How many times have you seen this scenario? Several years ago, someone created a spreadsheet to support the work of a department. They kept tweaking it, adding functionality; maybe even migrated it to Microsoft Access… and now it has become a mission-critical mess! And you can’t afford to let the employee move on to something else.

One of the key processes in an Agile Scrum development process is the daily stand up or Scrum meeting. Yet there are many teams who seek to be Agile but are part of distributed or virtual teams. This article describes a mitigation for the lack of collocation either due to permanent distribution as in geographically distributed teams or “plan B” meetings on “snow days”. This virtual daily scrum process cannot replace the benefits for a real scrum meeting with rich non verbal communication but it can be a very effective process in a distributed or “Scrum But” environment.

Lisa Crispin dives into the "we're all in the same boat" theory and explains how it can't be more true in the software development world. From the need for common goals to going beyond taking responsibility for the team's actions, each team must know that you're going to fail or succeed together.

Your developers are already working feature-by-feature in iterations, but your testers are stuck with manual tests. How do you make the leap to agile testing when the nature of agile's iterative releases challenges testers to test working segments of a product instead of the complete package? In this column, Johanna Rothman explains that the key challenge resides in bringing the whole team together to work towards the completion of an iteration. Only then will the testers—and the entire team—know how to transition to agile.