InfoQ Homepage Agile Content on InfoQ
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Stories of Scrum Adoption in China
This recent inquiry, by InfoQ China editor Jacky Li, looked at five very different cases of Scrum adoption in China, which got different results. He asked: Why did you use Scrum? How did you adopt it? What problems did you encounter, and why did it succeed or fail? Despite the small sample size, it's an interesting comparison, pointing out that improvement doesn't ensure success.
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Complaint-Free Iterations
No software project is perfect, nor is the organization in which the project takes place. When your software project goes wrong, do your team members complain, or do they take corrective action? The Complaint Free World project encourages people to take notice of how often they complain, and reduce the frequency of the complaints, aiming for a goal of twenty-one complaint-free days.
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Agile Version Control for Multi-Team Development
Many agree that the minimum set of Agile practices includes disciplined version control. In particular, when several development teams work in the same codebase, to ensure there's a clean, releasable version at the end of every iteration, they need a plan. Henrik Kniberg's proven scheme is a useful guide for teams. This detailed paper includes the entire method and even a cheatsheet.
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Creating The Culture For An Agile Environment
Greg Smith offers an in-depth practical perspective on making your agile transition just as much about culture change as it is about process change.
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Interview with Joseph Pelrine: Agile Works. But HOW?
Joseph Pelrine has come full circle: from university studies in Psychology, journeying through SmallTalk, XP and Scrum, and now back to broader questions: Why and how does Agile work? In this interview, Joseph talked about Complexity Science, and how story-telling, "sense-making," network analysis and speed-dating's gut-feel approach may prove more useful than our old toolkits for managing teams.
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Is Burnout Inevitable, while Facilitating Agile Projects?
Facilitation on Agile projects seems to involve much more than the primary responsibility of improving the effectiveness of the work that the teams are doing. The responsibility of a facilitator can become so broad that over-facilitating becomes common, thus leading to burnout. An interesting Group Facilitation newslist discussion takes a closer look.
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A Preview of Mingle 2.0
On April 15th Thoughtworks will release Mingle 2.0, nine months after the initial release of Mingle. InfoQ got some time with product manager Adam Monago to talk through the new functionality provided by Mingle 2.0.
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Article: QCon London 2008 Key Takeaways and Lessons Learned
QCon London took place March 12-14th and attendees have blogged summaries and take aways for 62 of the 96 sessions. There were 600 registrations for this second annual QCon in London, 70% of the attendees self-declaring as being team lead, architect and above. Over 100 speakers presented at QCon London including Kent Beck, Martin Fowler, and Erich Gamma.
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What is the Role of a Manager in an Agile Organization?
Your organization is adopting Agile Development and your Managers are trying to find their new role. Prior to the adoption Agile perhaps management was involved in the production specifications and assigned the tasks. Now that teams are self organizing and the stories (instead of specs) come from the product owner, what does management do?
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First (Forgotten?) Rule Of The Retrospective: Follow Through
Even the very greenest of agile teams clearly recognize the word 'Retrospective'. But, alas, it is often overlooked that a retrospective may be a wasted effort if not used to initiate an actual improvement that the team follows through on. Jim Shore gives advice on how to make the most of your retrospective and reminds us of the activity's ultimate place in the agile heartbeat.
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Rally's Agile Project Lifecycle Management Tool 2008.1 Released
InfoQ got together with Zach Nies, Product Development Manager for Rally software for a product walk through of Rally's latest offering of their Agile Lifecycle Management product, and to talk about where Rally's product in this space is going in the future.
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Debate: Agile Transition Success Rates, Help or Harm?
Many of the Agile community have chimed in on a recent popular discussion regarding success rates of Agile transitions. Responding to Niraj Khanna's question on the subject, Kent Beck, Ron Jeffries, Alistair Cockburn, Chet Hendrickson, and many more debate the value and risk of establishing such statistics.
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Do Extreme Programming Folks Care about Scrum?
Scrum and XP are considered to be natural allies and both are widely adopted in the industry. However, there seem to be some dark secrets behind the happy facade of using them together. A massive discussion on the Extreme Programming group tries to answer if Scrum is alienating extreme programming folks and whether Scrum would be as effective without XP.
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Managers: Help your Teams Learn Communication Skills
The Agile “self organising team” paradigm requires that team members develop strong interpersonal skills. Now management gains an important role in helping teams learn new ways to communicate and collaborate. This article proposes some strategies for imparting new skills without crushing a team’s growing self-organization, and suggests some sources of helpful material for developing new skills.
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InfoQ Video: Practices of an Agile Developer
At NFJS Venkat Subramaniam, co-author with Andy Hunt of "Practices of an Agile Developer," shared his pragmatic approach to some of the important technical and non-technical factors contributing to project success, including: coding, developer attitude, debugging, mentoring and feedback.