Here are links to the best of the blogs for the week of Dec 18th 2009.

1. A ScrumMaster’s Checklist – a comprehensive checklist from Michael James offering four areas a ScrumMaster should pay attention when coaching: the Team, the Product Owner, the organization and the technical practices.
2. Agile Leadership: Methodology Ain’t Enough – the Hacker Chick brings us a blog article about the management beliefs and behaviors which support the growth of Agile teams.
3. When Should QA be Engaged in an Iteration? – Hiren Doshi PMP discusses the role of QA on a Scrum team and tackles the myth that QA folks “have nothing to do until the end of a Sprint”.
4. Five Reasons to Hire a Coach for Agile Teams – Ester Derby talks about five pitfalls of DIY (Do-It-Yourself) Agile coaching.
5. Scrum Doesn’t Do Anything – explanation of how Scrum only comes to life when people are added to the framework and the importance of the following the rules by Tobias Mayer.
6. Practical Agility: On Estimation – Dave Rooney describes the Agile estimation lessons he learned while undergoing a recent move.
7. Overcoming Technical Challenges for Adopting Agile Methods in the Enterprise – Vijay Narayanan over at InfoQ discusses the importance of having an development environment which supports your Agile process.
8. Flipping Out – short description of how Flickr uses Continuous Integration and a Single Code Base to add features to their application without branching.

There was a lot of great stuff to read this week, unfortunately I can only go with eight or so entries.  Cya next week!!