My three books on agile made this list of “The Top 100 Agile Books” by Jurgen Appelo. He used an objective method of ranking books based on Amazon.com and GoodRead.com quality ratings and popularity. His blog explains the approach. Uncle Bob Martin and I were each fortunate enough to have two books in the top ten.

Just about all the books on the list are worth reading so pick up a few of them if you’re looking for something good to read.

Laurie Williams, a professor at North Carolina State University, recently conducted a survey to find out which principles and practices are used by agile teams. If you read my monthly newsletter, you probably saw the announcement asking for people to participate. She had over 300 responses and released the results today. Among the findings were that these are the most important principles based on the number of respondents rating their importance as “Very High”:

1. Our highest priority is to satisfy the customer through early and continuous delivery of valuable software.
2. Working software is the primary measure of progress.
3. Deliver working software frequently, from a couple of weeks to a couple of months, with a preference to the shorter timescale.
4. Build projects around motivated individuals. Give them the environment and support they need, and trust them to get the job done.
5. At regular intervals, the team reflects on how to become more effective, then tunes and adjusts its behavior accordingly.

The survey also asked which practices where essential for a team to be considered agile. The top five were:

1. Short iterations (30 days or less)
2. Continuous integration
3. “Done” criteria
4. Automated tests are run with each build
5. Automated unit testing

She is doing a follow-up survey about the agile principles. You can take that survey online. I will share the results here when they are available

Stealing a page from the software development industry, the World Champion New York Yankees have decided to send of their players offshore. Although New York will remain team headquarters, some players will now play their parts of games in the popular offshoring centers of India, Ukraine, and Brazil. The move is expected to save the Yankees $10 million in each of the first three years with no decrease in the number of wins each year.

All games in the 2010 season are scheduled to start at the customary New York start times. Players working in offshore locations have agreed to shift their working hours to accommodate US start times. Alex Rodriguez who will be playing in Kiev commented that “I don’t expect any degradation in performance from starting games at 2 A.M. And if my performance does start to suffer, I suppose there are drugs I can take to keep me awake and performing at my best.”

Shortstop Derek Jeter notes the importance of recent technological advances in making all of this possible: “Just a few years ago, this would have been impossible. But technology has advanced to where playing a game in at the same time on eight or nine continents is possible. Using the Wii, a pitcher in Boston can pitch to me in Bangalore and I can hit it out of the ballpark in Kiev.”

Manager Joe Girardi says he is looking forward to utilizing a “follow-the-sun” approach to games. The days of occasional double-header or extra-innings games going late into the night when played solely in New York are a think of the past. Girardi says that, “We can go to bed at a reasonable hour here in New York after, say, the fifth inning and players in India will finish the game for us,” Girardi says.

We’ve added two new tools for prioritizing a product backlog: Theme Screening and Theme Scoring. Each of these is a lightweight way of comparing product backlog items to one another.

Theme Scoring

You can use theme scoring to compare user stories or entire projects against one another. In this technique you identify a set of criteria that will be important in prioritizing. Each item is assessed on a relative 1-5 scale against each criterion and the priorities are determined.

Theme Screening

Like theme scoring and relative weighting, this technique can be used to prioritize user stories or projects against one another. The simplest of the three prioritization techniques, theme screening starts with you identifying a baseline item. Each other item to be prioritized is compared to the baseline item for a set of factors that will determine priorities.

A nice side effect of having the Succeeding with Agile book done and in print is that some of my time has freed up for other projects. One such project has been the creation of some tools for agile and Scrum projects that we’re making available on the Mountain Goat Software website.

I’ve wanted to make some of these available for a long time so it’s nice to finally be able to do so. The first two tools we’re making available are a velocity range calculator and a relative weighting worksheet.

Velocity Range Calculator

The velocity range calculator takes as inputs at least five recent sprints and then tells you the range which corresponds to a 90% confidence interval around your velocity. Plans created with this 90% confidence interval will be more likely to be accurate than plans created with a point estimate of velocity. This technique is described in Succeeding with Agile.

Relative Weighting Worksheet

The second tool is a relative weighting worksheet. Relative weighting is a prioritization technique that can be used for items on your product backlog (or for comparing entire projects). I teach this technique in Certified Scrum Product Owner classes and wrote about it in Agile Estimating and Planning.

More to Come

You can find the tools in the new tools section of the Mountain Goat Software website.

I’ll have more tools to announce in about a week.

We’re proud to announce that Mountain Goat Software has become a Project Management Institute (PMI) Registered Education Provider (REP).

Attendees at our courses have always been able to claim Professional Development Units (PDUs) for our courses, but becoming a Registered Education Provider through the PMI allows us to offer Category 3 PDUs. This makes PDU reporting and tracking easy for attendees at Mountain Goat Software courses. At the end of each course, we provide you with a code that has been registered with the PMI and that authenticates your PDUs.

You can see a complete list of our public agile and Scrum training courses on our website. Courses are also offered for onsite delivery.

We are now able to ship Planning Poker cards via FedEx. We’ve had a lot of requests for this since taking our store live a year or two ago and the delay was the inability to get “live rates” from FedEx. A live rate is calculated on the weight, box and destination and FedEx can now do this. FedEx only offers rates in the continental US so we can’t ship internationally with FedEx yet, but they are working on that.

We’ll continue to ship via UPS and the US Postal Service both domestically and internationally.

Also, if you didn’t catch the previous announcement, we now have two styles of Planning Poker cards–our branded ones with the mountain goat photos and unbranded ones with a cool burndown chart design. Those cost a bit more but that’s because we sell the branded ones at a bit of a loss. You can check them out on the Mountain Goat Software Store.

An audio recording of a January session on “Leading a Self-Organizing Team” has been added. You can access both the slides and MP3 of the audio from this session.