For teams practicing Agile Software development, value working software over other artifacts, a feature from the release plan is not complete until you can demonstrate it to your customer, ideally in a shippable state. Agile teams strive to have a working system ("potentially shippable") ready at the end of each iteration. Release Management should be easy for an ideal agile team, as agile teams, in theory, are ready to release at regular intervals, and the release management aspect is the customer saying, "Ship it!."

Retrospectives work for most teams, yet some teams are convinced that retrospectives will never work for them. When Esther Derby came across several of these teams for which retrospectives had failed, she questioned why and discovered eight common reasons for those failures. In this column, she details these eight reasons and offers solutions for each one.

Modern day reporters tend to write their articles using what is known as the "inverted pyramid" style. They start with the most important information in the first sentence, followed by the next most important, and so on. This format not only gives the reader the biggest bang for his buck as he reads it also gives both the reporters and their editors huge flexibility in their uncertain and fast-changing environments. Clarke Ching shows how modern software development techniques use the same idea to give customers the best bang for their buck—in equally uncertain environments.

We all know the payoffs that can result from employing the Agile methodology and employing it well: from highly effective self-managed teams, increased flexibility and realtime change management ... to tight quality control and heightened collaboration.

But what happens when you are already doing Agile in-house and then want or need to expand your Agile development circle to include an outsourcing partner that is 5,000 miles away?