Statistics tell me that I get lots of extra readers when I write about Agile development. And why not? The Agile movement is the most interesting trend in software development right now.

I would argue that coding for multicore processors is at least as important as making a move to Agile. So are testing methods and security, security,security. But these are technical problems, not philosophical paradigm shifts.

The problem with Agile is that it isn't really a development method, or even a philosophy. It's an aesthetic. It's a system of values. Heck, the document that started it all, the Agile Manifesto, is written as a statement of values. The Agile movement is little more than a statement of values. The values are intended to serve as a touchstone for developers as they make decisions about how to build teams and applications.

So the modern approach to software development is based on a the value system outlined in the Agile Manifesto. So if we're to evaluate the state-of-the-art in software development, we should start by evaluating those values.

There's just one problem. As many others have pointed out, the values are both vague and obvious. There's nothing revolutionary about any of the four values espoused in the manifesto. They're simple common sense.

Of course our development projects should be agile. The opposite of agile is slow and clumsy. Who would choose slowness and clumsiness over agility?

Translating an aesthetic statement into a guideline for real-world team structures, workflows, and development models is a nontrivial task. The values turn out to be the easy part. Developing software is still hard. Pair programming and unit testing and daily builds are consistent with the values espoused in the Agile Manifesto, but they are separate innovations in their own right. They would be good ideas with our without the manifesto.

When you describe your team or your values or your project-management philosophy as agile, all you're really saying is that it's good. Based on straight thinking about priorities. You're not saying anything technical and you sure aren't cutting software development's many challenges down to size. You're just expressing agreement with a handful of uncontroversial tautologies. Sure, we like Agile processes. We also prefer code that works. And projects that are finished on time. And teams that come in under budget.

Commitment to Agile isn't enough anymore. What are you really doing to improve your process?

Web recommendation: Today marks the 200th anniversary of the birth of Charles Dickens. The writer's contributions to literature are too easily overlooked these days. Certainly, many of his novels and stories now appear quaint, needlessly complicated, wordy, and baroque. But Dickens made lasting contributions to characterization, plot, and fiction's role as social commentary. Check out his life and accomplishments at Dickens 2012, a Web site created by the Charles Dickens Museum and Film London in association with The Dickens Fellowship.

J.D. Hildebrand has written hundreds of articles for dozens of publications and online communities dedicated to software development. He is currently rereading Salman Rushdie's masterful Midnight's Children, which offers no small debt to Dickens's innovations.

Trade organizations offer professionals a way to meet new colleagues, find out about job opportunities, get discounts and learn more about the field they've chosen. Developers have access to tons of different developer networks -- you've got the Android Developers' blog, the iOS developer network, Windows has one and RIM does too, but wouldn't it be nice to have access to tips and tricks for all those, in one place?

That's the goal of the Application Developers Alliance, a newly formed non-profit trade organization. Their goal, according to Jake Ward, head of communications, is to be the voice of the development industry, agnostic of process/language and platform, globally. The Alliance is free to join (for the time being), has no age restrictions and hopes to offer more discounts beyond the ones they're currently offering, which include some savings on Rackspace hosting and app dev training courses.

Check out the site -- the Alliance Network functions like LinkedIn and allows you to communicate with other developers, share tips, view message boards and search job postings.

Ward said the organization does not aim to discredit any work others have done in the past -- in fact, he said, he starts off most interactions with Meetups and other organizations by acknowledging the great work they've done so far and then asking how the Alliance can help.

As of right now, the Alliance has about 2300 members, many of are based in the US, but approximately 700 are based internationally.

Will you join the Alliance? Do you think there is a need for this?

To learn more visit the website, follow them on Twitter and like them on Facebook.

It's the end of the year, so I've decided to clean out my desk. It's always nice to start the year with a fresh slate, and a way to expand your knowledge. As I was cleaning my desk, I found this book -- The Elements of Scrum by Chris Sims and Hillary Louise Johnson, version 1.01 -- and thought it would be great to give it to an SDTimes reader to help them understand Scrum in 2012. 

Since nothing in this world is free, we're asking that you help us reach 3,012 followers by January 1, 2012 (3012 in 2012, if you will) and then we will randomly select one Twitter follower to get the book. 

