Have you ever been involved in a conversation about Agile and heard a term, for example information radiator” and you wondered what that term really meant?
Or maybe you’re the one throwing out those terms and someone replied “You keep using that word, I don’t think it means what you think it means.”
Or perhaps you’d like to get an idea of what techniques exist that might help you address a challenge you’re currently facing.
Or you’re familiar with several concepts in the Agile community, but you’d like an easy way to find the perspectives of different practitioners on those topics so that you can see the current thinking and revised perspectives on a variety of topics.
The Agile Alliance website has a set of resources that help you with these challenges and many others. These resources include:
- The Agile Glossary, a dynamic collection of terms commonly used by people who explore and apply Agile values, principles, and practices.
- Resources from past conferences to show you the current thinking on a variety of topics
- Initiatives that feature in depth exploration of a variety of topics.
From Archivist To Curator
“If I have seen further than others, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants” – Sir Isaac Newton
In 2012, Laurent Bossavit created the role of Agile Alliance Archivist. As the Archivist, he started this blog, and created the Guide to Agile Practices, and the Conference Archive. The impact of all his work on these resources is evidenced by all the content that the site contains from explaining relevant Agile terms, to describing the historical origins of many Agile concepts in the Agile Practices Timeline to showing how the practices relate to each other and common approaches via an ingenious subway map metaphor. He also built the foundation for the wealth of resources generated from the North American Agile Conferences that include presentations, videos, experience reports, and research papers.
In 2015 we redesigned our website in order to give it a fresh look and make the resources more findable and usable. I was the Product Owner for that effort and now have the privilege of following Laurent as the person responsible for building and maintaining Agile Alliance’s collection of resources. I’ve adopted the title Content Curator to reflect the nature of the task. Agile Alliance has a lot of information available. We need to distill all of that information in a way that helps you gain and build a solid understanding of agile values, principles, and practices. That’s what curation is all about.
What Content Curation is Agile Alliance Doing?
We’ve relabeled the Guide to Agile Practices to the Agile Glossary in order to reflect the broader nature of the information contain in the items. Most of the terms described are still practices, but we wanted to be able to discuss other terms that aren’t practices but are relevant to people using Agile approaches. We’re taking a look at every glossary item and updating them to reflect current practice as well as associate those terms with resources from past conferences. Our plan is to make these glossary terms the key launching off point to explore a particular topic related to Agile. We’re also looking exploring what terms are missing so that we can add them to the Agile Glossary. The great thing about a community that is continuously learning is that our understanding of practices and ideas never sits still and new practices and ideas are always appearing.
The content from the Conference Archive can now be found in the Resources section of the website. Coincident with the new website, Agile Alliance has seen an increase in the number of events that we operate and we’ve posted the content from those events. We’ve prioritized posting more recent content on the site, so we’re still working on getting content from older conferences up on the site. If there is a particular piece of content that you are looking for, send an email to [email protected] and I’ll help you out.
Agile Alliance has a set of Initiatives underway that produce content. Examples include the Technical Debt and Supporting Agile Adoption initiatives. When the people working on these initiatives produce resources, we publish them on the site and often have a blog post announcing any new materials. The Experience Report initiative produces a great deal of content that also provides some experience report authors a chance to present their experiences at the annual North American Agile Conference. The next conference in this series, Agile2017, is scheduled for Orlando August 7 – 11, 2017.
We also curate a list of books that members of the community find helpful, or that we’ve referenced in a glossary item as a particularly helpful resource on some topic. If you have a suggestion for a book that we’re missing, send me an email.
How You Can Help
There’s a lot of information about Agile available both on the site and in the community in general. As content curator, it’s my responsibility to distill all that information into something useful for you, but I could use some help with that effort. I don’t claim to be an expert in every Agile-related topic (especially the development and testing related ones) and there are probably new advancements that I haven’t heard of, or experienced enough to write coherently about yet. With that in mind, here are some ways you can help Agile Alliance help you:
- Look through the terms in the Agile Glossary. Are the terms missing information, or is there newer information about a particular term? Provide feedback here, or send me an email.
- Is there a term missing from the Agile Glossary? Let us know.
- Do you have an idea for Initiative that could explore a topic in more detail? Propose an Initiative.
