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Book Excerpt: Implementing Lean Software Development: From Concept to Cash

In 2003 Mary and Tom Poppendieck adapted the revolutionary principles of Lean manufacturing for software development. Their new book offers a blend of history, theory, and practice, drawing on their experience optimizing the software "value stream". They present the right questions to ask, the key issues to focus on, and techniques proven to work for those implementing a lean software process.

Mary Poppendieck Tom Poppendieck
on Sep 18, 2006
Agile Alliance Survey: Are We There Yet?

Diana Larsen, a member of the Agile Alliance Board of Directors, leads a lot of retrospectives... So, it's not surprising that, when she asked herself "Where is Agile going now?" her response was to run a retrospective of her own. She circulated a survey to the other Agile Alliance board members, and has compiled a picture of the trends they're seeing in the Agile world.

Diana Larsen
on Sep 13, 2006
Agile Business Rules

James Taylor looks at the challenge that arises when the new requirements are not really requirements at all, but new or changed business rules. Aren't business rules the same as requirements? Taylor says: no, not really; and looks at how to make an agile development processes work just as well for business rules as they do for other kinds of requirements.

James Taylor
on Sep 04, 2006
Interview: Jim Johnson of the Standish Group

Jim Johnson, founder and chairman of the Standish Group, took time out from his vacation to talk with InfoQ editor Deborah Hartmann about his research, and the role of Agile in changing the IT industry. Johnson is best known for creating the CHAOS Chronicles: 12 years of independent research on project performance, including data on over 50,000 completed IT projects.

Deborah Hartmann Preuss
on Aug 25, 2006
Book Excerpt: Agile Retrospectives: Making Good Teams Great

Project retrospectives help teams examine what went right and what went wrong on a project. Traditionally held at the end of a project, they're actually too late to help - no wonder we call them "post-mortems". Agile teams need retrospectives that are iterative and incremental, to find problems and design solutions to help teams improve early on, when improvement yields the most benefit.

Esther Derby Diana Larsen
on Aug 21, 2006
Executive summary - An Adaptive Performance Management System

Traditional thinking has turned budgets into fixed performance contracts forcing managers at all levels to commit to specified financial outcomes, although many of the underlying variables are beyond their control. In this Cutter Executive Summary, Jim Highsmith offers an alternative for the adaptive organization: a project performance management system and a team performance management system.

Jim Highsmith
on Aug 09, 2006
Using Logging Seams for Legacy Code Unit Testing

Using logging seams you can easily create unobtrusive unit tests around legacy classes, without needing to edit class logic as well as avoiding behavior changes.

Ian Roughley
on Aug 01, 2006
Agile: The SOA Hangover Cure

Author Carl Ververs who is an expert on SOA Integration and Distributed Systems writes about the application of "Agile" development philosophies that ensures that organizations can overcome architectural paralysis and get moving on those important SOA projects, while at the same time ensuring that the architecture is sufficiently flexible and adaptable for future growth.

Carl Ververs
on Jul 31, 2006
Book Excerpt: Practices of an Agile Developer

This book collects the personal habits, ideas, and approaches of successful agile software developers and presents them in a series of short, easy-to-digest tips. Practical and focused, it offers proven and effective agile practices to make the reader a better developer. InfoQ.com brings you an excerpt, "Chapter 7: Agile Debugging," as a free pdf download.

Andy Hunt Venkat Subramaniam
on Jul 24, 2006
Top 8 SOA Adoption Pitfalls

Thomas Erl is the world's top-selling SOA author. He has written two books on SOA. Understanding the pitfalls others have fallen victim to will help you chart a safer route down your own SOA roadmap. To this end Thomas has collected the eight most common SOA adoption pitfalls of last year.

Thomas Erl
on Jul 20, 2006
Book Review: Collaboration Explained: Facilitation skills for software project leaders

David Spann, himself an experienced facilitator, provides an insightful review of "Collaboration Explained: Facilitation Skills for Software Project Leaders" by Jean Tabaka. Jean, an experienced teacher, consultant and coach, offers techniques to enhance group effectiveness, provides some templates to assure their first efforts are well planned, and tells some great stories along the way.

David Spann
on Jul 10, 2006
Book Review: Agile Java Development with Spring, Hibernate and Eclipse.

Anil Hemrajani relates Agile practices to Java and several open source toolsets (Spring, Hibernate, Eclipse) designed to make Java development simpler. It's a high level overview of some free technologies used in web app development. Matt Morton liked this book, recommending it to technical managers and intermediate developers in small Java web development shops.

Matt Morton
on Jun 28, 2006