When a crisis hits a business, you've got to work hard and fast to mitigate the negative consequences--a process which includes communicating with your clients. In this week's column, Payson Hall reminds us that keeping clients in the know is critical to a successful recovery and will stabilize the clients' faith in you, even when all has failed. Drawing from a recent crisis in which he was the client, Payson gives us key points to consider the next time we are overwhelmed by customers who want to know when business will return to normal.

At regular intervals, the team reflects on how to become more effective, then tunes and adjusts its behavior accordingly. (Agile Manifesto principle 12)

A cornerstone of agility is the team's commitment to continued reflection and adaptation. For most teams, there is a natural cadence to this process as iterations occur frequently, typically every one to two weeks apart, and releases occur every two to four months. As such, the iteration boundary represents a frequent opportunity for immediate feedback and quick mid-course correction, primarily focused on the team's ability to simultaneously define, code and test new functionality in a time box. At the release boundary, the measures move to those things that reflect the team and the organizations ability to move that functionality from "inventory" to delivered product or system. In this article, we'll describe a set of iteration and release metrics that have been used to good effect by a number of agile teams. In our experience, teams that are effective in using these iteration and release metrics have the best chance to achieve the maximum benefits of agile.

It is apparent that agility works, whatever that may mean. However, many software projects remain artifact-driven and waterfallish. Why is this? The most common excuses are that agility is too developer-centric, that it is too lightweight, and that feedback to business is hard to understand. In particular, many managers in larger companies miss their metrics. In this paper we address this last problem by defining a new metric, Earned Business Value (EBV), that replaces standard Earned Value Analysis (EVA) metrics, and can be calculated in an agile project. Using EBV, teams can gain better understanding of a project's progress and determine when and where to reallocate resources or change course.

Personality differences often pose challenges for people who need to work together. One such difference is that which separates introverts and extroverts. Just by being themselves, introverts and extroverts can drive each other crazy. But they can also benefit from each other's strengths. In this column, Naomi Karten explains this personality difference and helps introverts and extroverts better understand and appreciate each other.