Agile Development and Scrum

The Agile family of development methodologies was born out of a belief that an approach more grounded in human reality would yield better results. Agile emphasizes building working software that people can get hands on with quickly, versus spending a lot of time writing specifications up front. Agile focuses on small, cross-functional teams empowered to make decisions, versus big hierarchies and compartmentalization by function, and Agile focuses on rapid iteration, with as much customer input along the way as possible. Often when folks learn about Agile, there’s a glimmer of recognition – it sounds a lot like back in the start-up days, when we “just did it”.

One of the fastest-growing Agile methods is Scrum. It was formalized over a decade ago by Ken Schwaber and Dr. Jeff Sutherland, and it’s now being used by companies large and small, including Yahoo!, Microsoft, Google, Lockheed Martin, Motorola, SAP, Cisco, GE, CapitalOne and the US Federal Reserve. Many teams using Scrum report significant improvements, and in some cases complete transformations, in both productivity and morale.

For product developers – many of whom have been burned by the “management fad of the month club” – this is significant. Scrum is simple, powerful, and rooted in common sense.

Excel 2007 Developer Reference

This reference contains conceptual overviews, programming tasks, samples, and reference documentation for developing solutions that are based on Microsoft Office Excel 2007.

Publish date of this reference: April 2009 (version 2007)

This documentation can be accessed from the following locations:

• From the product (most recent version):  If you are connected to the Internet, you can view the most recent version of this reference in Excel. Click Help, and in the Search box, under Content from Office Online, click Developer Reference.
• From the product (installed version):   If you are not connected to the Internet, you can still view the version of this reference that was included with your product. Click Help, and in the Search box, under Content from this computer, click Developer Reference. October 2006 (version 2007) is included with the product.
• From the MSDN Library.  To view the April 2009 version of this reference in the MSDN Library, click the items in the MSDN table of contents that is displayed in the navigation pane of your browser.