Be sure to share our handle @SDTimes with your friends, family and coworkers -- and any one interested in industry news, quirky updates and fun contests! 

I keep meaning to write about RedCritter. The innovators at this Dallas-based company are really thinking out of the box. I'm not sure if the result is awesome or awful, but it certainly has captured my attention.

RedCritter is the publisher of Tracker, a project-management tool for Agile development. It's a lightweight tool, but that's OK – Agile is a lightweight approach to development. In fact, most teams manage their Scrum and Kanban processes without recourse to a project-management tool. Using a tool seems...un-Agile, somehow.

But Tracker is well-suited to Agile methods. The folks at RedCritter built the product especially to support Agile development (though they believe Tracker is suited to project-management tasks in fields besides software development as well). And they added a twist: the software treats development like a game.

Tracker allows members of development teams to earn points and badges by fulfilling project goals. The badges – the system allows program managers to define as many as 50 of them – can be displayed on developers' profile pages, much like the badges gamers earn by acquiring skills in computer games like World of Warcraft. Points can be accumulated and traded for incentives in a company rewards store. A live feed, sort of like an in-house Twitter, lets developers track each other's progress toward incentives and gives managers a view into the development process.

The idea is that treating development like a game makes the whole project more fun. Letting developers compete for badges and points isn't just fun, it's motivating. At least, that's what RedCritter's customers have found.

RedCritter makes Tracker available on a 30-day free trial basis. So why not give it a try? It sounds like it could make development more fun. And isn't that what everyone wants?

Web recommendation: You have probably heard that Google is killing off its Code Search feature. Stepping into the void is search[code], an innovative site run by hacker Ben Boynter in Australia. According to Boynter, the site is “an attempt to put all programming documentation in one searchable place.” That's a big job for one guy, but it's pretty impressive what Boynter has done so far. You can see for yourself by clicking here. J.D. says check it out.

J.D. Hildebrand has written hundreds of articles for dozens of publications and online communities dedicated to software development. Today's lunch was spaghetti with an excellent homemade bolognese sauce.

I ran across an interesting Web page today: Agile @ 10: Ten Authors of The Agile Manifesto Celebrate its Tenth Anniversary. The editors at The Pragmatic Bookshelf contacted the 17 signers of the original Agile Manifesto and asked them to contribute their thoughts about developments in the Agile world over the succeeding 10 years. Ten of the 17 signers contributed publishable responses, which are collected in the article. The contributors – Andy Hunt, Kent Beck, Ron Jeffries, Jon Kern, Ken Schwaber, James Grenning, Arie van Bennekum, Stephen J. Mellor, Ward Cunningham, and Dave Thomas – shared reflections on the extent to which their bold statement changed the development world.

The article led me to read lots more about Agile, including the Agile at 10 series of articles here at SD Times.

For the most part, these articles stick to a predictable formula. With varying degrees of humor and self-effacement, the signers express parental pride in the path the Agile philosophy has traversed from offbeat mission statement to mainstream acceptance.

But as I read more closely, I noticed something else. At one point or another, in one article or another, almost every one of the signers tacitly admitted that the Agile movement has not lived up to his hopes. This quote from Andy Hunt is typical:

Last summer, I had the good fortune to visit a “very advanced” Agile shop. These folks really did embrace agile methods with a discipline, completeness, and a zealous fervor that would be hard to match. In many ways, they could have been a poster child for Agile methods...But these weren’t productive developers freed from mindless process dogma. They were Agile slaves. The dogma they followed was ours, and they followed it well. And as with many organizations in a similar position, they saw some promising results. Continuous integration, refactoring, unit tests, pair programming—all these techniques yielded some benefit. But they weren’t thinking, they weren’t reacting, they weren’t being agile. When problems came up, they addressed them with all the grace and elegance of a deer caught in the terrifying blaze of alien headlights. They knew how to do Agile; they didn’t know how to be agile.

Ron Jeffries told The Pragmatic Bookshelf, “I had imagined more. I had hoped that many people would adopt these ideas, and I had imagined a significant step upward in project success among those who did adopt them. I had imagined the industry really moving up a notch. What happened is that many have adopted the ideas, at least in name, but that few of them have attained anything like the benefit that is possible.”

