Some things in life, like death and taxes, are a given. Software development teams face their own givens: Project schedules will always change and certain teams will suffer because of these changes. If that's to be expected, then why haven't most managers done anything to save their teams from undue stress and abuse? In this column, Dion Johnson explains that we've got to take care of our teams, or else we'll never see the end of team abuse.

Agile approaches to software development promise many advantages: shorter schedules, more productive teams, products that better meet customer expectations, higher quality, and more. In this talk, Mike Cohn explains how agile teams achieve these goals by avoiding the seven deadly sins of project management. Covered will be sins such as gluttony, sloth, lust, opaqueness, and more.

Grab some hot cocoa, sit back, and watch this software tester's take on A Christmas Carol by the Grove Players.

Each week, I find myself using Jenga, Hasbro's wooden building block game, as an analogy for introducing agile into the enterprise. Few topics are more hotly debated throughout the software development community than how to apply the simple values of agile to big business. Many approaches favor knocking down the entire Jenga tower to start from scratch with an entirely new foundation of values and practices. Others opt for the comfort of traditional management processes, with some agile practices — like pair programming and stand-up meetings — sprinkled on top.