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Questioning the Retrospective Prime Directive

The 'Retrospective Prime Directive' is a practice used by many teams as part of their continuous improvement cycle. As outlined in Norm Kerth's book, it is intended to foster the deep learning that is the heart of a retrospective. This article is an enlightening conversation, captured by Linda Rising, between senior practitioners on the benefits and the challenges of using this practice.

Linda Rising
on Feb 14, 2008
Interview and Book Excerpt: Nicolai Josuttis, "SOA in Practice"

Today, InfoQ publishes a sample chapter from Nicolai Josuttis' "SOA in Practice". On this occasion, InfoQ's Stefan Tilkov had a chance to sit down with Nicolai to ask about his views on SOA, the main industry misconceptions about it, key success factors and a recommendation for how to approach it.

Stefan Tilkov
on Jan 15, 2008
Kanban Applied to Software Development: from Agile to Lean

In this InfoQ article Kenji Hiranabe applies lessons learned while working with Japanese manufacturers. While many Agile teams are optimizing only a portion of the value stream, Hiranabe proposes a simple way to adapt lessons from Lean Manufacturing's "Kanban" visual tracking system to make process visible to more of the organization, for better communication and process improvement.

Kenji Hiranabe
on Jan 14, 2008
The "Consulting" Contract

Coach Michael Spayd tells us that both contractors and permanent employees can play a "consultant" role, and should think about developing consulting contracts or "designed partnerships" with their clients - not about the exchange of money, but to help create stellar results for the client while working in a manner that adheres to their own values and preferences.

Michael K. Spayd
on Dec 30, 2007
Don't Let Miscommunication Spiral Out Of Control

We miscommunicate every day, with results ranging from trivial to catastrophic. In this seasonally themed article, J. B. Rainsberger shares one of his secret weapons - the Satir Communication Model. It's a thinking tool to help us analyze troubling conversations, and to more deeply understand the people around us, building trust, the first step towards building an effective team.

Joe Rainsberger
on Dec 23, 2007
Book Excerpt and Review: Release It!

'Release It!: Design and Deploy Production-Ready Software' by Michael Nygard, which is nominated for a 2008 Jolt Award, discusses what it takes to make production-ready software and explains how this differs from feature-complete software. InfoQ spoke with Nygard about the areas that the book covers and some questions around how the book's philosophy fits in with concepts such as Agile.

Ryan Slobojan
on Dec 20, 2007
Offer People Reasons to Love Your Remote Meetings

With an increasingly global workforce, face-to-face meetings are becoming rarer these days. In their place, we more frequently conduct business with a very different experience using a teleconference line supported by desktop sharing tools. Tips and tricks effectively facilitating these interactions, an emerging and important skill, are covered in this article.

Pete Johnson
on Dec 10, 2007
Key Takeaway Points and Lessons Learned from QCon San Francisco 2007

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, Architecture Quality, How much REST do we need?, Java in Action, Architecting for Performance & Scalability, Java Emerging Technologies, Challenges in Agile, Bleeding Edge .NET, The Rise of Ruby.

Ryan Slobojan
on Nov 27, 2007
A Leaner Start: Reducing Team Setup Times

How long does it take a newcomer to become an effective member of your team? Learning integral to agile methodologies, but the learning needs of the newcomer are different from established team members: in a standup meeting, "I did (unintelligible) yesterday" offers them more questions than answers. Pat Kua suggests some practices that specifically reduce the "setup time" for new team members.

Pat Kua
on Nov 22, 2007
Iterative, Automated and Continuous Performance

Iterative and continuous are terms that are often used in reference to testing of software. This new InfoQ article takes a look at whether the same concepts can be applied to performance tuning. Along the way topics such as tooling and mocks are discuss in regards to how they need to be adjusted for performance in respect to testing for functional requirements.

Kirk Pepperdine
on Nov 16, 2007
Book Review: Implementation Patterns

Kent Beck's new book, Implementation Patterns, is a book about writing code in Java. The patterns in this book are based on Kent's reading of existing code as well as his own programming habits. The patterns in this book are meant to be a coherent view of how to write code people can understand that serves human as well as economic needs.

Amr Elssamadisy
on Nov 06, 2007
Interview: IBM Architect Bertrand Portier on joining MDD and SOA

In the wake of the latest product announcement from IBM, InfoQ talked to Bertrand Portier about a RedBook that presents a Model-Driven-Development approach to service construction. The concepts are general enough to be applied to product stacks other than IBM.

Jean-Jacques Dubray
on Oct 29, 2007

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