What is a team effectively applying agile design practices supposed to look like? Formulating an answer requires addressing two common misconceptions about design: (1) it must always precede development; and (2) it is the work of one person. In this Executive Update, we will examine agile design as an ongoing activity carried out by teams, and this will give us valuable hints as to where to look to catch design happening "in the wild."

Making business decisions is never easy. It becomes progressively more complicated as those around us offer their "two cents' worth" about how we should act or what practices we should adopt. And the sheer number of those around us sometimes means that we receive input from a host of different parties, all with different perspectives. The challenge for organizations is to determine which approaches they should apply and which voices they should listen to in making the critical decisions about implementing and adapting project management practices within their organizations.

So are software development organizations losing valuable information through recklessness? A recent Cutter Consortium survey found that more than a quarter of surveyed software companies do not preserve historical project information. Of course, on the positive side, almost three-quarters do, but the percentage that do not is astounding when you consider that the effort to save this valuable information is so small.

Experience (and a quick Google search on "software implementation failures") tells us that implementing software packages can be just as treacherous, if not more so, than their custom software development brethren. So why not apply agile to mitigate the risks of these projects? In this webinar, Cutter Senior Consultant Sam Bayer answers these questions. He examines war stories of organizations and their attempts to purchase and implement COTS software and consolidates those lessons learned and synthesizes an overall agile approach to the selection and implementation of software packages.