InfoQ Homepage Agile Content on InfoQ
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Can Tools Reduce the Effort Involved in Test Driven Development?
With the presence of high quality test generation tools like Agitar One and Parasoft's JTest, some are questioning the need to write tests manually. 'Uncle' Bob Martin weighted in, exploring the weakness of the idea.
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Does TDD Really Ensure Quality?
Analysis of a recent study by the National Research Council of Canada's Institute of Technology into Test Driven Development turned up some interesting observations regarding the value that this approach adds, including whether, in fact, it adds any more value to the quality process than testing after development.
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Prefer Broad Design Skills over Platform Knowledge
In his latest article Martin Fowler suggests that what matters most while building a team is not experience or thorough knowledge of the specific platform and business domain, but rather some broader skills that allow building quality software and delivering value.
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InfoQ Interview: Dave Thomas on the Joys of Life-long Learning
Guest interviewer Jim Coplien chatted with "Pragmatic" Dave Thomas at QconLondon 2007, covering everything from 'agile' publishing and academia to staying limber with code katas. Dave's career advice: Cultivate the passion of a 5-year old!
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Iterating and Incrementing to 'Get What You Need'
In "Don't know what I want, but I know how to get it", Jeff Patton described a few ways in which Agile teams and business users miscommunicate, and argued that the agile community needs to be clear about the terms 'iterating', 'incrementing' and 'shippable'.
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Is Velocity Really the Golden Measurement?
What value do teams get from measuring velocity, beyond the ability to reasonably estimate commitments for the short-term future? J.B. Rainsberger proposes that teams spend less energy scrutinizing velocity and more energy thoughtfully identifying and eliminating areas of waste in their projects.
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Target Process 2.7: Agile Project Management tool for Distributed Teams
Target Process 2.7 has been released. Target Process is an Agile Process Management tool that automates many of the tasks associated with an agile project. Notable features in recent iterations include visual iteration planning, program level release planning, individual velocity reports, and more.
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Mike Cohn Provides New Patterns of Agile Adoption
Agile Alliance founding member, consultant, and book author Mike Cohn recently distilled his experiences helping teams adopt Agile into three core pairs of patterns that can be used by teams when launching an agile transition.
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Mythical Agile Shortcuts
Going agile seems a pretty trivial task. We pair up, write unit tests, integrate regularly and support our teams with an easy to manage framework such as Scrum. In reality, however, this is not the case. All too often the benefits are not achieved and team does not function as expected. Ross Petit's recent article sheds some light on why things go wrong when the rubber hits the road.
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QCon London March 12-14 Update: Kent Beck, Martin Fowler, Google, Amazon, Yahoo!
QCon's second annual conference in London, UK is taking place in just 8 weeks, March 12-14. In the last month, a number of important additions have been made to the conf: XP founder Kent Beck, author Martin Fowler, sessions from Google, Yahoo!, Amazon, Salesforce.com, MySpace.com, eBay, Merrill, Betfair, Credit Suisse, and others. Gang of Four Patterns author Erich Gamma is also presenting.
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Agile Kanban: Visual Tracking Beyond the Team Room
In the beginning Agile was largely a developer-driven initiative, sometimes improving development processes only to find the real bottlenecks lay outside developer control. In his latest InfoQ article, Kenji Hiranabe analyses Lean manufacturing's "Kanban" visual tracking tool, how it differs from the Agile taskboard, and how it helps identify more far-reaching improvements.
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Doer vs. Talker: Working Software over Comprehensive Documentation
In Are You a Doer or a Talker? Jeff Atwood of Coding Horror echoes the agile manifesto's 'Valuing working software over comprehensive documentation.' Noting an article by John Taber, Atwood draws parallels between transportation studies and transportation construction projects.
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Editorial: Selecting a .NET Web Framework
In the past selecting a web framework for .NET languages was a non-issue. Your choice was between pure ASP.NET or a hybrid design that mixed classic ASP with ASP.NET. And even that was seen as a temporary hack rather than a conscious choice. But with the introduction of ASP.NET MVC, .NET developers have to start making the hard decisions.
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An Agile Developer's Responsibility
What is a developer's responsibility when a customer asks for a quick and dirty solution? Should they listen to the customer and take the short cut because, after all, they are paying the bill? Should they instead always do what is technically the "best" option in their opinion? Or is there a middle road that should be taken?
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Why Crunch Mode Doesn't Work
Evan Robinson recently posted an article on why the practice of 'crunch time' doesn't work. Despite a century of studies showing that long-term output is maximized near a five-day, 40-hour work week, projects still hit the crunch usually to the detriment of the team. InfoQ looks at why crunch time is still so prevalent in the software industry and, if we know it's bad, why do we still do it?.