InfoQ Homepage Pair Programming Content on InfoQ
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How to Evaluate a Good Fit for XP?
XP might not be for everyone. An interesting discussion on the Extreme Programming group, tries to find the factors, on which, an individual should be evaluated, to determine, whether he is fit to be on an XP team.
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TDD Opinion: Quality Is a Function of Thought and Reflection, Not Bug Prevention
In a recent post, Michael Feathers argues against the widely held idea that unit testing, by itself, improves code quality. Michael talks about unit testing, integration tests, TDD and Clean Room Software Development, concluding that code quality is a function of thought and reflection, not bug prevention.
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Interview: Rachel Davies on Generic Agile
In this interview taken during Agile 2007, Rachel Davies, director of Agile Alliance, talks about Generic Agile, about the necessity to understand what is the essence of a development process.
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Integrating Testers on to the Agile Team
What is the role of testers on an Agile team? What is their day to day experience like? What lessons have they learned
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Stories of Scrum Adoption in China
This recent inquiry, by InfoQ China editor Jacky Li, looked at five very different cases of Scrum adoption in China, which got different results. He asked: Why did you use Scrum? How did you adopt it? What problems did you encounter, and why did it succeed or fail? Despite the small sample size, it's an interesting comparison, pointing out that improvement doesn't ensure success.
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Interview with Joseph Pelrine: Agile Works. But HOW?
Joseph Pelrine has come full circle: from university studies in Psychology, journeying through SmallTalk, XP and Scrum, and now back to broader questions: Why and how does Agile work? In this interview, Joseph talked about Complexity Science, and how story-telling, "sense-making," network analysis and speed-dating's gut-feel approach may prove more useful than our old toolkits for managing teams.
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Bedtime User Stories: Cowboys and Fairytales
In which David Longstreet claims Agile Software Development is a Fairy Tale that just tries to legitimise Cowboy development, and Geoff Slinker invites him to write a Serious Article based on Logical Arguments and Citing Sources.
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TDD: Essential Skill or Architectural Landmine?
At JAOO '07 Bob Martin asserted: "it is irresponsible for a developer to ship a line of code he has not executed in a unit test." In this InfoQ video, Martin debated with another well respected software thought leader, Jim Coplien, on this and other topics, including Design by Contract vs. TDD and how much up-front architecture is needed to keep a system consistent with the business domain model.
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Continuous Integration And Version Control for Databases
After asserting that one must, as a rule, always version their database work, Scott Allen detailed an approach to making the best of versioning databases. Allen presented a comprehensive, practical approach to creating a baseline, using change scripts to manage schematic revisions, controlling programmatic database objects, and handling branching and merging.
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TDD/BDD Leading To Incomplete Unit Tests?
Peter Ritchie raised concern about TDD and BDD keeping practitioners from writing good unit tests. He cites an over-reliance on “interaction testing", a core mantra and essence of TDD and BDD, as a driver with tendency to result in incomplete unit testing.
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Kent Beck on Implementation Patterns
What does good code look like? In this interview, Kent Beck talks about his new book, Implementation Patterns, that deals with this question. Kent explains why Compose Method is so important, but also talks about the relationship between implementation patterns and XP, the history of software patterns and why he believes that Cockburn's Shu-Ha-Ri description of learning is naïve and simplistic.
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Is Velocity Really the Golden Measurement?
What value do teams get from measuring velocity, beyond the ability to reasonably estimate commitments for the short-term future? J.B. Rainsberger proposes that teams spend less energy scrutinizing velocity and more energy thoughtfully identifying and eliminating areas of waste in their projects.
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Religion driven industry? Buzzwords and checklists vs. thinking and inspection
James O. Coplien has recently argued that today’s industry is based on buzzwords and checklists. The use of some techniques and methodologies, TDD for instance, has become “a religious issue”. This prevents from inspecting possible tradeoffs and focusing on finding solutions that would be the most appropriate and the most cost-effective for a given project.
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Analyzing Experimental Data Concerning Agile Practices
Agile literature is sprinkled with experiments on the effectiveness of one or more practices. Not all experiments come to the same conclusion. Some experiments come to conclusions that may not coincide with your team’s experience. To understand experimental results, and the level of confidence that you should have in their outcomes, an understanding of a few simple evaluation criteria is helpful.
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InfoQ Interview: Experiences with Planning Poker
In this fourteen-minute interview, Nils Haugen described "Planning Poker," a simple mechanism for arriving at estimates collaboratively, which has additional team building benefits and improves team estimates over time. Haugen shared his views on why this technique is an important tool for Agile teams in this InfoQ interview.