Agile development practices at their core, have a common theme of making better use of the time spent developing software. This starts at the project level and continues down to the developer day-to-day-activities. Consider an agile iteration. The team starts the iteration with a clear sense of the priorities for the sprint, and pretty good understanding of the project scope. Having estimated and committed to getting the work done, the team also has a sense that the goal is attainable. The team members then collaborate to get the work done as a team.

Software people love challenges and want to exercise their brains by tackling difficult problems. Our nature is to understand complicated problems, become familiar with various business domains, and generate a solution that helps the world become a better place. Nirav Assar explains four techniques to wrap your head around complicated code.

I always recommend to teams newly transitioning to agile that they keep every iteration the same length. This helps them learn to manage their time, and after a few iterations they'll start to get a rhythm. Hopefully, they'll learn to work incrementally, doing testing and coding concurrently as part of one development effort, so that user stories are finished throughout the iteration, and testing isn't pushed to the last day.

Bob speaks with Michael Spayd and Lyssa Adkins about the Agile Coaching Institute at ADPWest 2011.