In the same article, James Grenning said, “Many developers are still unaware of Agile, or only know the misconceptions. The idea that more upfront work is needed is deeply ingrained in the software development mindset. Code bases are a mess, dragging teams and products to a standstill.” He concluded, “Now we have organizations that have a few Scrum Masters and proclaim themselves Agile, but that continue to spend months in analysis and design, and similar amounts of effort in test and fix. They have stories and iterations, but ignore relative effort estimates and velocity. Code is deteriorating. Tests are not written. And they wonder why Agile is not working for them.”

I find Hunt's wistful observation insightful and moving. At its heart, the Agile Manifesto was a declaration of independence from the shackles of traditional development methods. The signers advocated not new processes, but new values and a new attitude.

The sad irony is that instead of overthrowing slavish commitment to orthodoxy, Agile has spawned a new orthodoxy – complete with certified tools, recommended texts, and a thriving culture of consultants to descend upon your organization and tell you how to do Agile right.

More and more shops now think of themselves as Agile. They're investing in Agile training and attempting to adopt Agile methods such as Scrum and Kanban. But they've missed the point. Instead of becoming enlightened freethinkers, they've drunk the Kool-Aid and joined the Cult of Agile. Dogma and orthodoxy are alive and well. At the cutting edge of our profession are the people Andy Hunt calls “Agile slaves.”

As Dave Thomas told The Pragmatic Bookshelf, “There’s this growing tendency to treat the word 'Agile' as a noun. People say, 'we’re doing Agile.' But friends, Agile is not a noun. It’s an adjective, meaning to be able to move quickly and easily.”

Is your organization agile? Or is it just “doing Agile”?

Web recommendation: The Supreme Court of the United States has agreed to hear a case in which police tracked a suspect's location by placing a GPS device on his car and querying its location every 10 seconds for 28 consecutive days – without a warrant. The question, of course, is whether the government should have the power to use technology in this way. The stakes are high and the right answer should be obvious to all of us. (Isn't it?) The case is summarized well in this GigaOM article. J.D. say check it out.

J.D. Hildebrand has written hundreds of articles for dozens of publications and online communities dedicated to software development. He likes raisins and walnuts in his oatmeal cookies.

I bumped into Kanban for the first time the other day. In the current rush for lean, agile, lightweight development methods, Kanban may be an idea whose time has come.

Kanban's first application was in automobile manufacturing. In the 1940s and 1950s, Toyota used the Kanban approach to implement just-in-time manufacturing, which it subsequently identified as a key to its success. Since then, Kanban has been used in a wide variety of industries.

Kanban has been applied to the challenges of software development only recently, but it has already shown promise. Like Agile development techniques in general (and Scrum in particular), Kanban is at its heart quite simple. It is essentially a workflow-management technique. The central idea is that team members create their deliverables only as they are needed by the team members downstream. The goal is to create a smooth process in which each step gracefully hands off work to the next step without backlogs or bottlenecks.

There's more to it, of course, but in the Agile tradition, not much more. Kanban is traditionally implemented with physical cards that are used as communication devices to alert upstream team members that their work is needed downstream. In manufacturing, the cards actually shuttle between different locations on the assembly line. In software development, they are more commonly moved from place to place on a bulletin board. A glance at the board reveals the status of the entire project.

Rather than trying to paraphrase what I've learned about Kanban in a dozen hours of googling and reading, I'll point you to the best resources I've found so you can pursue the topic on your own:

• David J. Anderson & Associates: David Anderson is the leader of the Kanban movement in software development, at least in the United States. He applied Kanban techniques at Microsoft and later at Corbis, and now makes his living as a consultant in Agile development techniques.

• Limited WIP Society: This online community calls itself “the home of Kanban systems for software engineering.”

• How an Automotive Secret Can Make for Better Software: An informative interview with David Anderson.

• Kanban Development Oversimplified: This article is a couple years old and the introduction goes on forever. But once you get to the heart of it, there's a lot of good tangible information on how and why to apply Kanban to your development process.

• The Real Differences Between Kanban and Scrum: These two lightweight development techniques are inevitably compared. This comparison isn't the most balanced I read – the author doesn't mask his enthusiasm for Kanban – but it is the most informative.

