Agile management promotes a project management process that encourages frequent inspection and adaptation, a leadership philosophy that encourages teamwork, self-organization and accountability, a set of best practices that allow for rapid delivery of high-quality products, and a business approach that aligns development with customer needs and company goals. It is related to extreme documentation and scrum methods.
#29463
Adapting to Scrum: Challenges and Strategies 
Read about some of the challenges facing technical writers who create product documentation in a Scrum environment, as well as strategies for confronting these challenges.
Sigman, Christine Marini. Intercom (2007). Articles>Project Management>Agile>Scrum
#38632
Scrum, the new development methodology in the Agile development family, is fast gaining acceptance in software development. But how can writers, who have little or no experience in any of the incremental development models, adjust to this methodology? And, how does the Documentation Development Life Cycle (DDLC) change in Scrum?
Bidkar, Prasanna. tekom (2011). Articles>Project Management>Agile>Documentation
#32997
Adopting User-Centered Design Within An Agile Process: A Conversation
eXtreme Programming and other agile processes provide a middle ground between chaos and over-elaborate processes sometimes referred to as 'death by documentation'. A particular attrtactive aspect of the agile approach for many teams is its willingness to accomodate change no matter how advanced development might be. However, this very flexibility can cause user interface design issues and ensuing usability problems. Adopting a user-centered approach to user interface design can address these issues, as the following simulated conversation between a user-centered design consultant and an XP team leader will explain.
Hudson, William. UIaccess (2002). Articles>User Centered Design>Agile>Project Management
#36022
One of the Agile Manifesto’s basic balance equations is valuing working software over comprehensive documentation. This line of the Agile manifesto can be confusing to some supporting roles in an Agile development enterprise. As technical support staff, trainers, and content creators, what are we doing to fit into this Agile methodology, and what’s working well? Let’s explore some old habits that need to die, and some new rituals to fill that space.
Gentle, Anne. Just Write Click (2009). Articles>Collaboration>Agile
#36023
Agile Across the Enterprise: Prioritizing Value in Support and Training
I have been a technical writer on Agile development teams, and working in tightly collaborative environments has taught me a lot about adding value in the customer’s perception. I still remember being challenged by Michael Cote when we were at BMC Software. He asked, “Why does it take three days to get a PDF out for review? Why aren’t technical writers using wikis for documentation?” Those questions prompted quite a bit of research that finally resulted in my book, Conversation and Community: The Social Web for Documentation.
Gentle, Anne. Agile Executive, The (2009). Articles>Management>Collaboration>Agile
#27801
The purpose of this article is to define a set of ideal practices for an agile software development project.
McLennan, Liam. Code Project, The (2006). Articles>Project Management>Agile
#33454
Agile Development Projects and Usability
Agile methods aim to overcome usability barriers in traditional development, but pose new threats to user experience quality. By modifying Agile approaches, however, many companies have realized the benefits without the pain.
Nielsen, Jakob. Alertbox (2008). Articles>Project Management>Usability>Agile
#30762
Agile Documentation (Using Tests as Documentation)
Storytelling can make documentation more exciting for both writers and readers. Stories provide context and people tend to remember them. More all-∆around fun when stories are tests.
Gheorghiu, Grig. Business Information Review. Articles>Documentation>Agile>Testing
#28121
Agile Documentation with doctest and epydoc
A Test Map is a list of unit tests associated with a specific function/method under test. It helps you see how that specific function/method is being exercised via unit tests.
Gheorghiu, Grig. Blogspot (2005). Articles>Documentation>Agile
#35040
Agile Documentation with uScrum
uScrum (uncertainty Scrum) is an agile process developed by a small team at Altitude Software to manage the process of writing user documentation. uScrum manages uncertainty and the unknown, allowing writers to quickly react to changing conditions. uScrum uses orders of ignorance to understand the difficulty of tasks, allowing the team to effectively prioritize regular work together with difficult creative work.
Baptista, Joaquim. ACM SIGDOC (2008). Articles>Documentation>Agile>Scrum
#27589
In Agile Documentation, Rüping gets to the heart of the documentation dilemma, offering a two-word solution: minimum necessary.
Davis, Donna L. developer.star (2003). Articles>Reviews>Agile>Documentation
#27588
Agile Documentation: Strategies for Agile Software Development
When I initially started work on Agile Modeling (AM) I wanted to focus solely on principles and practices for effective modeling but quickly discovered that this scope was not sufficient, that I also needed to consider the issue of how to be effective at the creation and maintenance of documentation too. Some agile models will 'evolve' into official system documentation, although the vast majority will not, and therefore it is relevant to discuss how to be agile doing so.
