Welcome to the August 3rd edition of the Carnival of Agilists. The blogroll pointing you to some of the latest thoughts in the agile community.

The biggest agile event of the year has come and gone - Agile 2006. If you would like to read some about the conference (or write your own experiences), please check out the Conference Wiki. If you enjoyed this year's conference, or maybe you couldn't attend this year, put Agile 2007 on your calendar today.

Individuals and interactions over processes and tools

• Why Is Agile Development Hard? Jon Kern, an author of the Agile Manifesto, helps us answer this question in his JDJ artical. You can also check out other entries on his blog Straight-Talk from Jon Kern.
• What is the responsibility of leadership in an agile process? Brian Marick is seeing An unhappy trend: leadership.
• Do your interactive daily standups smell? You may want to suggest some deoderant, or maybe you need to read Dave Nicolet's Is this a process smell?

• When we don't have a complete software specification, how are we to Determine project release dates? Kane Mar helps us with this question.

• What is the most important characteristic of a software developer? Knowledge of Frameworks? Understanding of Algorithms? Quality Focused? Martin Fowler believes it is Customer Affinity.
• Are you frustrated with your business folks? Here is a story from Rod Boothby about how Waterfall Drives IT Engineer Over the Edge.

• Having problems responding to change? A new book is available from Ester Derby - Agile Retrospectives: Making Good Teams Great.

• Survey says...
  • Scott Ambler's March 2006 Agile Adoption Rate Survey results.
  • Agile Software Development Gaining Momentum. Check out the results from this VersionOne and Agile Alliance survey.
• The Agile Alliance and The Agile Project Leadership Network Announce New Board Members and Officers for 2006-2007.
• Esther Schindler shows us to how Agile Development Helps Improve FTC Websites through development of an Agile SOA Infrastructure.
• Kathleen Richards indicates that we are in the Early mainstream: Agile develops in the enterprise.