On Nov 16 2011, 

Kim Werner, Agile Coach from ATSC and Liz Parnell, Solution Design
Manager from Blue Cross Blue Shield of North Carolina (BCBSNC), will give a webcast sharing their experiences regarding how BCBSNC adopted a few Agile techniques, with the help of some good coaching, and adopted some IBM Rational Jazz tools (Rational Team Concert and Rational Requirements Composer) to reduce time to market and lower
development costs. BCBCNC works in the highly-regulated healthcare industry, so faced a few interesting constraints when adopting agile.

During the second week of August the Agile 2011 conference was held in Salt Lake City (SLC).  As you likely know the Agile Manifesto was formulated 10 years ago in SLC so it was apropos to hold it there.  There was some excitement around the 10 year anniversary of the manifesto, with a panel session with the 17 authors of it.  Sadly there seemed to be little excitement around the efforts of the 10th anniversay agile workshop in February which proposed a potential path forward for the agile community.  I found the conference to be an evolutionary improvement over the conferences of the past few years, which is a very good thing because the focus since 2008 has moved beyond the "cool" new programming techniques to include the

I recently recorded an audio podcast about Collaborative Development and Operations (DevOps) and how it relates to Disciplined Agile Delivery (DAD).  The podcast is 17 minutes long and covers a range of topics including:

• What are the challenges typically
  faced by Disciplined Agile Development teams as they begin to transition their working solutions into production?
• How best could this gap between
  Development and Operations be closed so that they worked
  collaboratively rather than in silos?
• If