InfoQ Homepage Adopting Agile Content on InfoQ
-
The Value of Diversity
This is the second in a series of discussions looking at factors that enable Agile teams to be successful. Diversity of gender, culture, opinion, perspective, skills and background is considered to be an important factor in forming and persisting high-performance teams. This news item examines the perspectives from variety of commentators.
-
Agile Beyond Software
Agile is gaining traction outside of the traditional IT work that it is commonly associated with. Change is happening faster in technology and business, and the empirical approach is becoming more and more accepted as a productive way to manage change and respond to it.
-
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.
-
Do ScrumMasters need to be Technical?
Does a ScrumMaster need a technical background? Do they need to be able to read code and coach developers on their day to day work?
-
Agile Development Conference Delivers the Goods
The Agile Development Practices conference was held this past June 6-11 in Las Vegas. Hosted inside the Caesar's Palace Conference Center, this event showcased excellent sessions, speakers and content. Several good sessions on testing, a keynote by Johanna Rothman on people and culture, and some fine presentations on Scrum and Kanban made for an excellent conference.
-
What Should an Agile Project Charter Contain?
Agile projects have a strong emphasis on people over process and verbal rather than paper communication. Many formalised methodologies require heavyweight project initiation documents that have to be completed in order to gain funding. Given this potential conflict, what should an Agile project charter contain – how much documentation is “just enough”?
-
Agile Architecture - Oxymoron or Sensible Partnership?
A number of commentators have been talking about the perceived dichotomy between Agile techniques and architectural thinking. This post investigates some of the tensions between Big Up Front Design (BDUF) and You Aint Gonna Need It (YAGNI) thinking and looks at how the two approaches can in fact work together in complimentary ways.
-
Organizations Going Agile: Tread with Caution
Most organizations hire Agile coaches to carry out an organization wide Agile transformation. The intention is to have a lean and fit organization by the time coaches walk out of the building. However, it is very difficult to achieve transformation that improves the end-to-end delivery process and is sustainable if the transformation just begins at the team level.
-
The Lean Software & Systems Conference 2010 Underway In Atlanta
The Lean Software & Systems Conference kicked off Wednesday in Atlanta with a great diversity of exciting activities and talks by Don Reinertsen, Alan Chedalawada, Alan Shalloway, Mary Poppendieck, Joshua Kerievsky, the duo of James Shore and Arlo Belsheee, and many more
-
Organizing Self-organizing Teams
Rashina Hoda is a PhD researcher who has been examining how self-organization actually happens on teams. She has studied teams in New Zealand and India and identified six distinct roles that emerge when teams effectively self-organize. She spoke to InfoQ about her research, which will be published at the International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE2010) to be held in Cape Town in May.
-
Jim Shore Suggests Automated Acceptance Tests Are Not The Right Move
Much of the generally accepted agile literature will advise you that the best way to capture your user's needs is through examples encoded into automated tests - "automated acceptance tests". Thought-leader Jim Shore says maybe not, while others still challenge him.
-
Repetitive Tasks an Agile Smell?
Is slicing stories in horizontal tasks an Agile Smell? Is this common habit used in Scrum/Agile Planning meetings - hurting a team's focus on customer value? What is being suggested instead?
-
Making Change Stick
Making cultural change in an organisation is hard, and fraught with risk. Adopting Agile principles is a major cultural shift for many organisations. Management consultant and author Steve Denning has been researching what makes change stick, and provides some concrete advice for change agents.
-
Agile in the Mainstream
Mainstream Agile is an idea whose time appears to have arrived. Larger consulting services firms are now touting "agility", with firms like IBM Global Business Services and Cap Gemini pitching Agile-related service offerings. Given this kind of sudden mainstream popularity, what does it mean for Agile in general? What does "mainstream" Agile look like? What's in mainstream Agile?
-
An Alternative to Certifications
The Agile Skills project is a resource for establishing a baseline of skills that an Agile Developer needs. It provides an evolving repository and a place to start learning about these skills.