Card-carrying Seer of System Dynamics

(in dramatic Black & White, no less!)

This is Esther Derby, a management consultant and Agilist who is helping companies to put a more human face on software development. We highly recommend her conference talks and blog. Here Esther has a brand-new deck of "Agile in a Flash" and a happy smile.

What's On Your Wall?

Tim describes how the Agile In A Flash cards help make his workspace more informative.

Agile in a Flash Card Index

In order to keep Agile in a Flash very low cost and actually make a buck or two, Tim and I were pressured to keep the number of cards to a very minimum. That's why you'll see no author bios, for example, and no index / table of contents. (Of course, if the book takes off and you buy bajillions of copies, we can likely justify an index.)

Without further ado, here's the index of cards (which also tells you, by omission, which blog entries here are not in this deck--if, uh, all goes well with sales, we'll be doing a second deck):

The Idea:

1. Why Agile?
2. The Agile Values, aka the Agile Manifesto
3. Principles Behind the Agile Manifesto
4. Role-Playing in Agile
5. Agile Success Factors
6. Courage
7. Redefining Discipline
8. Pillars of Software Craftmanship
9. Toyota Production System (TPS) Principles
10. The Right Process
11. Got Organizational Obstinance?
12. Got Individual Obstinance
13. Don't Get Too Deep in Technical Debt

The Plan:

14. Incremental Everything
15. Embrace Change
16. Reach Consensus on Story Priority
17. INVEST in Your Stories
18. Categorize Requirements with FURPS
19. Sail on the Three C's
20. Shrink XL Stories to Fit
21. Acceptable Acceptance Tests
22. Acceptance Test Design Principles
23. Story Estimation Fundamentals
24. A Winning Hand for Planning Poker
25. Iterate with Principle
26. Communication-SMITH with Information Radiators

The Team:

27. Shu-Ha-Ri
28. The Only Agile Tools You'll Ever Need
29. Successful Stand-up Meetings
30. ABCs of Pair Programming
31. Retrospectives
32. When Not Pairing
33. How to Be a Team Player
34. Collective Code Ownership
35. Coding Standards
36. Is Your Team Circling the Drain?
37. Pair Programming Smells
38. Stop the Bad Test Death Spiral
39. How to Stay Valuable

The Code:

40. Eight Crucial Practices of Agile Programmers
41. Build Superior Systems with Simple Design
42. The Seven Code Virtues
43. ReallyMeaningful Names
44. The TDD Cycle
45. FIRST Properties of Unit Tests
46. Triple A for Tight Tests
47. Prevent Code Rot Through Refactoring
48. Refactoring Inhibitors
49. Field Guide to Mocks
50. Break Unit Test Writer's Block
51. Test Double Troubles
52. TDD Process Smells

How to use the deck

People have been asking how to best use the cards in their teams.

We've had several notes via twitter or email about teams reading and discussing them at retrospectives or standup, and even using them in lightning talks at conferences.  We are happy to see them used in this way.

But people have been asking how normal, individual, non-coach team members can use the cards. Jeff provides our recipe for use of Agile in a Flash:

• Pick a card that's relevant and read its front
• Read the back
• Re-read the front to help ingrain the short list
• Consider tacking the card up, so that it's in your face, helping you ingrain the concepts
• Seek and re-read related cards to get a more complete picture of the topic
• Visit the corresponding post here on the blog site if you seek more detail on the topic and why we said some of the things we did
• Visit the links located on many of the cards and at the blog site if needed

Don't forget to google the subject matter, because there is more written than we could fit in either the deck or the blog. Other opinions and recommendations are equally valid.

Please share and discuss the cards with your community, starting with the local software team and its neighbors but extending to conferences, user groups, or any other willing listeners. New insights can come from anywhere.

Javaranch Event

The Big Moose Saloon welcomes writing team Ottinger and Langr to a special event:

This week, we're delighted to have Jeff Langr & Tim Ottinger helping to answer questions about the new book Agile in a Flash. See this page for a description of the book.

The promotion starts Tuesday, February 22th 2011 and will end on Friday, February 25th 2011.

We'll be selecting four random posters in this forum to win a free copy of the book provided by the publisher, Pragmatic.

Please see the Book Promotion page to ensure your best chances at winning!

Sit in, ask or answer some questions, see if you can't win your free Agile In A Flash deck. If you don't win one, don't worry. We still have a few left for sale.

Sighting Report

From an undisclosed location in Des Moines, Iowa, comes this sighting report. It is likely a book store, judging by intact plastic wrap and "Alphabetical By Author" sticker on shelf. It also looks like they're down to their last copy. Snag it now, before their supply is totally exhausted!

Card-Carrying Mad Railer

David van Leeuwen, Card-carrying Mad Railer, shows off the new deck of Agile In A Flash that he won in a drawing at the Madison, WI conference.

Lisa Crispin and Courage at Belgium Testing Days

Our deck of cards makes a surprise appearance at Belgium Testing Days 2011 thanks to Lisa Crispin and her experience with the Courage card.

It is pleasing to see the cards having a supporting role in the lives of respected professionals, and to see them appear in a testing conference instead of a more predictable place like an Agile or programming conference. Markus Gärtner provides descriptions of several talks in this blog.

Card-Carrying agile author

Jeff Langr, programmer geek and computer addict shows off his Agile in a Flash deck in front of a warm fire in Colorado Springs. Look, Ma, no shrink-wrap! Tim, have you opened yours yet???

Card-Carrying Embedded Software Engineer

Card-carrying embedded-software engineer James Grenning, fellow-author, fellow-ex-ObjectMentor consultant, owner of Renaissance Software, great guy.  Here James shows off his deck of cards at a Starbucks near Mundelein, IL.  Doing embedded software, but don't know how to do it test-first? See James Grenning (and buy his book Test Driven Development for Embedded C to be released very soon).