Jooyung Han has translated my The Decline and Fall of Agile essay into Korean. Read it here.

Eric Lefevre-Ardant has an excellent transcript of a discussion about Fit that I participated in on Twitter a few weeks ago. Here's an excerpt:

It was kicked off by an interview of Ward Cunningham and James Shore on Hanselminutes where Ward & James were asked whether Fit was dead.

Bob Martin first reacted on Twitter by pointing out that, at any rate, “FitNesse is thriving”, along with Slim, a new system that can be used by Fitnesse as an engine to run the test tables.

Michael Feathers replied that, in his view, Fit was more appropriate as a seed for other works: “Take it, grow it locally, and never commit back.” This seems confirmed by James Shore, a former leader of the Fit project (and a successor to Ward in that role): “Fit core was intentionally resistant to change [...] from an organizational perspective”

Interestingly, James believes that both Fit and Fitnesse have “similar flaws, which could be solved by another approach”:

• “Fit flaw #1: maintenance. HTML is hard to maintain and refactor.”
• “Fit flaw #2: Customers. Customers don’t generate the documents, and that was the whole idea.”
• “Fit flaw #3: Programmers. Fit loves domain models and Whole Value. Most programmers don’t. Impedance mismatch.”

If you're interested in Fit, FitNesse, or similar tools, it's well worth the read.

Read the whole transcript here.

"Maximizing Value with Agile Release Planning" is one of my favorite presentations to give. It's a thorough look at five ways to improve value on your agile projects:

1. Work on One Project at a Time
2. Release Early and Often
3. Adapt Your Plans
4. Keep Your Options Open
5. Plan at the Last Responsible Moment

I delivered this presentation at the Portland IIBA meeting (International Institute of Business Analysts) last week, which reminded me that there's a recording of this presentation online at the Product Management View blog. I thought you might like to see it.

Watch it here.

The Unbound Developers Show just posted a podcast of an interview they did with me a few weeks ago.

The interview came out well. We discussed a wide range of topics, including Scrum, Lean, Kanban, how to adopt Agile, resistance to change, distributed teams, and more. It's worth a listen.

Hear it here.

Rod Hilton's Absolutely No Machete Juggling blog has a review of The Art of Agile Development. Here's an excerpt:

That said, this is an excellent book on XP. All of XP's practices are covered in just the right amount of detail - giving you enough information that you can adopt the practice, but requiring that you do additional research about the ones that interest or challenge you the most. This allows the book to be a pretty quick read in general, which is beneficial for a team wishing to adopt XP practices soon. This level of detail does have one disadvantage, though: by staying largely in the realm of hypotheticals and ideals, I often found myself thinking that the authors were being naive and idealistic about how easy some practices were to adopt. This made me somewhat more skeptical of the book than I would have been if more detail had been offered, but ultimately I felt the level of detail was right; I did my own research online about some of the things that challenged me.

Read the full review here.

David Wang has translated my The Decline and Fall of Agile essay into Chinese. Read it here.

郑柯 has translated my Beyond Story Cards: Agile Requirements Collaboration essay into Chinese. I don't speak Chinese, but it looks like he did a beautiful job.

Download the PDF here.

I have a short essay in the September issue of MundoJava, which was described to me as "Brazil's best software development magazine."

The editors at MundoJava translated my essay to Portuguese, but kindly gave me permission to post my original here:

What is Fit and why does it matter? It's part of your agile bug-prevention arsenal. Unlike the traditional approaches to quality, which focuses on finding and removing defects, agile approaches focus on preventing bugs from being created in the first place. This leads to some pretty amazing results. Experienced agile teams only produce a handful of new bugs per month.

The "agile engineering practices" introduced by Extreme Programming (XP) are part of the reason. These techniques--such as test-driven development, pair programming, collective code ownership, simple design, and energized work--prevent most programming errors. They ensure that the code does exactly what the programmers intended it to do.

Eliminating programming errors is a big step, but it doesn't prevent all bugs. Sometimes programmers misunderstand what is needed. Agile's idea of an involved product owner who sits with the team--an "on-site customer," in XP terms--goes a long way to preventing programmer misunderstandings. They can easily ask questions of the product owner, and she can see the team's progress and make corrections as they go.

These are great techniques, but some bugs still sneak by. Complex problem domains, such as finance or law, have a lot of nit-picky scenarios that have to programmed exactly right. In many cases, even the experts don't agree about the correct answers. In order for the programmers to create the software without bugs, they have to understand all of the possible cases and what the correct answers are. Surprisingly, even the experts haven't thought through all of the possibilities, and they often won't agree which answers are correct!

