InfoQ Homepage Agile Content on InfoQ
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Using a "Snake On The Wall" To Quantify Impediments
Kevin Schlabach discusses using a "Snake On The Wall", a lightweight approach targeted at helping your team get a better handle on the things that are slowing the development process.
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Scaling Scrum Without the Scrum of Scrums
Scrum has proven effective at promoting communication between members of a development team. The question of how to scale this high-bandwidth communication across teams, especially in large organizations, remains an area of active exploration and debate. Will Read has proposed a mesh-network inspired alternative to the popular Scrum-of-Scrums meeting for achieving this goal.
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Agile 2009 Conference: Call for Proposals
Building on the success of last year’s metaphor of festival with multiple stages, the Agile Alliance has gone with the same approach this year. The idea behind the stages is to make what has become a large conference a smaller place so that sessions with similar themes will end up on the same stage. As a result, attendees who're focused on a few themes will see the same people again and again.
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Managing Change Requests in Scrum
Tracking change requests in Agile is often associated with being at odds with the Agile principle of "Responding to change over following a plan". However, in certain situations it might be necessary to track change requests. An interesting discussion on the Lean Agile Scrum group tries to look deeper into the 'Why' and 'How' of tracking change requests.
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Interview: Scott Ambler On Agile’s Present and Future
In this interview, InfoQ’s Chief Editor, Floyd Marinescu, interviewed Scott Ambler, Practice Lead for Agile Development at IBM, on the current status of the Agile community and practices having a look at the perspective of the Agile’s future.
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How Agile Benefits the Individual
A recent discussion on the ScrumDevelopment list shed light on the ways in which agile development practices directly benefit the individuals involved. The consensus was that an environment ideal for individual growth can be created by the implementation of agile practices such as inspect-and-adapt, pair programming, test driven development, and constant collaboration and communication.
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Presentation: Manager's Introduction to Test-Driven Development
In this presentation filmed during Agile 2008, Dave Nicolette and Karl Scotland try to introduce non-technical managers to one of the most popular Agile development techniques: Test-Driven Development (TDD). The presentation intends to be a primer for managers who want to understand the value of TDD, and of Agile in general, in software development.
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Scrum of Scrums - Issues and Value
The Scrum of Scrums meeting "is an important technique in scaling Scrum to large project teams. These meetings allow clusters of teams to discuss their work, focusing especially on areas of overlap and integration." Allan Shalloway asked for people's experience "on Scrum-of-Scrums for coordinating teams vs scaling Scrum to the enterprise" he sees problems in with large groups (350 people).
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Forget Your Debugger, Use The "Saff Squeeze"
Kent Beck, renowned co-father of XP, TDD, and JUnit itself, tells a story about tracking down a defect in a new JUnit feature, JUnitMax, with unit tests instead of a debugger. He explains a method shown to him by current JUnit lead developer, David Saff, where a high level unit test is recursively inlined until a super concise test is created down at the very root of the defect.
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Brian Marick: What's Missing From the Agile Manifesto
In his keynote at the Agile Development Practices conference, Brian Marick described values missing from the Agile Manifesto. His view is that the Manifesto was essentially a marketing document, aimed at getting business to give agile a chance. Now that this goal has largely been achieved, an extended set of guiding values are needed to help teams deliver on the promises of the manifesto.
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Agile Usability
Jakob Nielsen, usability guru and author of Usability Engineering, raises the concern that Agile methods are a threat to traditional approaches to designing usability. He goes on to propose solutions so that usability designers can work together in the Agile world. In addition Alistair Cockburn, while generally supporting Jakob, takes issue with a few of his points.
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Presentation: Principles and Practices of Lean-Agile Software Development
In this presentation held during Agile 2008, Alan Shalloway, CEO and founder of Net Objectives, presents the Lean software development principles and practices and how they can benefit to Agile practitioners.
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Faster Test Runs With Clover's Test Optimization
The recent release of Clover 2.4 highlights a new "Test Optimization" feature that offers to speed up CI builds and allow developers to spend less time waiting for their tests to run. The feature leverages "per-test" coverage data to selectively run only the tests impacted by your code changes.
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SEI publishes report integrating CMMI and Agile
Last week was hot in international scenario on software development. The SEI (Software Engineering Institute) recently published a report entitled " CMMI or Agile: Why Not Embrace Both!", which addresses the integration between the ideas and practices of the CMMI with the ideas and practices of Agile as something possible in software development projects.
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James Shore: The Decline and Fall of Agile
James Shore has declared agile to be in decline. He cites the many teams doing 'sprints' and stand-up meetings, without adopting any of the technical practices necessary to produce high-quality software over the long-haul. In his estimation, this has led to thousands of Scrum teams doing agile so poorly that they will almost certainly fail, and possibly take the agile movement with them.