In 2011, the agile manifesto turned 10 years old. Some of the agile methodologies are even 5 to 10 year older. In the agile world, we pay a lot of attention to the people in the teams. Thanks to mailing lists and social media, agile leaders are very approachable. Yet we don't know them. This book gives you access to learn a little more about agilists. You will find all kinds of people in this book, people who have been on the Agile Alliance board, Gordon Pask Award winners, Scrum masters, Scrum trainers, people who started movements, people who organized agile conferences, famous authors, hard core teammembers, etc.You will also read about people who don't consider themselves agilists. They are in this book because they have inspired agilists, and we dare to say that they actually agree with what we call an agile mindset.

All these people have 2 things in common: they are interesting people and they have remarkable stories.

Yves send them all the same set of questions and asked them to select an extra question from someone else.The answers have been posted on Yves' blog for a while. The book contains one extra answer, per person.

We have finished adding people to the book. It now contains answers from 89 people.

When we have finished and polished the book, we take a nice break and then start of Volume 2 https://leanpub.com/WhoisagileVolume2

(The "Who is" backlog contains +250 people, the order of publication is in order of answers received.)

These are the questions we asked:

What is something people usually don’t know about you but has influenced you in who you are?If you would not have been in IT, what would have become of you?What is your biggest challenge and why is it a good thing for you?What drives you ?What is your biggest achievement?What is the last book you have read?What question do you think I should also ask and what is the answer?What question of one of the co-authors do you also want to answer?Who should be the next person to answer these questions?

Have fun reading their answers.

Andrea Chiou, Peter Doomen, Marcin Floryan, Yves Hanoulle

Europe 2012

This is what other people say about the book:

Johnnos Nose: http://johnnosnose.blogspot.co.uk/2012/07/returning-to-who-is-agile.htmlJohanna Rothmann: http://www.jrothman.com/blog/mpd/2012/02/who-is-agile-a-book-on-leanpub.htmlShane Hastie from InfoQ: http://www.infoq.com/news/2012/02/agile-who-whoThe podcast: the agile revolution episode 31: http://www.theagilerevolution.com/episode-31-an-apple-a-day Vickie Gray: http://simplerulesandtools.com/2012/06/06/who-is-agile/Portia Tung: http://www.selfishprogramming.com/2012/04/28/who-is-agile/ScrumDesk : http://www.scrumdesk.com/the-book-who-is-agile/

Leanpub Interviewed Yves Hanoulle about the book and the service: http://blog.leanpub.com/2012/05/yves-hanoulle-podcast.html

In 2022, Yves started a video edition of this book on youtube.

The software profession has a problem, widely recognized but which nobody seems willing to do anything about. You can think of this problem as a variant of the well known "telephone game", where some trivial rumor is repeated from one person to the next until it has become distorted beyond recognition and blown up out of all proportion.

Unfortunately, the objects of this telephone game are generally considered cornerstone truths of the discipline, to the point that their acceptance now seems to hinder further progress.

In this short ebook, we will take a look at some of those "ground truths": the claimed 10x variation in productivity between developers; the "software crisis"; the cost-of-change curve; the "cone of uncertainty"; and more. We'll hone our scholarship skills by looking up the original source for these ideas and taking a deep dive in the history of their development. We'll assess the real weight of the evidence behind these ideas.

And we'll confront the scary prospect of moving the state of the art forward in a discipline that has had the ground kicked from under it.

This book is a work in progress. Visit the blog. Download the sample. Read the Preface - know just what you're getting.

Curated choice of blog posts from 3 years of blogging about Kanban and Agile at http://yuvalyeret.com. These are the posts that were reader favorites according to traffic, as well as my personal favorites.

Is it time for a new job? How do you find a job that matches what you have to offer, that matches what you value in a culture?

Treat your job hunt like the project it is. Use a visual system to track your job search to increase your productivity, track your progress, evaluate your work, gain feedback, and throw out what doesn’t work while building on your successes. Learn from your past career to optimize for your next step. Full of tips, stories, and humor, you’ll apply practical techniques to take control of the most important project you’ll ever work on: find your next best job.

You think you know a lot about Agile or maybe you just starting with it? With this book, you can check your knowledge in a fun way. Are you the first one to reach the highest level? Well congrats then… And don’t think it’s just another quiz... each question has a different difficulty grade, the more correct answers you have, the more difficult the questions will be. You can play the quiz in different ways: play it on your own or otherwise play it using the levels or the “Join and Split” quiz. The Join and Split quiz uses the principle of planning poker. Is the team smarter than the individuals?

Why should you read this Personal Kanban book?

