The Loosely Coupled podcast, hosted by PHP community members Jeff Carouth and Matt Frost, has posted their latest episode. In Episode #4: An Agile Rant they talk about agile development practices and compromises.

In this episode Matt and Jeff talk about their experiences with adopting Agile as individuals and as teams. The important take aways are to not be too loose nor too rigid with the practice; to accept change as it happens but to not force change too rapidly; to honor the purposes of the components of agile practices; and, above all, to find what works for your team specifically over what you read in a book.

Topics mentioned include the Agile Manifesto and the books "Agile Project Management and Extreme Programming Explained. You can listen to this latest episode either through the in-page player or by downloading the mp3 directly. If you like what you hear, consider subscribing to their feed and following them on Twitter.

PHPMaster.com has posted a bit less of a technical article than usual and shares some of the concepts behind scrum, the project management style that's currently quite popular with development groups.

In an earlier article I wrote, we took a general look at project management and discussed what some of its pitfalls are that should be avoided. As part of that, I mentioned that you should, as much as possible, be using an Agile methodology, particularly Scrum, to manage development. I’d like to follow that up with a look at Scrum and at how we can use it to tame our projects.

He talks about the typical "waterfall" technique of project development - requirements up front and cross your fingers for the rest. He compares this to the agile process and how scrum, in particular, helps keep things from falling apart. He then gets in to "how to scrum" by defining some of the key terms and talking about things like:

• Holding smaller meetings
• Limiting scope and time frame
• Looking for feedback
• Constant reworking remaining time

...all at the same time, multiple times during the life of the project. Agile focuses on quick changes and updates because the project is constantly getting feedback from those asking for the product, giving them (hopefully) exactly what they want.

The latest issue of Web & PHP Magazine has been released today - issue 11, "Climate Change". This new edition includes articles like:

• "PHP in the Cloud" By Frédéric Harper
• "Develop your Agile mindset" By Steffan Surdek
• "Database Indexing part 2" By Cory Isaacson
• "Presenting For Geeks eBook teaser" By Dirk Haun
• "Level Crossings and Traffic Jams" By Stefan Priebsch

As always, you can pick up this issue for free by either registering or logging into your account. You can also get the back issues from the site too for more great reading.

On the Ibuildings blog there's a new post that looks to answer the question "is PHP an agile programming language?"

In raising the question about whether a specific programming language is agile I want to avoid exploring what makes a language agile, or comparing PHP with other languages. The intention here is not to associate PHP to agile as a natural relationship, as much as to try and understand if we can find the ingredients in the PHP world, for creating an agile environment.

He (Marcello Duarte) first defines agile development practices for those not familiar and talks about the tools that PHP has to offer that fit in with that goal. He notes that PHP fits in well with the goals of agile development in being both light and powerful.

On the PHP::Impact blog, there's a new tutorial showing how to use the Phing build system to deploy your application.

A common way to automate development and deployment tasks is by writing shell scripts, however, Phing provides some advantages over shell scripts for task automation. [...] But, having a large collection of shell scripts can lead to a maintenance nightmare, reason why I decided to port some of them to PHP as Phing tasks. I chose Phing because it’s simple, powerful and very easy to extend.

He talks about DbDeployTask (an optional task for database revisions) and how to use the system for Agile development practices.

Stefan Koopmanschap has issued a Call to Action for all PHP developers out there in his latest blog entry in an effort to get things happening in the arean of Agile development in PHP.

My experiences so far as a PHP developer is that a lot of companies and (open source) projects do not work according to Agile methodologies, or often not really according to any methodology (a.k.a. Cowboy Coding). While there may be nothing wrong with that, I still want to try to push the Agile methodologies more into the realm of PHP.

He's even started up a website (no content yet, AgilePHP.eu) to help promote the effort. So now he's looking for some PHP developers that would like to help out with the project - to help promote agile development in PHP and give the community a solid resource and foundation (via the website and other forms of communication). If you're interested, check out the blog post for more or just email Stefan at stefan [at] agilephp [dot] eu

Stefan Koopmanschap has issued a Call to Action for all PHP developers out there in his latest blog entry in an effort to get things happening in the arean of Agile development in PHP.

My experiences so far as a PHP developer is that a lot of companies and (open source) projects do not work according to Agile methodologies, or often not really according to any methodology (a.k.a. Cowboy Coding). While there may be nothing wrong with that, I still want to try to push the Agile methodologies more into the realm of PHP.

He's even started up a website (no content yet, AgilePHP.eu) to help promote the effort. So now he's looking for some PHP developers that would like to help out with the project - to help promote agile development in PHP and give the community a solid resource and foundation (via the website and other forms of communication). If you're interested, check out the blog post for more or just email Stefan at stefan [at] agilephp [dot] eu

In an effort to improve the way that he's writing web applications, Felix Geisendörfer has looked around him and found some good tools to "help him on his way to agility" in his programming. In this new post, he recounts some of his findings so far.

So I've decided that, over the course of the next couple days (or weeks), I'll dedicate quite a bit of my time to explore ways to improve the way I write web applications. This includes getting into unit/integration testing, automating workflows, and also adopting better coding techniques.

He covers four software packages that he's found so far to help achieve this goal:

• Apache Ant
• SimpleTest for PHP
• Selenium Remote Control
• Selenium IDE

For each of the software in the list, he talks about what kinds of features they offer and how that relates back to his goal. There are also links to downloads and documentation for each of them for further reading.

In an effort to improve the way that he's writing web applications, Felix Geisendörfer has looked around him and found some good tools to "help him on his way to agility" in his programming. In this new post, he recounts some of his findings so far.

So I've decided that, over the course of the next couple days (or weeks), I'll dedicate quite a bit of my time to explore ways to improve the way I write web applications. This includes getting into unit/integration testing, automating workflows, and also adopting better coding techniques.

He covers four software packages that he's found so far to help achieve this goal:

• Apache Ant
• SimpleTest for PHP
• Selenium Remote Control
• Selenium IDE

For each of the software in the list, he talks about what kinds of features they offer and how that relates back to his goal. There are also links to downloads and documentation for each of them for further reading.