• Trichord: Where there are development methods there are, inevitably, tools. Change Vision Inc. is the publisher of Trichord, a simple tool for supporting Kanban development. I haven't used the tool but I like the price: It's free. So why not download it and take a look?

• From Scrum to Kanban: Here are reflections from a development manager who added Kanban to his team's Scrum toolkit. Good insights.

Okay. That's enough to get you started. Take a look at the sites, follow the links to others, and make up your own mind.

Web recommendation: I love this article: At Least Three Good Reasons for Testers to Learn to Program. Yes, this is the latest in a disturbing series of dreadfully ugly Web sites created by people whose insights into software development would lead you to expect better. Try to look past the atrocious design and appreciate the clarity of the argument. I wouldn't blame you if you followed up by reading other blog posts at the same site (I Reject His Argument is a delight). J.D. says check it out.

J.D. Hildebrand has written hundreds of articles for dozens of publications and online communities dedicated to software development. He recently relocated to a small town outside Belgrade – stop by if your travels take you through Serbia.

What does the future of software development look like? For the first time in decades, it appears that no one knows.

It used to be fairly easy to peek a few years into programming's future. Languages evolved according to a predictable path from lower to higher levels of abstraction. We incorporated objects, then visual development environments, then Web architectures, then managed-code platforms. Development methodologies and project-management philosophies approached with plenty of warning – it took no special insight to see them coming.

My subjective feeling – backed up by a few hours of earnest Googling – is that all of that has changed.

The future? Well, let's see. We have some broad agreement that development methods will become more agile, though we are not entirely sure what agility means. It seems clear that the future will be cloud-oriented, though every definition of “cloud” is different. Our code will need to adapt to the availability of parallel architectures, though we can't say whether the parallelism should or will reside primarily in the code we write, the libraries we incorporate, the tools we use, or the architectures we employ. Security, mobile platforms, portability, interoperability, declarative programming, functional programming...all are likely to be important. One way or another.

As for languages – oh my! At the moment it appears that every nontrivial app will incorporate modules, libraries, frameworks, and custom code written in multiple programming languages. Or maybe we'll resolve that complexity by adopting a new language with the flexibility to address all the challenges we face.

For once, the pundits are quiet. Search the net for predictions about the future of software development and you'll retrieve a list of Web pages that are years out of date and devoted to particular narrow problem or language domains.

We are in need of the same sort of paradigm-buster that object-oriented programming and visual development environments were, back in the Windows era.

Search long enough through all the partisan arguments and language-specific rants, and one name keeps coming up: Anders Hejlsberg.

Hejlsberg has been around the programming world since before the IBM PC. He is the original author of Borland's Turbo Pascal and Delphi, and since he joined Microsoft he has created C# and become director of Microsoft's programming-language strategy.

You can learn more about Hejlsberg and his views in these videos:

• Where are programming languages going?

• Trends and future directions in programming languages

• Tour through computing industry history at the Microsoft Museum

(Disclaimer: Hejlsberg's views are pretty much guaranteed to be the official views of Microsoft. I'm the last person to sign up mindlessly to Microsoft's view of the world. While I don't see the company as a customer-exploiting evil empire, neither do I think it has always acted in the development community's best interests. Although I owned and edited Windows Tech Journal, my relationship with Microsoft was always an arm's-length one – much, as it turns out, to my personal cost. But that's a long story for another day. What I'm trying to say is that you have a responsibility to take Hejlsberg's point of view with a grain of salt.)

I think the Hejlsberg videos have great value. They identify both the challenges facing our community and some of the technologies and approaches that will help us address them. Hejlsberg has proved himself to be a visionary throughout his career, and he is uniquely positioned to see the problems and possible solutions that we will encounter in the next few years.

What's your view of the future? Drop a keyword or two into the comment section below and I'll use your feedback to shape a future post. Because ultimately, the future isn't something that just happens. It's something we create. Together.

Web recommendation: Research for this post brought me for the first time to Microsoft's MSDN Channel 9. This Web site contains hundreds of videos about (Microsoft) technology and how to get the most out of it. There's a predictable amount of corporate flag-waving, of course. But there's also tons of useful content. I have some reservations about video as the medium for dispersing such information – text is more readily searched and recalled, in my view. But there's no denying that there's real value here, for free. And the site has a mission statement you can dance to. J.D. says check it out.

