I've noticed an interesting trend lately.  Whenever people talk about Agile development or Scrum they use the two interchangeably.  Like one always means the other, and there is no other Agile process other than Scrum worth mentioning.  Why do I think this is an interesting trend?  According to recent surveys (for example here) Scrum is the most popular Agile process in use today so why not just equate the two words?  It definitely isn't a horrible idea. 

Ok, so you've heard about Scrum and want to know what all the fuss is about.  What does it mean to say that you are following a Scrum methodology?Well Scrum is one particular way to do Agile Development.  For example there are a set of practices that are common to Scrum projects such as.The team is self-organizing.  That is there is no project manager that plans the order of work, or give guidance on how to fulfill the iteration goals.  Instead the team has the authority an dresources to make al

From what I can tell Extreme Programming (XP) is the most misunderstood Agile methodology out there.  For example one time I was giving Extreme Programming (XP) as an example of Agile development, and one person's response was "Extreme Programming?  I don't want to talk about just how you plan to write the code, I want to talk about how you're going to run your project." *SIGH*I think its name helps to tie into this sort of thing.  Some people hear the word "programming" and just shut down becau

The Unified process is yet another method of Agile Development.  One of the key strengths of this process is that it encourages its users to tweak and change it so that it meets their needs.  Activities and artifacts in this process are considered optional and can be done or not as the team decides.  Even the order in which steps are done are up to the project team.   As a result there are a number of different variatons on this including the Agile Unified Process, the Rational Unified Process,