Agile Product Development – If you're not Agile, you must start

Agile product development has become second nature to us at OpenView… All of our portfolio companies adopts the Scrum approach to Agile Development. Most of them started after we hosted a forum on agile development methods back in 2007. We then asked Jeff Sutherland, one of the authors of the Agile Manifesto, to become a senior advisor to the Labs team… and he conducted a two day scrum master certification session for us and our companies.

Most of the companies we invested in since then, and most of the prospect companies we talk to these days, have adopted some level of agile development methods. It seems that Agile has really become a standard for early and expansion stage software companies.

I dusted off some of the resources that I point CEOs to when looking to learn about adopting agile:

First must reading is the Manifesto for Agile Software Development

VersionOne has an outstanding set of resources here and in their blog

One of our portfolio companies pointed to this book as being an extremely practical real world set of approaches to get going with Agile and Scrum. You can register for free and download the book for free http://www.infoq.com/minibooks/scrum-xp-from-the-trenches

Speaking of free books, and worth a read- http://codereviewbook.com

Also Lean for Software Development, Poppendieck seems to have gone a long way with some of the key developers