These three have set in the left-hand-side of my Firefox tabs list for most of the year. I've come back to them again and again and will continue to do so :)

• Jeff Patton on Twelve emerging best practices for adding UX work to Agile development: "Let's recap. Two secrets to success in software development are: 1. Start sooner2. Build less software".
• Alan Cooper on Bringing sanity to swat-team design projects: "With increasing demand for design “"swat teams" to rescue fully developed but flawed software that is scheduled to ship within months or even weeks, the critical question becomes: how can you avoid getting caught up in the chaos that frequently permeates "crisis-mode" engagements?"
• A Scrum-Masters Checklist. Q1 of this year I need to print this out and track myself against it.

And last but not least, a few bits and pieces that don't fit into any box, but are lovely nonetheless:

• Afrika, a PS3 wildlife game where you photograph animals. Ahem, "first-person shooter".
• Story arcs and The Wire. The Wire followed BSG as the second ever TV series I've bought the DVDs of and plodded through - and has delivered way more enjoyment than the slightly beautifully-started yet damp-squibbish Galactica has so far managed.
• Everything you know about ARGs is wrong, from Dan Hon. Dan channels Charlie Brooker and burns his boat. Mobile-obsessed myself, I'm wondering when it'll be safe to drop gratuitous multi-platformness that seems to infect the genre in favour of a game that you just play all the time with your phone.
• Iain Tate of Poke on high scores

Another pile of interesting mobile-related stuff from the last month or two:

• Helen rightly rags on the complexity of mobile tariffs, though I have to wonder if operators actually benefit from their being difficult to equate to one another.
• Typical iPhone application budget referred to as being $30,000
• Interesting stats on iPhone leading the way with application installations
• You can now give out promo versions of your iPhone apps
• Truphone launched VOIP for the iPod Touch. In a nice, ahem, touch, this subtly and neatly fragments the iPhone platform a little (though at what is presumably a commercial level - i.e. an arrangement with Apple - rather than at a technical level)...
• ... and it looks like it helps to either be Apple, or one of its Friends With Privileges, if you're building cute iPhone apps (though it's by no means essential). Interesting to see how this ecosystem vs mothership plays out over time (and there might some interesting economic effects) but still, 300m downloads since July or 100m in 45 days is pretty good going, even if the top positions do disproportionately well (as you might expect)
• Nice call from Mr Greenfield: all public objects should have APIs, as a matter of policy.
• More patents from Apple around touch sensors: "desirable because it can enable the computing system to perform certain functions without necessitating actual contact with the touch panel, such as turning the entire touch panel or portions of the touch panel on or off"
• SMS is a bigger earner than box office receipts plus music revenues plus video-game revenues. Jeepers.
• I can't help but feel a little cheer rumble inside me as I read of Palm having another shot at relevance :)
• iPhone is growing fastest amongst lower income demographics - very interesting;
• David Wood has a nice writeup of a Google Mobile presentation, including their philosophy for mobile success;
• He also has a nice response to the John Strand article I posted: "The mobile industry is in a time of very considerable flux. The iPhone has played an important role of opening people's eyes to the possibilities of smarter mobile devices, but that doesn't mean that operators will continue to be keen to actively support the iPhone. Instead, what I hear is that they're looking for phone platforms that are both complete and highly customisable."
• Strange widget stuff going on at Orange: "another Java-based widget platform is about as useful as a hole in the head. Still, perhaps a good trepanning is just what Orange needs."

Brought to you by the combined power of phlegm and NetNewsWire, a pile of links relating to software development:

• Clarifying the purpose of iteration planning. I'm booked onto the Mike Cohn course in London in a few weeks time. I'm so excited. And I just can't hide it.
• The perception of agile seems to be on a knife-edge between recession-busting common sense and meaningless management drivel right now.
• Joel Spolsky on servant leadership: "I'd love to imagine that I'm the most valuable person in the company, that my time is so precious that I have to optimize every minute. But it's not true. At this point, I'm probably the worst developer in the office."
• Logging styles: "Resist the tendency to log everything"
• Nice piece on growing an agile organisation: "These ideas are easier to give lip service to than to actually implement. So if it doesn't work right away, don't give up."
• David Wood ventures down a similar path: "Being big can have its advantages as well as its disadvantages, so long as individual parts of the company have sufficient autonomy"
• What have you tried? "The problem is that this person’s problem-solving technique is to ask for the solution... but to just ask for the code, fully formed and ready to go. This is not problem solving, and software engineering is entirely about problem solving."
• Static methods: the death of testability
• Lean and Kanban for game developers;
• Why pairing sucks in '08, a nice writeup of a session at XP Day exploring why developers choose not to pair.
• Writing testable code: "To keep our code at Google in the best possible shape we provided our software engineers with these constant reminders. Now, we are happy to share them with the world."
• Can't work out whether I like this article, since it seems to simultaneously promote every point of view: "don't optimise, hardware is cheaper than people", "fast hardware won't save you from bad code", "you can always improve performance", "optimising is hard", etc etc. Hardware-is-cheaper-than-people is often a lazy way of justifying crap IMHO, and ignores some of the complexities of scaling up beyond a single node.

... and some nifty bits I've pulled out of the box marked "design":

• Design on time: "Larry Cheng created a ‘free time’ dispenser that hands out free time in ten minute increments in the form of printed tickets. What you do with that time is entirely up to you. Nice idea, but Ted Howes and Adam Vollmer decided to try it out in the real world and took the dispenser on their Caltrain ride back to San Francisco the other day"
• Lovely piece on the design of the Classics book reader for iPhone: "Real-life testing was an important part of the application; users could be lying in the park grass reading a book on their iPhone in the bright afternoon sun, and if they are, they should be able to still read pleasantly without having to squint an eye or going indoor and looking at an interface that’s completely black on white" (oh, and isn't the mobile books space busy right now?)
• Cultural probes: "Users are met in their environment and given a ‘black box’ or a mock-up of a device. They are then told what functionality the device has and are asked to go about their life as they normally would…They are given a digital camera for a week and asked to take pictures of the situations where they would use the 'magic thing'."
• The N79 launched: "Simply, in the case of the N79 comes with a handful of interchangeable Xpress-on covers that feature an embedded chip to enable the replacement of a cover to automatically trigger the on-screen theme to morph accordingly"