Jay Flowers finds ways to promote the growth of unit tests in Playing for Real, More Than a Scoreboard.

While Apache has just released version 1.7 of Ant, JRake is starting to earn attention: "JRake is the latest entry in build tools for Java that is based on a scripting language. JRake leverages JRuby and the Rake build tool for Ruby to make building, running tests, and deploying web applications quick and easy." (JRake: Build, Test, and Deploy Java applications without XML, InfoQ)

Rick Hightower writes the steps to setting up TestNG, JMock and Spring integration tests.

Jee Wartac has also been blogging about Shale Mock Objects.

"I believe that the agile community is at a crossroads: It has reached the chasm point in Geoffry Moore's technology adoption curve and is looking over the precipice. Although some techniques, such as test-first design, refactoring, and daily stand-up meetings seem to have crossed the chasm it is not clear yet whether agile methodologies -- or even the concept of agile software development in general -- is going to succeed in the long term. Clearly a critical success factor will be our ability to attract traditionalists to our way of thinking. From what I've seen over the past few months, I believe that we are struggling if not out-right failing to do so. One of our problems is that traditionalists see that many self-declared agilists only seem to talk about being agile but they don't actually live up to their lofty ideals." (Dr. Dobb's, An Agile New Year's Resolution for All of Us)

"Previous criticisms of Agile by Steve Yegge and Joel Spolsky have been discussed previously on InfoQ, and such criticisms aren't new. What is new is the extent to which the agile community itself is questioning the current direction of Agile." (Reflections on the Growth of Agile, InfoQ)

Trail Ridge Consulting conducted an independent global survey of the agile software development community to determine the project management tooling that companies are using to support their agile processes. The report is here.

Gary Pollice wrote a review of Organizational Patterns of Agile Software Development.