"...if any one of the participants at the meeting starts to deviate away from the subject, repeat themselves or get a little carried away with their topic, the "Scrum master" presents them with the baseball cap to wear – the idea being to "cap" the conversation at source! This indicates that the person presented with the cap is now prohibited to speak until asked to contribute again, or until the cap is passed to someone else during the course of the meeting." Iiinteresting.

Lots of good analysis and tips in here. It's very much not a selection of things to do, more a selection of issues noticed and ways to fix them - many of which are contradictory.

"Agile is like teen sex: Everyone wants to do it, many say they're doing it, only some actually are, and very few are doing it right." Yup.

"Just remember, 'There’s only us.'" Some good analysis; fair and even-handed.

"A popular misconception about agile is that it doesn’t allow for plans. This isn’t true. Agile focuses on the activity of planning rather than focusing on a fixed plan."

"I’ve reproduced the list [of rules from Lockheed’s Skunk Works] here with an identification of a modern software development rule or business practice that it corresponds to." Good stuff from Matt J. Can't wait to see his book.

"...they need to keep thinking creatively about how they work together and continuously try to improve their process. This mindset is the key to high performing, self-organizing teams."

"Every day, we have our team meeting and on one of the walls is a white board containing the heading 'Scary List'. When someone catches whiff of a problem or rumor that could potentially sink the projects, we jot it on the list."

"We can now deal with forms in the language of our stories, something that the customer understands and relates to." Webrat lets you navigate your Rails app through the DOM, rather than HTTP.

"A Walking Skeleton is a tiny implementation of the system that performs a small end-to-end function. It ... should link together the main architectural components. The architecture and the functionality can then evolve in parallel."

Pretty much true, all of it. One day, I'll experience this. One day.

"CCMenu displays the project status of CruiseControl continuous integration servers as an item in the Mac OS X menu bar." And it integrates with Growl.

A great Dan North entry on stories and BDD.

"In this prsentation... we examine key agile practices, that when applied judiciously to Ruby, retain the amazing productivity, improve the quality of code, etc." Looks good.

"the length of time that priorities can go unchanged is a factor in selecting the iteration length."

'Functional specifications document are "yes documents." They’re political. They’re all about getting to "yes" and we think the goal up front should be getting to "no."' ...which ties nicely into "make mistakes early and often".

A useful, meaty charter from Meg, with some basis in her real-life efforts. I particularly like focusing effort on "making things real". Things which do not exist in their final medium do not exist yet.

Andy weighs in on the UCD/Agile clash. Am really thinking about this a lot at the moment.

Resolving the conflicts between UCD and Agile processes. It's not necessarily as hard as it might seem...

Agile Work consists of seven core practices. These practices form a solid starting point for any person, team or community that wishes to follow the Middle Way to Excellence.

"'Urban Legend' doesn't refer to the message content; it refers to the transmission protocol." Bookmarked not for the agile stuff, but for this quotation.

The team, and even the immediate layer above the team may be following Agile practices, but once it reaches out into the rest of the organization, leakage occurs in both directions: development needs frequent input from the field on what's valuable to imp