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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.

Ryan Cooper
on Jul 21, 2008
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.

Danijel Arsenovski
on Jul 16, 2008
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.

Craig Larman Bas Vodde
on Jul 15, 2008
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.

Jay Fields
on Jun 30, 2008
An Introduction to Lean Thinking for Software

For Agile developers only familiar with Scrum or XP, it may be unclear how Lean relates to what they do. This article introduces Lean Thinking and how it enhances software development. Ning Lu of ThoughtWorks China identified the biggest obstacle to Lean or Agile as the mind-set developed during the period of large-scale manufacturing.

Jacky Li
on Jun 23, 2008
Using Numbers to Communicate - in the Spirit of Agile

It's an old story. Techies cave in to the business guys because they don't know how to push back. The problem? Developers use numbers primarily for computation, but the business uses numbers to make decisions. In this story the "Spirit of Agile" encourages a developer to turn non-computational problems and issues into number language.

Linda Rising Barbara Chauvin
on Jun 13, 2008
The Agile Coach, from A to Z

Agile approaches introduce a new leadership role, the "Agile Coach," which is not familiar from traditional methodologies. What's so important about this role? Is it just a new name for an old role? Why does Monster.com list 54 positions with this title? Patrick Kua of ThoughtWorks lists 26 useful answers to this question, in the form of an A-to-Z primer.

Patrick Kua
on May 22, 2008
Creating Product Owner Success

The role of the Scrum Product Owner is powerful, but challenging to implement. Success can bring a new and healthy relationship between customers/product management and development, even competitive advantage, but it comes at a price: organizational change is often required. In this article Roman Pichler looks at what it takes to succeed as a Product Owner.

Roman Pichler
on May 14, 2008
Culture & Methods

Distributed Version Control Systems: A Not-So-Quick Guide Through

Since Linus Torvalds presentation at Google about git in May 2007, the adoption and interest for Distributed Version Control Systems has been constantly rising. We will introduce the concept of Distributed Version Control, see when to use it, why it can be better, and have a look at three actors in the area: git, Mercurial and Bazaar.

Sebastien Auvray
on May 07, 2008
Software Development Lessons Learned from Poker

There is no silver bullet. We know it, but don't act like it. Your language, tool or process is better, right? Jay Fields says: "It depends". The right choices varies with context, people, and more. This article touches upon how a lot of things must impact a choice; learning culture, skill levels, teamwork, incomplete information, metrics - and context.

Jay Fields
on Apr 26, 2008
Improvement, Success and Failure: Scrum Adoption in China

This recent inquiry, by InfoQ China editor Jacky Li, picked 5 very different cases of Scrum adoption in China, which got different results, and asked: Why did you use Scrum? How did you adopt it? What problems did you encounter, and why did it succeed or fail? Despite the small sample size, it's an interesting comparison, pointing out that improvement doesn't ensure success.

Jacky (Jian) Li translated by Jacky (Jian) Li
on Apr 16, 2008
Development

Key Takeaway Points and Lessons Learned from QCon London 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, Architectures you've always wondered about, The Cloud as the New Middleware Platform, SOA, REST and the Web, Evolving Java, Banking, Agile in Practice, Programming Languages of Tomorrow, Effective Design, .NET, The Rise of Ruby.

Ryan Slobojan
on Apr 09, 2008

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