Four Agile Posts Everyone Should Read

Today, I want to share some of my favorite blog posts about agile with you. Without further ado, here they are:

• How Do Story Points Relate to Hours? – One recurring question I get asked when talking about agile (and specifically when estimating in Story Points) is how those things relate. Mike Cohn does a great job in describing that the relation between Story Points and hours is a distribution rather than a direct mapping.
• Agile is All About Feedback – Bret Pettichord debunks a couple of myths about agile while coming to the point. Agile is all about getting feedback about the software you’re building on multiple levels: pair programming, acceptance testing, iteration planning, etc.
• Do We Need Projects? – I like James Shore’s view on software “projects”: The end of a development project is usually not the end of the software being built but the starting point of its life! One has to consider operations, maintenance, etc. instead of thinking software is “done” just because the initial development project ends. I’ve made especially bad experiences in that respect with external contractors whose assignments ended with the project which, of course, killed their motivation to care about how the software they’re writing shall be later maintained and operated. I prefer to think in products and releases like James does!
• Beware the Hero by Elisabeth Hendrickson. Elisabeth tells a tale about the lonely hero in an agile project simulation who was very close to ruining the complete project. Unfortunately, I fear most of us have experienced a similar situation in real life!

Let us know in the comments what your favorite posts about agile are!