A talk with Bob Martin at the Agile 2005 conference about the convergence of Agile Methodologies and the minimal list of practices that a team could employ to become agile.

If your customer interview questions focus too narrowly on a problem that must be solved, you run the risk of missing information that could be critical to a successful outcome. In this column, Naomi Karten says playing detective improves your ability to gather information. To improve the odds of success, it's important to ask questions from multiple perspectives—and to pay attention not only to the customers' response, but to how they say it as well.

Drawing up a to-do list sounds like a logical starting point when you want to prioritize your workload. But if you have an extra-long list of tasks, the list you should start with is the not-to-do list. Doing so forces you to take an extra hard look at what you're doing and if you should be doing it. Learn more about Johanna Rothman's not-to-do list, how it helps you stay focused on the most important tasks, and how it inevitably helps you maintain your value to the organization.

Unpaid overtime has negative personal and business consequences. Although regarded as free time by many organizations, there is a true business cost to not estimating or counting overtime hours, whether paid or not. Ed Weller presents the argument that those who do not count free time in their planning and tracking will make poor decisions and often invest in the wrong projects.