In some organizations, reviews are a valuable aspect of the software lifecycle. In others, they are a necessary evil tainted with political bureaucracy and big egos. Suboptimal reviews conducted late in the lifecycle are often misguided due to few objective guidelines that help guide the review process. When used throughout the development lifecycle, code and design quality metrics are valuable inputs to the review process.

What happens when teams adopt agile techniques? How will the rest of the organization react? Maybe you work in a small or idealistic organization with little or no political back-biting or infighting. If so, you are to be envied. Most of us don't live in a perfect world. We are human, and even the best of businesses have a bit of dysfunction here and there. Internal politics, infighting and turf battles will emerge. Your PHB needs to understand and be prepared for this eventuality. PHB can run, but he can't hide from the ripple effects of going agile.

There are many ways to transition to an agile process. Choosing the approach that is most likely to work best for your organization can be critical to a smooth transition. Through helping hundreds of teams make the transition to agile over the years, I have identified six core patterns that teams use to initiate the transition to agile. These patterns fall into three sets of opposing pairs. You should choose the core pattern from each set that best suits your team or organization:

• Start Small or go All In?

• Technical Practices First or Iterative First?

• Stealth Mode or a Public Display of Agility?

In this week's column, Jeff Patton sends a reminder that software developers who neglect the practices of "iteration" and "incremental" will get caught either delivering poor quality software or delaying schedules in order to make time to iterate. We kick ourselves, or others, for not "getting [software] right up front" when we all know that the hardest part of software development is figuring out what to build. But there's hope, and it comes in the form of prototypes and frequent iterations.