Car manufacturing in the 1970's was a mostly manual process and quality wasn't great. Then the Japanese brought in automation and sophisticated quality checks.

The investment necessary for these improvements was substantial and risky. The up-front spend was increased but manufacturing unit costs fell and the reputation for reliability rapidly drove up market share.

The showcase is a critical part of Scrum. It is a window in to the project for the business users and will often determine their attitude and approach to the Scrum team. Done badly, a showcase will alienate stakeholders and disrupt the team's progress.

I have a long-running debate with a friend of mine about the state of software development.

I argue that by applying agile best practice the majority of software projects can be successful. My friend counters this argument by saying the trouble is that nobody ever applies agile best practice, so software projects continue to fail.

In many ways my friend is right, in the real world agile is often badly applied. The reason why this is has puzzled me for many years.

Too many developers hated planning because the plan had never been of any personal benefit to them. Instead, plans were often used as weapons used against the developers

- Succeeding with Agile, Mike Cohn

Even if I don't know how to implement something I can almost always write a test for it and If I can't figure out how to write a test for it I have no business programming it in the first place. - Kent Beck

Many processes in agile are mutually supporting. A good example of this is testing and its relationship to the development iteration.

I'm a great believer in getting quality in as early as possible in the development cycle. Checks that run automatically in an IDE are best (for example the Checkstyle/PMD plug-ins in Eclipse).

But these have one drawback: they are not enforced.

Nothing kills the productivity of a development team more than working on and supporting poor quality legacy code.

You start work in a new team, full of grand ideas and determined to do things the right way. Then you discover the morass of existing software that is sitting at the heart of the system. This code has been around for years. Nobody likes it, everyone wants to get rid of it. But that would mean spending lots of time and resource and producing little, if any, business value.

The Daily Scrum is one of the Scrum ceremonies. It is also often called the daily stand-up or just the stand-up.

What is a stand-up?

The idea in holding a daily stand-up is to get the Scrum Team members talking to each other. The stand-up is there to coordinate dependencies, to identify issues and to fascilitate team members helping each other out.

In my career I have seen the transition in popularity from FORTRAN to Pascal, from Pascal to C, from C to C++ and from C++ to Java. That is not to mention the introduction of Hibernate, Spring and numerous other technologies.