Agile Modeling. Articles>Documentation>Agile>Extreme Documentation
#30707
Agile Principles Are Changing Everything
There's an irony about agile development. There is no hard evidence that it produces better software, faster. And formal adoption rates, admittedly hard to measure, don't reach the 20 percent mark. Yet the ideas that underpin agile development--defining requirements incrementally, writing software in short stints, seeking customer feedback, testing code as it's written, frequent builds--have caught on like wildfire. They are widely accepted as sound development practices, even among teams that have not formally adopted them.
deJong, Jennifer. Software Development Times (2008). Articles>Collaboration>Agile>Methods
#27570
Agile Project Management - Reliable Innovation
This webinar discusses how Agile Project Management (APM) excels on projects in which new, risky technologies are incorporated; requirements are volatile and evolve; time-to-market is critical; and high quality must be maintained.
Highsmith, Jim. Rally Software Development (2005). Presentations>Project Management>Agile
#31163
An Agile Review Process for Technical Documentation
Documentation teams need a fast and effective review process to move forward on their projects and deliver quality, timely content. Reviewers, may they be SMEs (Subject Matter Experts) or key organization authorities, are usually extremely busy and have limited time (or interest) to review documentation. Interesting dilemma, no?
Talbot, Fabrice. LiveTechDocs (2008). Articles>Documentation>Agile>Workflow
#38611
Agile Technical Writing Basics
Unfortunately, nobody wrote instructions for Agile technical writers, so peculiarities of profession need to be studied out.
Mizinova, Ksenya. Dr. Explain. Articles>Project Management>Agile>Technical Writing
#33588
RITE differs from a “traditional” usability test by emphasizing extremely rapid changes and verification of the effectiveness of these changes. Specifically, practitioners make changes to the UI (prototype or application) as soon as the problem is found and the solution spotted. Changes such renaming buttons, changing the text of menu items often happen before another participant arrives. More complicated, but obvious changes are made as rapidly as possible. This way the change can be tested as quickly as possible.
Levison, Mark. InfoQ (2008). Articles>Usability>Collaboration>Agile
#35715
Agile User Experience Projects
Agile projects aren't yet fully user-driven, but new research shows that developers are actually more bullish on key user experience issues than UX people themselves.
Nielsen, Jakob. Alertbox (2009). Articles>Project Management>User Experience>Agile
#35811
Agile Works Best in PHP Projects
Agility includes effective, that is, rapid and adaptive, response to change. This requires effective communication among all of the stakeholders. Stakeholders are those who are going to benefit from the project in some form or another. The key stakeholders of the project include the developers and the users. Leaders of the customer organization, as well as the leaders of the software development organizations, are also among the stakeholders.
Abeysinghe, Samisa. Packt (2007). Articles>Web Design>Agile>PHP
#33988
Three panellists talk about how they've applied agile development techniques to XML, followed by audience discussion and Q&A: Tony Coates will discuss XML and schema quality assurance using unit test frameworks. David Carver will discuss agile XML schema development. Claudia Lucia Jimenez-Guarin will discuss software construction for evolving systems with incomplete data definition.
Carver, David, Anthony Coates and Claudia Lucía Jimenez-Guarin. XML 2006 (2006). Articles>Information Design>XML>Agile
#31040
Agile methodologies have had a lot of press in recent years. To listen to some people, agile methodologies are the answer to all the ailments that have ever plagued software development from the beginning of the computer age. But what are they, really? And do they really deliver on that promise? The answer is: (drumroll, please) it depends.
Little, Karen. BA Collective (2007). Articles>Project Management>Agile>Methods
#28605
The Agile/Waterfall Cooperative 
In this tutorial, attendees will learn to factor their company's business needs into their existing Agile procedures, and management will learn how to begin the investigative work of determining how to streamline these requirements and activities so that they don't hamper the project.
Sliger, Michele. Rally Software Development (2006). Presentations>Project Management>Agile
#27601
Why do we bother with models or documentation? They don't execute, and our customers pay us for working code, not pretty pictures. We bother with models to communicate. The idea is that a graphical object model can show how objects fit together more clearly than looking at the source, an interaction diagram can show a collaboration better than figuring out the call path from several class definitions. But so often the design documentation fails in this, and leaves me puzzled on my sofa.
Fowler, Martin. MartinFowler.com (1997). Articles>Documentation>Agile>Extreme Documentation
#27600
Applying Agile Methods in Rapidly Changing Environments
The authors (both coming from a heavyweight software development environment) describe their approach to transferring a heavyweight method into a more agile approach. One can argue whether the described result is intermediate or final, the the process described and the choices made are well worth studying.
Kutschera, Peter and Steffen Schafer. Jeckstein.com (2001). Articles>Collaboration>Agile
#35421
Authoring in an Agile Environment
It's a simple fact of life. Developing products in today's world requires shorter cycles, sensitivity to customer needs, and a focus on deliverables that breaks the old waterfall development paradigm. More and more there is a need for teams to focus on the entire development process and deliver precisely what customers need with little or no fluff. As products move towards the user-centric model of product development the push is for more intuitive interfaces with little need for documentation -- or does it really?
Vazquez, Julio J. SDI Global Solutions (2009). Articles>Documentation>Collaboration>Agile
