InfoQ Homepage Agile Content on InfoQ
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Continuous Integration And Version Control for Databases
After asserting that one must, as a rule, always version their database work, Scott Allen detailed an approach to making the best of versioning databases. Allen presented a comprehensive, practical approach to creating a baseline, using change scripts to manage schematic revisions, controlling programmatic database objects, and handling branching and merging.
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How to Develop New Activities for the One Laptop Per Child Project?
The One Laptop Per Child project has starting shipping its first generation of XO laptops. OLPC "is not a laptop project, it is an education project", explains Nicholas Negroponte, director of the project. A full Sugar based development environment is available for developers to contribute new activities to the project. Sugar supports collaborative activities when XOs are meshed together.
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Questioning the Retrospective Prime Directive
The 'Retrospective Prime Directive' is commonly used in retrospectives to encourage deep learning without recriminations. But what do you do when you *can't* agree that you "understand and truly believe" that everyone did their best? In this InfoQ article, a group of senior practitioners discusses the benefits and difficulties of using this practice.
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Communicating Intent through Idiom and Paradigm Selection
What about using idioms and programming conventions as signals to achieve more readability and expressiveness? This is what Reg Braithwaite advocates for, suggesting that syntax or even paradigm choices can be a means to communicate the intent.
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Does "Done" Mean "Shippable"?
There has been a lot of discussion on various agile forums and blogs about the difference between 'Done' and 'Shippable'. It might sound like both mean the same, however discussions on the lists and various blogs suggest that these are still widely misunderstood, mis-used terms. Here's a roundup of recommendations about how to handle "Done."
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TDD/BDD Leading To Incomplete Unit Tests?
Peter Ritchie raised concern about TDD and BDD keeping practitioners from writing good unit tests. He cites an over-reliance on “interaction testing", a core mantra and essence of TDD and BDD, as a driver with tendency to result in incomplete unit testing.
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Responsibility, Personal Agility, and Other Touchy-Feely Ideas
Successful Agile teams are predominantly characterized by their culture and not their practices. This sentiment rings true to many (if not most) in the Agile field. Christopher Avery, who has made his name in the world of organizational transformations, has taken his work on Responsibility and focused it directly on Agile practices. Is Personal Agility the key to successful Agile adoption?
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InfoQ Presentation: Selecting the Right Methodology and Steering it to Success
It's easy to agree with "anything more than 'barely sufficient' in is waste," but it's more complicated when we actually need to customize a process for a particular project. At Agile2006 Todd Little shared a model to help leaders choose the right flavour of Agile based on project and team attributes, and he emphasised the need to actively steer projects as development progresses.
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Opinion: Programming Languages Shouldn't Enforce Style, Teams Should
Some believe that, if you write a large enough cookbook, there will always be a simple recipe to solve our programming problems. Taking it to an extreme, some want programming languages to limit developers to safe constructs and clean style. Reg Braithwaite skewers this idea, and challenges teams not to give up accountability for style, asking "Whatever happened to code reviews?"
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Does Continuous Production Lead To Extreme Agility?
The idea of continuous production has been around for some time, with Cal Henderson revealing in 2005 that Flickr releases code to production about every 30 minutes. InfoQ investigates continuous production and explores the effects it has on the product lifecycle, and in turn the host organisation.
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Agile2008 Reminder: Registration Discounts, Submission Deadline
Agile2008 is scheduled for August 4th-8th 2008, in Toronto, Ontario, Canada at the Sheraton Centre Hotel. The Agile Alliance issued a call for participation in December and reminds us to submit by February 25th. Another way to attend for less is to nab one of the limited number of discounted super-early-bird registrations.
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Right-Size Your User Stories
For those using User Stories, getting them right is one of the difficult aspects of an Agile process - they can drive or bog down your work. Pat Kua recently addressed a key question: How much detail should you put in your story? The answer, of course, is "it depends" on where you are in the process.
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Kent Beck on Implementation Patterns
What does good code look like? In this interview, Kent Beck talks about his new book, Implementation Patterns, that deals with this question. Kent explains why Compose Method is so important, but also talks about the relationship between implementation patterns and XP, the history of software patterns and why he believes that Cockburn's Shu-Ha-Ri description of learning is naïve and simplistic.
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Unconsciously Agile? (Rhythms of Agile Development)
Damon Poole wrote recently that many of us maybe practicing Agile development without even realizing it. It turns out that many of us maybe showing signs of the Agile disease without knowing it.
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Discussion: Measuring Success of an Agile Project from the Customer’s Perspective
A recent discussion on the Scrum Development list looked at: “How does a customer measure the success of an Agile project?” Emphasis on: “measure”. The discussion seemed to agree that clients do need a way to track success in their terms, and various metrics were suggested, though it was agreed: it depends on the situation and the customer.