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  • The Importance of Agile Feedback Loops

    Several members of the Agile community emphasize the importance of feedback loops in the effectiveness of Agile development processes.

  • Learning from the creative industries - consistency to build trust

    This is the first in a series of discussions looking at factors that enable teams to be successful. This post reports on a recent Wired magazine article that looks at the creative process in use at Pixar Animation Studios and how their process encourages team formation, long-term relationships and trust in a “safe to fail” environment.

  • ScrumBan - Evolution or Oxymoron?

    Kanban workshops, courses and conferences are springing up, and practicing Agilists are investigating what this method, adapted from Lean, offers their teams. Attractive benefits are cited, from revealing bottlenecks to happy teams experiencing more "flow". But thought leaders warn that Kanban's laid back approach is "kryptonite" to Scrum's call to resolve impediments immediately.

  • Is Leading Self-Organisation like Conducting an Orchestra?

    Traditional management models don't tell leaders how to support their Agile teams without undermining their emerging self-organisation. Allusions to musical performance and "conducting the orchestra" abound - but not all are in agreement. Is the "conductor" model a good practice or an anti-pattern? In his TED talk, conductor Itay Talman shows that it may depend on what we think a conductor does.

  • Ladies: Please, Would You Submit a Proposal?

    Although it's widely accepted that diversity leads to innovation and performance, visible leadership in the IT community often doesn't represent the diversity of the community itself. What can be done to increase diversity in the leadership of our high-tech communities? One suggestion is to actively help a more diverse group to get their talks accepted at conferences.

  • Feedback and Feedfoward: Best of Both Worlds

    Feedback is a situation in which an output from an event of the past has a potential relevance in the future. Agile places a lot of importance on soliciting and providing feedback with every step in order to build a quality product. On the other hand Feedforward is, to give someone suggestions for the future and provide help in terms of future direction.

  • Giving and Receiving Effective Feedback

    On Monday at the first day of Agile 2009 Liz Keogh ran a workshop and Effective Feedback.

  • DeMarco Reflects on 40 Years of Software Engineering Evolution

    40 years after the NATO Conference on Software Engineering, Tom DeMarco paused to reflect on the discipline's evolution, wondering whether the metrics orientation he championed has distracted from the real point of computing: "transformation, creating software that changes the world." Is his earlier advice valid, though? "No", he said, in Software Engineering: An Idea Whose Time Has Come and Gone?

  • Opinion: Will the Scrum Alliance Change its Stripes?

    Recently the Scrum Alliance asked a number of user groups to sign a licensing agreement. This turned out be to a big public relations mistake in the Scrum Community. In cleaning from this mistake the Scrum Alliance issued a new policy, hired Cory Foy as Community Organizer and promised to listen to feedback in the future. Will this be succesful?

  • Scrum Alliance Asks User Group to Sign Licensing Agreement

    Today a Scrum User Group closed shop, in response to a Scrum Alliance request "to sign ... a licensing document for a logo they created for Orlando Scrum users group." Community reaction varies widely. Despite clarification from the SA's managing director, it is unclear what, if anything, this trademark application will mean for existing groups.

  • Top InfoQ News and Exclusive Content for 2008

    Looking back at the year that is coming to its conclusion, we wanted to have a retrospective and find out which were the most read news and exclusive content items during 2008. We compiled a list containing top 5 news for each community and top 3 exclusive content items for each type: articles, interviews and presentations. This list considers the number of unique readers for each news.

  • James Shore: The Decline and Fall of Agile

    James Shore has declared agile to be in decline. He cites the many teams doing 'sprints' and stand-up meetings, without adopting any of the technical practices necessary to produce high-quality software over the long-haul. In his estimation, this has led to thousands of Scrum teams doing agile so poorly that they will almost certainly fail, and possibly take the agile movement with them.

  • Presentation: Jim McCarthy and 11 Commitments For a Shared Vision

    In this presentation filmed during Agile 2008, Jim McCarthy talks about 11 commitments team members should adhere to if they want to achieve a state of shared vision. Such a state empowers a team to reach their full potential and ultimately attain greatness.

  • Martin Fowler on Avoiding Common Scrum Pitfalls

    Jacky Li of InfoQ China spoke with Martin Fowler during ThoughtWorks' AgileChina conference. In this print interview, Martin Fowler talked about Scrum certification and the future of Agile.

  • Opinions: Why Most Social Software Fail and how to Avoid it

    According to Clay Shirky, the success key for social software is “a brutally simple mental model [...] shared by all users”. Referring to it as Shirky’s law, Michael Nielsen analyzes why programmers often fail to obey it. His arguments as well as the discussion that has followed provide interesting insights into pitfalls that need to be avoided for building successful social applications.

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