There are several techniques that can help you organize your work, improve focus and generally help you be more productive, but none of them raise questions about your work, or bring enough value, not only professionally but also personally! That's why we are convinced that personal kanban is the way to go to bring more value to your life on all levels.

• If you're struggling with your work-life balance or...
• If you don't know anymore if you work on the important stuff or urgent stuff or...
• If you start questioning what you actually did during the day or...
• If you feel that you could do more within a day or...
• If you want to move from doing good work to doing great work or...
• If you are juggling multiple things to do and feel trapped or...
• If you think GTD (Getting Things Done) just didn't provide you with what you needed or...
• ...many more...

Then personal kanban will be a worthwhile investment of your valuable time to increase your personal time management skills, day in and day out!

How to use this book?

This book is build in such a way that you'll be guided through the basics behind the personal kanban system, going from the grandfather of all kanban systems over to elaborate metrics and more. But... you could skip everything and immediately jump to the "experiment" chapter which gets you going with personal kanban within a couple of minutes.

We do recommend to keep the book at hand for future reference, a handbook to provide improvement ideas and thoughts, a re-read to give yourself a kick in the ass to keep experimenting... There is no end to your quest for optimization, even after years of practicing personal kanban techniques you will still be at the beginning of your quest to perfection.

What can you expect from the book?

First time you read through the book and follow its instructions, you can expect to have a descent and trustworthy system at hand towards personal happiness. You will have insights into why the system works and you will be aware of many tips and tricks to optimize your personal implementation and become a true time management Jedi. Keeping the book at hand for times to come you'll be equipped to overcome any obstacle on your path to happiness.

Enjoy the ride...

Greetings, Jürgen & Erik

In my daily job as a change agent, I constantly need to reassure people that the path we follow is worthwhile traveling. This need is often expressed in the form of critique and difficult questions. When I coach Agile teams, this is often the case. The same thing happens when introducing Kanban. However, I noticed that Kanban raises much harder questions on a management and leadership level, once people are introduced to the basics and start to explore the subject on their own.

The type of questions Kanban raises, seem to be hard to answer without lapsing into an hour long discussion. I guess this is normal because Kanban is much less prescriptive than Scrum, for instance. In order to provide reassurance, as a coach, you need to trace the questions all the way back to the principles of Kanban, which are grounded in Lean thinking.By listing the 5 most common arguments against Kanban and my response to them, I hope to help people in their Kanban journey and build great organizations that create amazing products.

These answers are based on my own perspective and experience. It would be great to hear your answers and improve the book while more people are introduced to Kanban. The goal is not to explain Kanban scientifically, but provide insights why these arguments don't stand, in a language that is understandable by all.

Are you running retrospectives regularly? Perhaps you run retrospectives once a week, or fortnightly. Do you feel like you could be getting more out of your retrospectives and fuelling continuous improvement in your teams? You may already find retrospectives valuable, but suspect there are ways of making them better.

This book condenses down over eight years of experience working with the retrospective practice within the context of real agile teams. It offers you practical advice on how to make your retrospectives even more effective including topics such as:

• Best methods to prepare for a retrospective
• Picking just the right materials
• Facilitating retrospectives with ease
• Dealing with common retrospective smells
• Retrospectives in different contexts including distributed, large and small groups
• A checklist for preparation
• Ensuring retrospectives result in change

Read the Foreword (available in the preview) by Agile Retrospectives's author, Diana Larsen to see why this book is for you.

Hard copies now available

Prefer a hard copy (paper version) or want to give one away as a gift? Order one online at Amazon.com or Amazon.co.uk

Please note that there is also a print version of this book available for purchase, for example on lulu.

As a professional programmer, how do you learn new skills like Test Driven Development? Pair Programming? Design principles?

Do you work on a team where not everyone is enthusiastic about good design and writing automated tests? How can you promote good practices amongst your colleagues?

I've worked as a programmer for many years, and these kinds of questions have come up again and again. This handbook is a collection of concrete ideas for how you can get started with a coding dojo where you (and your team) can focus on improving your practical coding skills. In my experience, it’s a fun and rewarding activity for any bunch of coders.

Learning new skills inevitably takes time and involves making mistakes. In your daily work environment where the focus is on delivering working production code, it can be hard to justify experimenting with new techniques or to persuade others to try them. When I attended my first "Coding Dojo" with Laurent Bossavit and Emmanuel Gaillot in 2005, I could see these kinds of meetings could be a fun way to effect change.

When you step into the coding dojo, you leave your daily coding environment, with all the associated complexities and problems, and enter a safe environment where you can try stuff out, make mistakes and learn with others. It's a breathing space where the focus is not on delivering solutions, but rather on being aware of what you actually do when you produce code, and how to improve that process. The benefits multiply if you can arrange to bring your whole team with you into the dojo. Through discussion and practicing on exercises, you can make a lasting impact on the way you work together.