It's a recipe for bugs, and that's where Fit comes in. More than anything else, Fit is a tool for improving communication and collaboration around business requirements. Using Fit, teams discuss real-world examples of business rules in practice, and Fit automatically checks that the software does what the examples say. This conversation flushes out misunderstanding, errors, and disagreements. The automatic checks force the conversation to be rigorous, and provide documentation and ongoing confirmation.

This ability to enhance communication is Fit's most important attribute. Teams often think of Fit as a tool for testers. Nothing could be further from the truth! Fit's strength is its ability to get programmers and business experts talking to each other, disagreeing with each other, and reaching consensus together. Testers play a role in this process--often bringing up edge cases nobody had considered--but Fit is not a testing tool. It's a tool for collaboration... that happens to automatically check your results.

What is Fit and why does it matter? It's a tool for eliminating defects that arise from the confusion and miscommunication that often surround complex business requirements. It's an important part of your agile bug-prevention arsenal.

O'Reilly conducted an interview with Shane and me at OSCON in June. It came out well, and this is one of the rare times that Shane and I have appeared together to discuss the book.

InfoQ just posted a video interview with me. Deborah Hartmann interviewed me at Agile 2007 last year just before the book came out. It came out great, and InfoQ also included a transcript for those of you who prefer reading to watching.

This interview joins a few other good recent interviews: Bob Payne's Agile Toolkit interview, also conducted at Agile 2007, and Clarke Ching's Agile Thinkers interview.

Clarke Ching has a new website called Agile Thinkers. It's devoted to interviews with people in the agile community and it looks like it will have some great stuff. (Clarke's already proven the model with TOC Thinkers, about the Theory of Constraints.)

Shane and I are the first ones up. Clarke is putting the interviews up one question at a time--you can either visit the front page and see everything as it comes, or you can jump straight my interview or Shane's interview.

To give you a taste, here's my response to Clarke's first question. There's more on the site.

Q1. Hi Jim, I'm really enjoying your book. I honestly think it is the best agile book I've read - and I've read a good few of them. Good job! Can you tell me a bit about yourself - both personally and professionally? What got you to the point where you could produce such a wonderful book?

Thank you! I should start by recognizing my coauthor, Shane Warden. Shane and I collaborated closely on the book, so that's part of the reason it turned out so well. Another reason would be the sheer amount of time and effort we put into it--I put nearly a year of full-time work into it myself, and that's not counting Shane's effort or the effort of all the people at O'Reilly. I think our open review process helped a lot, too. We put nearly every section of the book online and we got tons of feedback--over 1200 messages were posted to the reviewer list. Our best work started as drafts that got brutal beatings.

So: blood, sweat, and tears. You know, the usual.

As for how I personally got here... you know, it's hard to say. I've always liked reading and writing, even though I was born a hardcore geek. (I placed in my first programming contest at age ten or eleven. I think I would have come in first if my program had actually loaded off the tape drive.) I actually did better on the English portion of the SATs than the Math portion. I also wasted a huge amount of time on Fidonet and Usenet, talking about programming and (in retrospect) being a general pain in the ass. I could spend hours composing careful explanations of why OS/2's Worksplace Shell was better than the Windows desktop. I expended far more effort than the topics were worth, except for two things: I had fun, and I had a lot of practice writing and seeing how my writing was received.

So that's how I learned to write. On the software side, the really core experience was when I had an AppleSoft BASIC program dissolve on me. Applesoft BASIC was old-school: line numbers, two-letter variables, GOTO's, the works. When I was in high school, the complexity of one of the programs I was writing overwhelmed my capacity to keep track of it all. The program just fell apart in my brain. Ever since, I've been fascinated with the human side of programming: if programming is partly an exercise in making the unbelievably complex comprehensible, how do we do that? That led me to structured programming, then OOP, then software engineering texts, then Ward's Wiki, then XP and agile development, and now to questioning what makes software successful. Along the way, I did the same thing I did with writing: I spent hours every day just playing with the ideas, writing programs, writing about programming, and so on. (As well as my professional experience.)

So really, the answer is that, for most of my life, I've had a pretty single-minded dedication to writing, programming, and software development. (The word you're looking for: Nerd.) It's amazing I ever married, let alone reproduced.

Bob Payne has a great interview with me up on his "Agile Toolkit" podcast. It's a nice, wide-ranging interview. We start out talking about the book, migrate to a discussion of learning styles, then Bob's Mano a Mano project at Agile 2007, before wrapping up with a discussion of agile tools and CardMeeting.

It's a fun interview. Check it out.