InfoQ Homepage Best Practices Content on InfoQ
-
Measuring Agile Performance with the Agile Triangle
Traditional software development teams were supposed to work within the confines of the software 'Iron triangle'. The three sides of the triangle are Scope, Schedule and Cost. Jim Highsmith suggested that the Iron triangle, imposes a lot of constraints on the flexibility of the Agile teams and suggested an alternate Agile Triangle.
-
Slow Down to Speed Up Profits
General understanding suggests that, if everyone on the team works at top capacity then the team would be most productive. Contrary to this, Steve Bockman discussed that this assumption might not always be true. In some cases, it may be necessary to slow down and work at less than top capacity in order to boost productivity.
-
Rescuing Your Ruby on Rails Projects
Ruby on Rails has been around for about 5 years and in those years developers have created a lot of applications. Many of those applications were created while learning Ruby and Ruby on Rails and may not have used the best practices but yet made it into production web sites. These web applications can be problematical but a new book focused on the solution is available.
-
Resource Management in Agile Projects
Agile projects are known to address the problems of rapid change. These may be changes in market forces, system requirements or implementation technology. One of the change, that does not gel well with Agile projects, is the frequent change of people working on the project. The idea is not to disturb the high performing teams so that they can continue to deliver high velocity.
-
How to Tide Over Organizational Politics?
Politics is an integral part of all organizations.Generally, technical people have a distaste for politics because technical matters are mostly precise and can be stated in black and white where as political matters generally involve shades of gray, which are not always easy to decipher. Recently, members on the Scrum Development group discussed ways to deal with politics.
-
Is Measuring Hyper-Productivity a Waste of Time?
In a presentation about Shock Therapy, Jeff Sutherland mentioned that Hyper-Productivity is at least Toyota level of performance which is four times the industry average. In a recent discussion on the Scrum Development group, members debate whether it is both fruitful and possible to accurately measure productivity across sprints.
-
A Good Velocity
Buddha Buck recently asked the Extreme Programming list if there were a velocity range that could be considered 'good' for a team of about seven people doing two-week iterations. He felt that a velocity of eight or below indicated that the team's stories might be too big. The resulting discussion provided some answers to the question, and the questions behind the question.
-
Presentation: Meeting the Challenge of Simplicity
This session addresses the abstract notion of simplicity, looks at why it is critical in modern UI design and answers questions: Why does simplicity matter? Is there a meaningful definition of simplicity? Why do design processes and good intentions undermine simplicity? What processes and techniques can software developers use to achieve simplicity?
-
Article: Where To Now With Build Automation
Most developers nowadays are familiar with the basic tenets of Continuous Integration, but arguably only a small proportion of these are fully benefiting from an optimized CI set up. This article, by John Smart of Atlassian, discusses Continuous Integration practices that can take CI beyond merely being a glorified cron job and make it an effective, productivity-enhancing hub for development.
-
8 Best Practices to Improve Scalability
Wille Faler proposes 8 scalability and performance best practices like offloading the database, using caching, minimizing network traffic and others.
-
Presentation: 10 Ways to Improve Your Code
In this presentation recorded during QCon SF 2008, Neal Ford, an architect at ThoughtWorks, shows 10 ways to write better code. This is practical advice for developers, but application architects can benefit from it too.
-
The Cloud Security Alliance Wants Safer Clouds
The Cloud Security Alliance (CSA) is a non profit organization meant to be an open forum promoting the exchange of information and knowledge related to security and cloud computing with the aim to create a set of best security practices for cloud vendors and consumers.
-
Agile Governance: The Bridge Between Management and IT
Traditional project governance is used to describe the rules and processes that need to exist to ensure a successful project. At first glance the concept of governance and Agile seem to be incompatible however, most Agilists would agree that just enough governance might do more good than bad for the Agile project.
-
SOA: Where Do We Go From Here?
"Enough wrangling over whether SOA is dead, or is thriving, or never even existed, or crashed somewhere near Roswell, New Mexico. The indisputable fact is many organizations are now working toward service orientation for at least part of their business application offerings, and this will only grow.", says Joe Mckendrick, so where do we go from here?
-
Article: We Need to Create Information System Ratings
Pierre Bonnet, CTO of Orchestra Networks, argues that information systems are too opaque and not agile enough. He claims this is the main reason why "healthy" multinationals can collapse within months as they take on too much risk. He suggests that information systems be rated on how they manage master data, business rules and business processes.