Following the dojo I attended in 2005, I brought Laurent to my (then) workplace to show us all how it was done, and from there I began to facilitate coding dojos in various other settings. I've done them with my immediate colleagues, user groups, at conferences, and and more recently as a paid consultant brought in to do training with teams. Inspired by Corey Haines, I've also led "Code Retreat" days, which is a kind of scaled up coding dojo. All these events have been good fun - coders enjoy coding! We've had excellent discussions, learnt from each other, and written a significant amount of clean code and tests. It seems to me that acquiring skills like TDD, Refactoring and pair programming is a long process - it takes years - and it is a lot more fun and rewarding if you can get a like minded group of people to join you on that journey.

This handbook is a collection of practical advice drawn from my experience, with concrete ideas for how you can get started with your own coding dojo. There is a catalogue of "Kata" coding exercises that you can try, and advice about how to choose one for your particular situation. There are many useful resources on the internet which you can use to augment your dojo, and some are reviewed here.

Kent Beck once said "I'm not a great programmer, I'm just a good programmer with great habits" [1]. What are you doing to improve your coding habits? This is the book with the advice and encouragement you need: get together with some like minded people and hold a coding dojo! It's fun!

[1] page 97 of "Refactoring" by Martin Fowler

Reader Daniel Read wrote:

"I had the pleasure of reading an early draft of this three volume book set by Jerry Weinberg called "Experiential Learning". I also have had the pleasure of attending some of Mr. Weinberg's experiential workshops. This stuff is gold. You won't find it anywhere else. I dare say it is the culmination of a life's work by someone who practically invented this approach. (A few other Weinberg books could fit that description, actually--he has several "life's works"!)" <end quote>

The second volume—Class—guides the reader in constructing and delivering classes consisting entirely (or almost entirely) of one or more experiential exercises.

Volume Three—Simulations—takes up the possibilities for longer classes and longer exercises.

Volume Four—Examples—provides a host of actual examples of simulations we've used over more than half a century.

At the beginning of our classes, we generally gather the students' hopes for what will happen as a result of the class. (You can read more about this practice in the section called Requirements Gathering.) We haven't figured out how to gather requirements from each reader of a book, but we do offer a class about experiential learning, and from these classes, we've developed some ideas of what most of our students want.

So, what can you hope to gain from reading these volumes? If your hopes for these books is similar, we've made a list of hopes distilled from these classes:

1) Learn practical knowledge about designing experiential exercises.

2) Expand my understanding of what participants experience during experiential exercises.

3) Unlearn things that interfere with effective experiential learning.

4) Help to expand my "big picture" about this topic.

5) Link to other knowledge to help increase my effectiveness.

6) Figure out if students are really learning.

We've used this list to guide us in deciding what to include, and as with any experiential exercise, this book may lead its readers to many additional lessons we never planned for them.

And, of course, a book may be an experience for a reader, but it's not what we're thinking of as an experiential exercise (though a reader may benefit greatly from trying at least some of the exercises described here) In the final analysis, a book about the effectiveness of experiential exercises may seem to be a paradox, but there's a learning there, too.

We are not claiming that experiential learning is the only way to learn. We're not even claiming that experiential exercises always teach anything worthwhile, or that students never take away erroneous or vacuous learnings. We're merely saying that we have found this approach to be one more tool for our teaching repertoire—a tool that has been strikingly effective for us as both teachers and learners. We hope it turns out that way for you, as well.

What do you expect from a leader?

• That he goes away?
• That she takes you strongly and firmly by the hand?
• That he enforces the team spirit?

This book is the manual for a three-hour game, together we will try to find an answer to these questions. By practicing different leadership styles and approaches in our "playground", you will gain insights about:

• The different results that can be achieved by different approaches
• Your own and others' personal preferences
• Group dynamic effects

We will give special attention to the link between these three themes and the daily practice of project teams. After the game, we will explain the three models and give you references to further reading for those who want to learn more.

Expected benefits of playing this game

This session lets you see what influence the leadership styles have on your team. It lets you reflect on the leadership style you wish to use or/and want to develop.The book also contains a texts about:

• - PairCoaching
• - Contemplation on leadership
• - The Rose of Axes, applied on leadership

What did the authors hope to learn?

When we created this session, we hoped this would bring us one session closer in the integration between the two worlds we both live in. We selected these three kinds of leadership because these are the most extreme cases. A real situational leader would use the three leadership styles in different situations. By exaggeration the three styles the differences and uses of each style become much clearer for the participants.We have been playing this game around the world since 2004 and are happy to say that we learned that and so much more...