InfoQ Homepage Agile Content on InfoQ
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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!
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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.
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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?
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Bedtime User Stories: Cowboys and Fairytales
In which David Longstreet claims Agile Software Development is a Fairy Tale that just tries to legitimise Cowboy development, and Geoff Slinker invites him to write a Serious Article based on Logical Arguments and Citing Sources.
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Overburdened Teams are Less Likely to Root Out Waste
Sometimes, management encourages adoption of Agile but fails to help remove the overburden that cripples teams and keeps them in non-productive patterns. In his article, Roman Pichler looks at the "3 M's" of Lean, and how the concept of removing "muri" (overburden) provides help for Agile adoptions, by encouraging teams to give up wishful thinking and commit to their actual capacity.
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Cockburn on Testing: Real Programmers have GUTs
In a moment of relaxation, Alistair Cockburn had the insight that we may be quibbling over inconsequentialities: "test before" or "test after," what's important to professional programmers is Good Unit Tests. Eureka!
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Pragmatic is the new black - Reality Driven Development
Taking an empirical approach, Reality Driven Development promotes the idea of rigorous experimentation as a way to improve the user experience and technical qualities of software development.
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Crunch Mode And Making Superstars Average
James Golick and Reg Braithwaite discuss the often overlooked realities of how putting teams into "Crunch Mode" can have undesirable results. The discussion looks at various ways applying pressure to a team often results in putting your project into not better but worse shape and how teams and managers might benefit by taking a different approach.
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Is the ScrumMaster-as-Blocker a Pattern to Follow or a Smell to Avoid?
So, you are on a development team that is adopting Agile or thinking of going in that direction. If you are adopting Agile by starting small, you probably are working against-the-grain in your organization. You may have heard that there should be a role that protects the team from the rest of the non-Agile world that might be useful