InfoQ Homepage Agile Content on InfoQ
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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.
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Agile Project Management ScrumWorks Pro 3.0 released
Danube Technologies has just released the 3.0 Release of ScrumWorks Pro, last mentioned in August 07. ScrumWorks Pro is an Agile Project Management tool that help track team(s) progress through individual iterations and whole releases. In this release changes focused on two areas: usability improvements and the use of MySQL as the backend database.
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Fixture Gallery, a New Quick Reference For FitNesse How-To
Fixture Gallery is a new open doc cookbook by Gojko Adzic for FIT/FitNesse tests. It provides developers with a quick overview of the most important fixture types and concepts for agile acceptance testing using the FIT framework.
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Well Formed Teams: Helping Teams Thrive, not just Survive
What does it take to create a high-performing team? According to Doug Shimp and Samall Hazziez, a "Well Formed Team" exhibits the following characteristics: follow Agile and Lean principles, use an adaptive system with a feedback loop, are focused on the business vision, are passionate and hyper-productive.
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Distributing Bonus to Agile Teams is Like Playing with Dynamite
Everyone is excited when bonus is declared. However, for Agile teams it could eventually become a make-or-break situation. The general consensus is that distributing bonus should be a 'well thought-out' strategy there is no 'one size fits all' here. In an interesting discussion on the Lean Development group, people share their thoughts to find the best way.
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DbFit 1.0 With Enhanced Querying Capabilities and User Docs
Gojko Adzic has recently announced the version 1.0 release of DbFit, his popular FIT/FitNesse extension used for practicing TDD on database code.
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Improving Productivity without Formal Metrics
Ron Jeffries has started writing a series of fictional stories based on his observation of real teams. The first story (Kate Oneal: Productivity) focuses on the character Kate O'Neal (CTO) and one of her teams "Rimshot". In this episode Ron explores achieving and measuring Productivity improvements without formal metrics.
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Should the Customer Care about Agile?
The involvement of customer in an Agile project is taken for granted, however in many situations, intentionally or unintentionally, the customer may not follow the Agile practices. An interesting discussion on the Extreme Programming group tries to decipher the situation and find possible solutions.
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Interview: Johanna Rothman on Schedule Games and other Organizational Dysfunctions
Johanna Rothman is an organizational consultant, coach and co-creator of the AYE conference (Accelerate Your Effectiveness). Deborah Hartmann interviewed her at Agile2007 about her third management book - and discovered that there are names for some of the the scheduling games that cause us to spin our wheels, including: Bring Me A Rock, Queen of Denial and Pants on Fire!