design concepts like coupling, cohesion, abstraction, and volatility have real practical value. In this article, Jeff and Tim talk about how cohesion can make your life as a programmer easier.
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Code Coupling: Reducing Dependency in Your Code
by Jeff Langr & Tim Ottinger in PragPub January 2011
Following up on their article on cohesion, Tim and Jeff talk about what coupling is, why it’s necessary, and how you can reduce it to just that necessary amount.
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Managing Your Life Projects: Surprise! You’re Making Dinner Tonight
by Johanna Rothman in PragPub August 2009
How to be more effective in your daily life by applying the principles of managing your project portfolio.
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Barriers to Agility: How to Thread the Barriers to Agility when Failure Is Not an Option
by Johanna Rothman in PragPub February 2010
Johanna shows how to thread the barriers to Agility when failure is not an option for your project.
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Shady Illuminations: Toward a Better Class of Manifestos
by John Shade in PragPub August 2010
John surveys the leading examples of software development manifestos and makes some suggestions.
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Agile Microsoft: An Introduction to ASP.NET MVC
by Jonathan McCracken in PragPub June 2010
Microsoft’s Model-View-Controller web presentation framework is being called “Rails for .NET.”
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The Indispensable Developer: How to Keep Yourself Indispensable
by Jonathan Rasmusson in PragPub June 2010
Jonathan takes a break from writing The Agile Samurai to share the four things that will make you indispensable.
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Way of the Agile Warrior: Ten Questions You’d Be Crazy not to Ask at the Start of Your Project
by Jonathan Rasmusson in PragPub October 2010
It starts out so hopefully. As you begin the project, you and your team are all on the same page. Or so it seems. Then you start actually building, and you realize that you all had something different in mind. Has it happened to you?
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Way of the Agile Warrior: Production Readiness
by Jonathan Rasmusson in PragPub November 2010
Once regularly producing shippable code becomes a habit to you and your team, it’ll just feel good. You are delivering something of value every week and your customer is seeing steady progress in a live system.
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Way of the Agile Warrior: The Way of the Spartan Warrior
by Jonathan Rasmusson in PragPub December 2010
Jonathan explains the benefits of startin’ Spartan.
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Against SEMAT: Thinking Differently about a Proposed Software Engineering Revolution
by Jorge Aranda in PragPub January 2010
You say you want a revolution? We’d all love to see the plan.
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Responsive Design: Coming to Grips with the Chaos that Is Software Design
by Kent Beck in PragPub September 2009
Kent reflects on his years designing software and concludes that we need a new approach, one that embraces ambiguity and tension.
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Swaine’s World: A Team of Two
by Michael Swaine in PragPub February 2010
Working with another person can change your perception of time.
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Swaine’s World: Multitasking Considered Harmful
by Michael Swaine in PragPub June 2010
Does multitasking battle with our ability to turn repetitive tasks into habits?
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The Quiz: Playing Cards in the Bizarro World
by Michael Swaine in PragPub September 2010
A card-based quiz inspired by Jeff Langr and Tim Ottinger’s article on Agile in a Flash.
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A Troubleshooter’s Tale: Three Principles and a Big Ball of Mud
by Mike Hostetler in PragPub April 2010
Sometimes fixing the problem is the last thing you should do.
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Tangled Up in Tools: What’s Wrong with Libraries, and What to Do about It
by Mike Taylor in PragPub April 2010
Surely “Just learn these 57 classes” is not the re-use we were promised?
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The Virtues of Mockery: A Mock Is Like a Stub with Attitude
by Noel Rappin in PragPub May 2010
Mock objects can be very useful in test-driven design, but they need to be used wisely.
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The Mikado Method: Small- and Large-Scale Refactorings
by Ola Ellnestam & Daniel Brolund in PragPub June 2010
The Mikado Method can help you find the troubling dependencies that affect any large refactoring.
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Forgive and Remember: Learning from Your Mistakes without Blame
by Paul Butcher in PragPub December 2009
Paul offers some advice to make debugging a learning experience.
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Great Expectations: Better Testing Through DSLs with Ruby and Scala
by Paul Butcher in PragPub August 2010
Improve your tests with custom expectations.
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Why ASP.NET MVC?: An Interview with Phil Haack of Microsoft
by Phil Haack in PragPub June 2010
A chat with the Project Manager for the ASP.NET MVC project at Microsoft.
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The Agile Coach: An interview with Rachel Davies and Liz Sedley
by Rachel Davies & Liz Sedley in PragPub November 2009
Agile coaches Rachel Davies and Liz Sedley share advice on coaching your Agile team.
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Building Trust: The Equation for Successful Agile Teams
by Rachel Davies in PragPub September 2010
When you’re coaching Agile teams, it’s essential to work on building trust from the get-go. Without trust, Agile simply doesn’t work. So how can we build trust on our teams so that Agile practices can take root?
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BDD on iPhone: iCuke: iCuke Gives iPhone the Cucumber Treatment
by Rob Holland in PragPub July 2010
In an earlier article in PragPub, Ian Dees showed how to use Cucumber to test your iPhone apps. Now iCuke makes it even easier.
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The Pompatus of Pomodoro: Can a Cute Kitchen Timer Change the Way You Work?
by Staffan Nöteberg in PragPub November 2009
Make time an enabler rather than the enemy who always wins.