J.D. Hildebrand has written hundreds of articles for dozens of publications and online communities dedicated to software development. He recently relocated to a small town outside Belgrade – stop by if your travels take you through Serbia.

Hear the stomping feet? The 3 a.m. break-outs? if you're a software development office, you may want to trim the trees outside your windows – software development, as an industry, is a rowdy teenager, begging to get out. 

Okay so perhaps your software code isn't jumping out the windows after curfew, but the industry is a just a teenager, especially when you compare it to it's counterparts of manufacturing, creative design and architectural processes. 

This idea resonated with me (as I have a teenager brother) and I wanted to present it to you. 

I'm still out here in Salt Lake City (which is so unbelievably gorgeous; it's good to get out of smoggy NYC once in a while), and I spent the morning meeting with vendors and analysts about the Agile movement and the state of the software industry. 

Vishy Nagaraj, VP of market development at Thoughtworks Studios, said "software is growing up," and explained that as the industry grows, it is looking for parallels in other areas of manufacturing. 

Manufacturing, agricultural planning, architectural building and creative design have been around since the dawn of time, and now software is trying to find it's place, so logically developers look for industries with titles similar to their own. 

"What other industry has architect as a title?," Nagaraj said, citing architectural design as that industry, but then noting that cement isn't malleable, while software is. 

"Lean talks about building quality into manufacturing, and now software – in the Agile methodology – does too," he said. 

Think back to your first software project -- would you say it's a combination of creativity and manufacturing? Do you feel that this relatively young movement has lots to learn? 

Share your ideas with me, and be sure to check back for more views from Agile2011 in Utah. 

Hosting over 1,600 people this year, the Agile 2011 conference shows that not only is the agile development movement alive and well, it's growing. 

Todd Little, conference chair for Agile 2011, and Phil Brock, managing director of the Agile Alliance, said that this is one of the largest conferences to date. 

Little said that in 2004, the conference hosted about 200 people, with the same interactive sessions the conference will be hosting this week. 

As the movement has grown, so has interest among the business side, which Little and Brock attribute to the growth of management and corporate teams attending this year. Little said that some corporate teams – ranging from 30-50 members or more - have attended for the past several years. 

Lean, as many of my articles have said on SDTimes, is also picking up within the community. "The Agile Alliance is not closed; we're open to any new ideas about advancing the state of software development," Little said. 

The first conference in 2003, two years after the signing of the Agile Manifesto, was held here in Salt Lake City and Little said as part of the celebration it's being held here again. Fifteen of the 17 signatories are attending the conference, with a special Park Bench Open Jam session, open the entire week. 

If you didn't get a chance to attend, Little and Brock said you will be able to re-live the events through the 75 hours of video being shot at the sessions. Brock said some videos will be available for free while others will be available to conference members and still others will be available for a fee. These videos, and the active Twitter feed (@Agile2011 and #Agile2011) are meant to serve as a way to continue community interaction during – and beyond – the conference. 

Another movement in the agile community is the interest among project managers and the business side, something Little said is part of the diversity among companies. 

Most companies live in a distributed world, Little said, and the geographical distribution is evident in the types of sessions being held here this week. 

Salt Lake City, Utah – where it all began. 

The Agile Alliance is hosting Agile 2011, from Sunday to Friday of next week and SD Times will be bringing it to you here, live and in color. 

I will be heading out and Tweeting from my Twitter, @giornalista515, throughout the conference. I'll also be live blogging and would love to talk to anyone attending the conference – send me a tweet or an email and perhaps we can meet up at the conference. If you have something to say about the conference tweet @SDTimes or at me with the hashtag #SDAgile2011. The official Agile Alliance Twitter handle is @Agile2011 and the hashtag is #Agile2011, which I'll be including on some of my Tweets as well. 

What are you most interested in learning about? I'm quite excited to see how Lean will be explained at the conference as that seems to be a growing movement within the community. 

I'll be at Agile 2011 from Sunday to Tuesday, and plan to attend the Big Park Bench Reunion, among other things. Here's a list of the sessions and all the other information you need should you be traveling to Agile 2011.