InfoQ Homepage Agile Content on InfoQ
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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!
-
New Agile Community Site Launch
A new site Agile Commons has recently been born, as a result of collaborative work between Rally employees and their customers. It has been launched as an ideas exchange platform funded by Rally & Hivemind, with the aim of becoming the leading resource for Agile minded people, by inviting different types of organisations, Linked In groups to discuss and exchange agile ideas in a single place.
-
Common Questions when Adopting TDD
If you are new to TDD you may be struggling with some common questions such as: How much upfront design should I tolerate? Or, when writing a test you have to build interfaces and some classes to get it to even compile - how far do you let that go?
-
Understanding Business Value
Aside from "Agile" itself, "Business Value" may be one of the most widely used buzzwords around the floors of any fresh agile project. But, how many of these projects actually have a good understanding of what they really mean when they're saying it? Joe Little presents his thoughts on this very question.
-
Apple Manager Writes "Managing Humans" to Help Techies
It’s Michael Lopp’s belief that developers are trained to manage bits well, but not humans. When developers are promoted to managers much harm can be inflicted. Michael uses stories and humour to warn us of the many perils of management and how to navigate around them.
-
Design and Code Reviews : The Good, Bad and Ugly
Kirk Knoernschild shares his thoughts about Design and Code reviews. He mentions that such reviews promise to improve software quality, ensure compliance with standards, and serve as a valuable teaching tool for developers. However, the way they are performed affects their value. In some organizations they might really add whereas in others a review might just be a part of the bureaucracy.