InfoQ Homepage Agile Content on InfoQ
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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.
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Co-location Transition, Tips and Concerns
What are the tricks to successfully transitioning from cubicles to a team room? What are the concerns? Ideas include: make the change an experiment, make sure everyone is heard.
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Interview: Pressure and Performance – The CTO's Dilemma
In this interview made by Deborah Hartmann during Agile 2008, Diana Larsen and Jim Shore talk about patterns observed in CTOs' activity. CTOs emerge as real people caring for other people in their organization, and are put under a lot of pressure and constraints.
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Infrastructure Made Easy for Agile Software Teams
Getting the right infrastructure set up is instrumental for the success of Agile software teams. Teams now have the option of deploying a fresh infrastructure using Buildix or using an online workspace provided by Assembla to kick start their project in no time.
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Careful With Your Coverage Metrics
Christian Gruber takes some time to clarify the TDD stance on using code coverage metrics. He discusses what code coverage metrics do and don't tell you, how TDD fits into the picture, and how one might be best advised to use their code coverage metrics.
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Presentation: Reaching Hyper-Productivity with Outsourced Development Teams
In this presentation filmed during Agile 2008, Jeff Sutherland, co-creator of Scrum, and Guido Schoonheim, CTO of Xebia, present an actual case of reaching hyper-productivity with a large distributed team using XP and Scrum.