The Agile Manifesto (http://agilemanifesto.org) is important, including the second principles page, which people hardly ever read.
Here are some things of mine they could look at. I’d be happy to receive email that might help a pair of us decide on better questions.
For those inclined to look at videos, they could randomly pick one of these:
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A lightning talk on the importance of being naive: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iRoH_zKu5mQ Short!
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The above was somewhat extracted from “The Agile Manifesto, Seven Years Later”, which is about values missing from the Manifesto. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0U0cfejYMOI
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“Artisanal Retro-Futurism Crossed with Team-Scale Anarcho-Syndicalism” https://youtu.be/T5yv-WcQ4wY Agile was already faltering, nine years later.
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“Rage Against the Power Law”, 2011, https://vimeo.com/45547185 - 'Agile projects as gift economies. "Business value" as a boundary object that symbolizes relationships between people.’, and various other topics. The end of the video is missing.
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"Cheating Decline / Five Principles for Thinking Less (Expensively) and Accomplishing More”, https://www.infoq.com/presentations/programming-for-life/, a keynote that got reactions ranging from “drivel” to “refreshing, honest, and interesting”.
As far as writings go, the most influential was probably “Agile Testing Directions”, http://exampler.com/old-blog/2004/05/26.1.html#directions-toc I’m not very involved in agile testing any more, though.
A short bit is “Process and Personality”, which gets at something that’s almost universally ignored. http://exampler.com/testing-com/writings/process-and-personality.html
A longer bit is “How to be a Product Director” http://www.exampler.com/writing/product-director.pdf Even the most isolated programmers need to understand their interface to the outside world.
I’m fond of “When Should a Test Be Automated?” It’s 20 years old (!) but I still like the emphasis on economic tradeoffs, something that’s a lot more understood these days. http://www.exampler.com/testing-com/writings/automate.pdf
It’s hard to remember which blog posts were influential. Here are two I remember:
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“Recover Forward” (how the agile style is not to revert) http://www.exampler.com/old-blog/2007/02/18/index.html#recover-forward
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“Going Slow” (you need to go slow to get fast) http://www.exampler.com/blog/2007/04/28/going-slow/trackback/index.html
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I’m very fond of reading outside of software and asking “If were true, what would it mean for software?” I especially do that with “science studies”. I gave a talk at OOPSLA (not recorded) about Bruno Latour’s “Actor-Network Theory”. Here’s a writeup: http://www.exampler.com/blog/2007/11/06/latour-table-of-contents/trackback/index.html
A writeup
For a change of pace into the more “technical” part of the socio-technical, I’m a big fan of mocking, especially for functional languages. https://github.com/marick/Midje/wiki/The-idea-behind-top-down-development is an explanation of top-down development using mocking, using my Clojure tool.