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InfoQ Homepage Introducing Agile Content on InfoQ

  • Selling Your Good Ideas

    In this month's edition of StickyMinds, communications consultant Naomi Karten has written a short article "Developing Sales Savvy" which may help your new ideas reach the ear of a resistant colleague. She notes that, while sometimes you just get lucky, there are other times when *how* you sell can be as critical to your success as what you sell.

  • Agile Coach = Agile Secret Police?

    Software engineer Paul Tyma, in a recent blog entry, tells us "I don't get this new craze of a job called 'Agile Coach'. I mean, everything I've read about Agile and XP seems dead simple." Though not a proponent of Agile, Tyma has done XP, so perhaps there's a basis for his view that an Agile Coach is not so much a 'coach' as "a hall monitor or a secret police officer."

  • Opinion: Inability to Adopt Agile May Signal Bigger Problems

    Peter Coffee, IT industry veteran, blogged on the recent Digital Focus survey of the state of Agile practice, noting that obstacles to Agile adoption are also general danger signs of development dysfunction.

  • Interview: Real-World Agile for .NET Developers

    Kathleen Richards interviews Robert C. Martin about his new book, co-authored with his son Micah: "Agile Principles, Patterns and Practices in C#," which puts Agile practices to work in a .NET environment,

  • Survey: The State of Agile in Practice

    In March Scott Ambler surveyed over 4,200 people to discover the actual rate of Agile process adoption and effectiveness. His conclusion: Agile is not only growing in popularity, it's working so well that adopting an Agile approach appears to be an incredibly low-risk choice. Ambler recently published not only his conclusions but also the raw data he collected.

  • Does Agile Dispense with Project Managers?

    Agile does away with many of the tasks by which Project Managers formerly measured their own performance. The Product Owner and Dev Team take on these activities, leaving PMs confused and wondering: "Am I redundant?" Agile coach Michele Sliger offers some reassurance, mapping PMI PMBOK practice areas to new Agile practices in her whitepaper "A Project Manager's Survival Guide to Going Agile".

  • Mary and Tom Poppendieck Discuss Their Next Book

    Bob Payne interviewed Mary and Tom Poppendieck at Agile2006 about their next Lean book, which focuses even more on software than the last. Mary summarizes it as "So you think Agile is a good idea: now what?" saying it will help people get started with Lean, going beyond the recipes of the first book to provide practical information and case studies to help teams do their own process experiments.

  • InfoQ Article: Agile - The SOA Hangover Cure

    Carl Ververs, an expert on SOA Integration writes about the application of "Agile" development philosophies and methodologies in order to build a sustainable and valuable SOA system.

  • Agile Delivery at British Telecom

    Methods and Tools has a 3-part article by Ian Evans of British Telecom outlining the challenges of software development at BT and the approach they took to switch to an Agile approach. Going from a well-established waterfall-based delivery approach to Agile takes patience and time, as well as a lot of commitment. But despite the challenges, few at BT would go back to their old ways.

  • Increase Your Personal Resilience to Change

    "Highly resilient people are best suited for a world of constant change. They don't fight against disruptive change... they adjust to new situations quickly." Sounds useful for members of Agile teams which want to "embrace change", even more so for those experiencing the drastic change from traditional to Agile methods. Bob Weinstein's article lists some ways to increase your own resiliency.

  • Outsourcing Gone Bad - Another Reason to Consider Agile

    Proponents of Agile methods suggest they can spare organizations some outsourcing nightmares, by helping in-house teams produce ROI comparable to outsourced solutions. Stories from Sprint and Sears provide incentive to at least give them a hearing.

  • AOP Used to Isolate Change on Large-scale Financial System

    A large-scale J2EE-conversion project of 50+ developers at a financial services company recently had a chance to use aspect oriented programming (AOP) as a mechanism to isolate change. Vincent Frisina, revealed some of the consequences as well as some lessons learned about Agile development.

  • Where Did All the Positions Go?

    How can existing, experienced IT professionals fit into an Agile project? By being flexible, open minded, and willing to change.

  • Agile Well Represented at Better Software Conference 2006

    Intrigued by all this Agile talk? Do you have a colleague you'd like to introduce to Agile concepts? While not explicitly an Agile event, almost one third of sessions at this conference represent Agile topics, and the roster of Agile speakers is impressive. It takes place this year in Las Vegas, June 26-29. TestDriven.com has compiled a list of the conference's 13 Agile sessions.

  • Article: What is Agility, and Why Should You Care?

    Business is moving faster than ever, there's no time for fads. But Agile has been around for decades, enabling businesses to be ever more responsive in these times of rapid change. This short article tells how it has helped two teams excel.

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