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  • Key Takeaway Points and Lessons Learned from QCon San Francisco 2008

    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, Interviews, RESTFul Web Integration in Practice, Solutions Track, Performance and Scalability, Being Agile, Ruby in the Enterprise, Cloud Computing, Functional/Concurrent Programming Applied, Effective design and Clean code, and many more!

  • The Role of the Analyst in Agile Projects

    Addressing another Agile Myth (we don't need no analysts!), Shane Hastie, Chief Knowledge Engineer at Software Education, outlines how the Business Analyst can help Agile teamwork - when properly aligned with the business, rather than the development team.

  • A Case For Short Iterations

    Dave Nicolette, Agile Coach with Valtech, addresses the question are short iterations better than long. Dave demonstrates that short iterations: allow for more rapid response to change, the opportunity to discover and fix problems more often. He also deals with the concerns that short iterations might lead to burnout and other issues.

  • "Who Do You Trust?" by Linda Rising

    During Agile 2008, Dr. Linda Rising held a presentation centered on experiments conducted many years ago, presenting how deep, powerfully affecting, and difficult to avoid are human “prejudices” and “stereotypes”. This article is a summary of that presentation.

  • "Systems Development": a New Discipline for a New Education

    Educator Dr. Dave West discusses “Systems Development”, a new discipline emphasizing humanity, craft, design, creativity, innovation, and emergence - in stark contrast with current university disciplines. West proposes a better educational experience, replacing the sterility of today’s classrooms and labs with the workshop, or “bottega.”

  • Tips from a Top Sports Team Coach

    In team sport, as in software development, the team factor is crucial for success. In fact, team sport shows many inspiring parallels to software development. This article outlines 9 essential principles top-coach Marc Lammers discovered while building the world’s best field hockey team, and maps them to software development practices

  • Case study: Distributed Scrum Project for Dutch Railways

    How we customise Scrum to our local context plays a large role in the success or failure of a project. This article describes a successful, large, distributed Scrum project, which had already been scrapped once under a traditional approach. The authors share lessons learned on: project startup, product ownership, testing and the importance of estimates and effective communication.

  • Building Scalability and Achieving Performance: A Virtual Panel

    Join our industry-heavyweight (eBay, Betfair, FiveRuns and Twitter) panel as they explore the cost of making their sites as scalable as possible, whilst tuning to get the most performance they possibly can. They explore the pros-and-cons of making their apps as awesome as possible - all the while under the pressure of their business requirements.

  • Book Review: Agile Adoption Patterns, A Roadmap to Organizational Success

    Ryan Cooper reviewed Amr Elssamadisy's new book and found it a useful framework for designing customized adoption strategies. Rather than a single recipe of Agile practices for everyone, the reader is offered patterns and tools to help determine which practices will most effectively help them reach their own organization's specific goals.

  • Debunking Common Refactoring Misconceptions

    In comparison to Java, an emphasis on continuous refactoring is still relatively new in .NET. Besides having few ardent proponents, many myths linger around what refactoring really is and how it applies to the development process in general. Danijel Arsenovski, author of Professional Refactoring in Visual Basic, attempts to dispel some of these myths.

  • Choose Feature Teams over Component Teams for Agility

    Feature teams, common enough in small groups, are all too rare in large product development - but they can be a key to scaling with agility. This article analyses how feature teams resolve weaknesses of component teams, and points out key issues to address when transitioning. It is an excerpt from "Scaling Lean and Agile Development," by Craig Larman and Bas Vodde, to be published later this year.

  • User Story Estimation Techniques

    One of the great things about working as a consultant is the ability to try out many different ideas and adapting your personal favorite process to include things that work. This article gives the details about user story estimation techniques that Jay Fields has found effective.

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