InfoQ Homepage Agile Content on InfoQ
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Presentation: Technical Lessons Learned Turning the Agile Dials to Eleven
In this presentation filmed during Agile 2008, Craig Smith and Paul King present what happens when one tries to be super Agile. Practically, they employed most currently used Agile practices on several projects, then they experimented with new ideas leading them to better results, increased productivity and quality.
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Performance Reviews Banished
In the Wall Street Journal, Sam Culbert argues that annual performance and pay reviews are at best dysfunctional. He sees their primary purpose as "intimidation aimed at preserving the boss's authority and power advantage". Jeff Sutherland, Mary Poppendieck, ... offer alterantives
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Testing: What Developers Are Expected To Do Versus What They Actually Do
The recent PDC underscored a major disconnect in the testing community. There is a fundamental misconception that developers only need to write "unit testers" and all other forms of testing are someone else's problem.
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Working Group Formed to Produce Reusable Agile Contracts
Traditional software contracts have often pitted the customer and vendor against each other. Several Agilists in the past have taken a stab at defining an Agile contract which improves the relationship between the customer and the vendor. A working group is collaborating on OpenPlans taking a step further in this direction and coming up with a reusable Agile contract.
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What is the value of the Nokia Test?
A recent discussion thread on the Scrum Development Yahoo Group examined the value of process checklist tests such as the Nokia Test or the Joel Test. Some see these tests as the starting point for a rich agile maturity model, others worry that this could lead to prescriptive approaches to agile, which would miss the whole point of inspect-and-adapt entirely.
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Interview: Linda Rising: Prejudices Can Alter Team Work
In this interview filmed during Agile 2008, following the presentation "Who Do You Trust?", Linda Rising shows how prejudices can affect the relationships between team members. According to Linda, we all have a tendency to categorize others based on characteristics like race, religion, sex, but also based on more trivial characteristics, and many times we are not even aware we are doing it.
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Presentation: Jim McCarthy and 11 Commitments For a Shared Vision
In this presentation filmed during Agile 2008, Jim McCarthy talks about 11 commitments team members should adhere to if they want to achieve a state of shared vision. Such a state empowers a team to reach their full potential and ultimately attain greatness.
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Kanban as Alternative Agile Implementation
Kanban systems for software, derived from the Toyota Production System, are an iterationless approach for scheduling work. Instead of using a time boxed iteration and planning meeting, the pulls stories from the backlog only when it has completed its previous work. Dave Nicolette thinks that its important to expand our repertoire beyond the basics become familiar with other tools like Kanban.
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Iterating To Acquire Knowledge, Not Just 'Business Value'
At first glance, most agile methodologies define simply that stories be developed in order by business value. In many cases though, it is prudent to blend increasing business value with deliberate steps in "knowledge acquisition". Alistair Cockburn describes how to do this blending effectively, and how to leverage it to deliver the right feature set at the right time.
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Presentation: Planning with a Large Distributed Team
In this presentation filmed during Agile 2008, Wes Williams and Mike Stout share their recent experience with a large distributed team, the planning hurdles they encountered and how they passed them, and their recommendation: avoid large distributed teams.
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Presentation: Measuring Agile in the Enterprise: 5 Success Factors for Large-Scale Agile Adoption
In this presentation filmed during Agile 2008, Michael Mah analyzes the development process in 5 companies: 2 Agile (one of them BMC) and 3 classic. He measures the development progress and effectiveness and compares the results with industry averages. He also presents the factors which contributed to the success of BMC's Agile adoption.
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Agile Games for Learning
At Agile 2008, Don McGreal and Michael McCullough ran a session that showed how to use games and exercises to help improve our understanding of Agile principles and practices. After the conference they created the Tasty Cupcakes as a repository for all Agile games.
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Agility Means Truthfulness
Talk about agile can often tend toward the tangible things that people do day-to-day, toward the "process of agile", but true agility is really less about process and more about principle. Travis Birch presents his perspective about some of these more intangible aspects of agile, namely "truthfulness".
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Handling Absence in Scrum Teams
Absence of a team member whether planned or unplanned can potentially affect the velocity of an Agile team. A discussion on the Scrum Development group tries to find ways to deal with absence.
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The Power of Done
Scott Schimanski recently added his voice to those talking about the power of a clear definition of "done." Scott points out there is both business and personal value in a well-defined meaning of "done". The business can count on shipping features that are done, without making any additional investment, while individuals really seem to enjoy the sense of accomplishment that comes with "done."