Many flavors of Agile have emerged: Scrum, Lean, Feature Driven Development (FDD), and Extreme Programming just to name a few. These methods have numerous complementary and distinguishing features, but the gamut of choices can be confusing and disorienting - as if being told to choose the best from 31 flavors of ice cream. Return on Investment (ROI) is important to me, so Lean must be the answer. But wait, I also want to be agile with my business priorities so I’ll choose Scrum. We are left wanting a simple question answered: “Which Agile method should I choose for my organization?”

Agile embraces the concept of self-organizing teams but they are inherently unstable and are only successful when the ‘Leadership – Self-Management’ dilemma is understood and dealt with. Too much central control destroys agility, inhibits creativity and resists change. Too much self-management leads to chaos and anarchy and destroys a team. A successful Agile Team needs to operate as far along the continuum towards self-management as it can, without tipping over into chaos. You can’t just eliminate the PM role and say to a software development team, “OK, you’re now an Agile Team – you need to self-organize”. This is a recipe for failure, and one of the reasons why many organizations resist the Agile approach.

This article is mainly for developers, yet it doesn't cover specific languages or technology. The author details some tools that can help you learn the application's internal structure. Also included is an example of hook lib code, but it doesn't require deep development knowledge to understand.

Complaints in the workplace about insufficient or inadequate communication are common, yet that very word "communication" is subject to multiple interpretations.

Here's an example of what I mean: A director had a survey conducted to determine the cause of his employees' low morale. One of the key findings was their desire for more communication. Eager to put things right, the director began circulating more reports and email than ever. And as a voracious reader, he started to extract articles from his many periodicals and circulate them to everyone.