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At QconLondon 2007 Jim Coplien spoke with "Pragmatic" Dave Thomas for InfoQ. This energetic 30-minute interview runs the gamut of Dave's wide-ranging interests: 'agile' publishing; how to turn what you love doing into a book; programming (and methodology) monocultures; staying limber with code "katas"; and advice for academics: help your students live with the passion of a 5-year old!
Microsoft has recently made available the .NET Framework 3.5 Enhancements Training Kit.
In September InfoQ inaugurated the AgileEvents calendar so the community could share information about events for Agile professionals, free of charge. Over a hundred events have been posted on the calendar, and now that it's taken off it's not really news any more, so check in here to see how to get regular notifications of new events via Upcoming.org, now that InfoQ won't be covering it as news.
The call has gone out to anyone interested in presenting at the Agile2008 conference in Toronto. Grigori Melnik of the Agile Alliance explained in a video the new collaborative submission process, which rewards early birds with feedback and a chance to improve their submissions right up to the deadline.
The AgileEvents calendar is a place for non-profit or commercial groups to announce their events for the Agile community, free of charge. Here's what's coming up as of December 1st, including user groups, Extreme Tuesday club (XTC), training, and "Naked Agilists" (which, fortunately, meet on skype). AgileEvents can easily be added to your own website, ical or gcal calendar to keep you up to date.
How long does it take a newcomer to become an effective member of your team? Learning integral to agile methodologies, but the learning needs of the newcomer are different from established team members: in a standup meeting, "I did (unintelligible) yesterday" offers them more questions than answers. Pat Kua suggests some practices that specifically reduce the "setup time" for new team members.
Agile conferences are receiving an influx of novice teams and managers, and some suggest that new conferences should be organized for these beginners. To the contrary, this report from XPday Montreal suggests that mixing up expertise levels creates a valuable experience for all.
"Ruby is risky" is a common perception. As Ruby on Rails moves closer to the mainstream, that risk will decrease. In this article, Bruce Tate examines the changing risk profiles for Java and Ruby from a managers perspective, examining Java's initial adoption and also common risk myths about Rails.
Venkat Subramaniam, international trainer and co-author with Dave Thomas of "Practices of an Agile Developer", talks about his passion for improving project success by incrementally implementing an Agile approach, specifically addressing large projects and projects in trouble.
Scrum, arguably the fastest-growing Agile methodology, is well described in the original Scrum books, which tend to be read once and put aside. The SPRiNT-iT coaches have abstracted the basics to produce a compact reference to help teams facilitate all Scrum meetings and create the Scrum artifacts. The book doesn't teach Scrum, but offers trained teams confidence to run their first successful Sprints - successes that will increase the acceptance of Scrum in their organization.
