Collaboration: At the Extremities of Extreme
Jason Ayers share the observations he made watching a team of developers collaborating in real time on the same code base, pushing XP, pair programming and continuous integration to their extremes.
Jason Ayers share the observations he made watching a team of developers collaborating in real time on the same code base, pushing XP, pair programming and continuous integration to their extremes.
In December the GEOCens (Geospatial Cyberinfrastructure for Environmental Sensing) is finishing its pilot phase, as the not-for-profit organization Cybera has recently published at GISUser.com. The software architecture is supposed to improve researcher access to international environmental data drawn from more than 60,000 sensors and 2,800 web map servers.
Tom Arbogast, Bas Vodde and Craig Larman have released a sample chapter from their upcoming book on scaling Lean and Agile. The chapter deals with the difficult topic of writing contracts for agile development.

In the last couple of years terms like Specification by Example, Executable Specifications and Feature Injection have showed up quite frequently in the community, often in relation to Behaviour Driven Development (BDD) or tools like Cucumber or SpecFlow. InfoQ have talked to some of the leading experts in this domain about what these practices are and how they relate to BDD.

Ken Howard and Barry Rogers have written a book that focuses on the first value from the Agile Manifesto. They provide advice, tools and techniques to help teams and individuals improve their communications and interpersonal interactions. The book presents a set of tools that work together more effectively. They provide guidelines for a workshop to put the techniques into practice.
Jez Humble presents remediation patterns based on prevention, low risk release through automate provisioning and deployment plus dev/test/ops collaboration, and incremental delivery.
John Allspaw presents technical, cultural, and process related lessons learned at Flickr and Etsy.com from the collaboration between the operations and development teams.

In this interview, Jeff Patton discusses the Product Owner role and points out that Agile has never been very focused on the customer. While Agile development excels at “delivery”, it struggles to support “discovery” (i.e. defining what the customer really needs). Also discussed are techniques such as Lean Startup and story maps and the importance of defining business value in an Agile context.

Linda Cook, a well-known agilist, and board member of both the Agile Alliance and the Agile Leadership Network, discusses the agile coaching profession. Among other things, she covers servant leadership, being as a role model, types of individuals appropriate for the profession, and the differences between being an external coach versus being an internal employee in the coach role.