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Who Moved my Product Value?

At the outset, it seems like agile is all about short-term focus and a product life cycle is typically the polar opposite – it runs the total gamut in the spectrum that is the life of the product, starting from incubation to end-of-life. So, how does one attribute the relationship between the two? This is where product value comes in.

Mukund Srinivasan
on Jul 05, 2010
Agile Team Meets a Fixed Price Contract

Fixed price contracts are evil - this is what can often be heard from agilists. On the other hand those contracts are reality which many agile teams have to face. But what if we try to tame it instead of fighting against it? How can a company execute this kind of contract using agile practices to achieve better results with lower risk? This article will try to answer those questions.

Marcin Niebudek
on Jun 30, 2010
Fred Brooks on The Design of Design: Interview and Excerpt

A review of Frederick P. Brooks' latest book, The Design of Design. Few individuals have had as much influence on the 'practice' of software development and this book of loosely coupled essays on the essence of design, design process, and the development and nurturing of great designers extends and enhances previous contributions to the field. The review is enhanced with an interview and excerpt.

Dave West
on Jun 30, 2010
Multitasking Gets You There Later

It's now well understood that multi-tasking on a personal level is bad and slows down the rate at which we work. One of the key challenges of new Agile/Scrum teams is the number of projects that they have on the go. Agile teaches us that a team should work on one project at a time or it will thrash. Roger Brown shows in depth why this happens.

Roger Brown
on Jun 29, 2010
A Tester's Learning Journey

The software industry is changing fast. More and more teams put testing up front and center; they use tests to drive development. In this article, Lisa Crispin talks about how her attitude and curiosity have shaped her career and kept her passion for testing software fresh.

Lisa Crispin
on Jun 24, 2010
Book Excerpt: Coaching Agile Teams by Lyssa Adkins

Very little in our education or experience properly prepares a ScrumMaster or project manager for the role of agile coach. This leaves most wondering, "What is my role in a self-organized team? How do I help the team yet stay hands-off?" This chapter, excerpted from the book Coaching Agile Teams, shows you how to activate the journey toward high performance in both provocative and practical ways.

Lyssa Adkins
on Jun 15, 2010
5 Configuration Management Best Practices

There has been a lot of conversation going on around the configuration of applications, and how to manage it. This article explores things people can do from within their code to make their lives, and the lives of anyone else who has to administer or maintain their application, easier. These patterns have been used a number of times on ThoughtWorks projects, and they have proven their worth.

Chris Read
on Jun 03, 2010
Agile Operations in the Enterprise

We've been hearing about agile operations quite a bit lately. There have been some good talks, articles and a few lively debates. It has even been called the "secret sauce for startups". What about those of us who aren't in a startup or a Web 2.0 company? Is agile operations something that can really work inside a large, established enterprise?

Michael Nygard
on May 21, 2010
Phil Abernathy on Agile Governance and Suncorp's Agile Transition

Phil Abernathy discusses the Sun Corp Agile journey - taking a 19000 person banking and insurance organization formed by the merger of two companies with over 4000 IT staff Agile from the top down. He talks about handling governance and change management, implementing Agile on mainframe projects and the impact of Agile in the heavily regulated financial industry in Australia.

Shane Hastie
on May 05, 2010
Learnings from Five Years as a Skype Architect

Too often in our work as architects and designers we focus on the task at hand, seldom reflecting on the past. We should really know better, how else do we improve? This article by Andres Kutt summarizes six learnings from 55 months as an architecture team lead at Skype. Some of them are technical while some focus upon the softer aspects of an architect's work.

Andres Kutt
on Apr 28, 2010
Key Takeaway Points and Lessons Learned from QCon London 2010

This article presents the main takeway points as seen by the many attendees who blogged about QCon. Comments are organized by tracks and sessions: Keynotes, Tutorials, 2015 Software Development, Agile Evolution, AlphaGeeks on .NET, Architectures You've Always Wondered About, Pragmatic Cloud Computing, Cool Stuff with Java, Dev and Ops: A single team, Software Craftsmanship, NoSQL and many more!

Abel Avram
on Apr 06, 2010
A Discussion with Allard Buijze on CQRS with the Axon framework

The Axon framework is a Java implementation of the Command and Query Responsibility Segregation. InfoQ talked with its creator, Allard Buijze, to find out more.

Josh Long
on Mar 24, 2010