Bob Payne talks with Jay Zimmerman at the end of the No Fluff Just Stuff conference in Reston, Virginia. Jay talks about the Java roots of NFJS and discusses the inclusion of Ruby and Agile Methods into the conference tracks.

Teams communicate quickly and freely when they work in the same room. There's no time wasted walking down the hall, going to another floor, or waiting for a return email or call back. Collocation is the most effective arrangement for teams, but that's not always possible. Esther Derby shares five tactics that help teams compensate for distance.

Application Development Open Source Strategy with an Architecture-centric Approach Today's software developer, like never before, is blessed with a plethora of sophisticated open source tools and technologies to aid his craft in producing market-worthy applications.  Leveraging these resources together with the developer's business domain knowledge and agile best practices can quickly yield some truly amazing results  To sustain these successes, an application developer must apply an architectural-centric approach in order to realize longevity, flexibility and independence in his application.

Feature-driven development (FDD) has the more traditional progression of a systems-engineering life cycle mode as compared to agile methods. It uses distinct phases in its iterations while still being highly iterative and collaborative. FDD does conduct up-front planning, design and documentation and relies very heavily upon domain modeling.