InfoQ Homepage Agile Content on InfoQ
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Agile Contracts Require Trust
Contracts are the seam that tie together different organizations. Traditional contracts are based on mistrust and a CYA philosophy. Fixed price contracts don't take into consider the uncertainty of software development. Time-for-money projects are not based on value delivered - a team can work for a long time and not have much to show for. The Agile community is looking for something better.
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Teleconferencing: How To Keep 'Em Engaged
While Agile processes recommend to colocate team members for synergy, it's not always possible. More and more projects are utilizing talent from locations all over the world to solve various problems. In these cases leaders and facilitators can contribute significantly to teamwork by mastering the ability to run effective remote meetings.
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Do Dedicated Team Rooms Make for More Productive Teams?
Following a recent article on Science Daily, and a flurry of activity on the Lean Agile Scrum mailing list, InfoQ summarizes what factors make for an optimal team room, and in some cases influence whether a team room is effective at all.
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Multiple Projects, One Agile Team
It's not uncommon for an organization to have one group of developers who need to complete multiple projects. In those situations, how should the group be structured, and how should their work be planned and allocated?
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Panel on Agile Leadership: Stories from the Trenches
InfoQ presents video of a panel from the APLN Leadership Summit at Agile2006, where four business leaders spoke about their experiences: Bud Phillips (Capital One Financial), Israel Ganot (BMC Software), Steven Ambrose (DTE Energy), Peter George (Cronos Inc.). Topics included top-down vs. bottom-up adoption, making the leap of faith to enterprise adoption and the value of the PMO.
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Is Quality Negotiable?
If a customer tells you that they are not interested in software quality, that they have a specific scope that must be completed by a specific date - what do you do? Do you listen to the customer and compromise quality? (By the way, what is quality?)
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AgileEvents Monthly Update
The AgileEvents calendar is a place for non-profit or commercial groups to announce their events for the Agile community, free of charge. Here's what's coming up as of December 1st, including user groups, Extreme Tuesday club (XTC), training, and "Naked Agilists" (which, fortunately, meet on skype). AgileEvents can easily be added to your own website, ical or gcal calendar to keep you up to date.
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Evidence Based Scheduling and FogBugz 6.0
Joel Spolsky recently posted an article about Evidence Based Scheduling. The post focuses on managing and identifying good estimates, in turn allowing the project manager to forecast the probability of delivering on a given date, adding a new method of measurement to the agile project manager's toolbox. InfoQ investigates the theory behind the practice, and its implementation in FogBugz 6.0.
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QCon London March 12-14 Announced
QCon London 2008, taking place March 12-14 has been launched and is open for registration. QCon is an enterprise software development conference for team leads, architects, and project managers covering the range of topics also on InfoQ as well as a strong focus on architecture & design, real world case studies, and more. This is the 3rd QCon, don't miss it!
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Debate: Scaling teams up in productivity rather than in personnel
Larger team size prevents from adopting the whole range of language abstraction tools and puts constraints on productivity. Reg Braithwaite believes that tools should not be tuned to the size of the team. He advocates for building teams around the tools and keeping them small. It appears however that team growth is often inevitable. What can be done then to maintain quality and productivity?
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No More Self-Organizing Teams?
Jim Highsmith has suggested that the term self-organizing team "has outlived its usefulness in the agile community and needs to be replaced". He suggests that Light-Touch Leadership is more appropriate. But does this negate the need for self-organizing teams and the focus on individual team members "doing what it takes" to get things done?
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Article: Key Takeaways and lessons learned from QCon SF
Bloggers were quite active at InfoQ's QCon San Francisco conference which took place Nov 7-9. Bloggers wrote about 32 of the 60 sessions at the event, including the keynotes, session on Linked-In, eBay, Orbitz architectures, and more. Read this article to learn the most valuable insights the attendees took the time to blog about, as well as many other aspects about QCon.
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Leadership is not Obsolete for Self-Organizing Teams!
In this talk, software thought leader Mary Poppendieck reviewed 20th century management theories, including Toyota and Deming, and went on to talk about "the matrix problem", alignment, waste cutting, planning, standards and other topics including the role of measurement: "cash flow thinking" over "balance sheet thinking". InfoQ presents video of this popular talk from the Agile2007 conference.
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Ready! Set! Getting New Team Members off to a Good Start.
How long does it take a newcomer to become an effective member of your team? Learning is integral to agile methodologies, but the learning needs of the newcomer are different from established team members: in a standup meeting, "I did (unintelligible) yesterday" offers them more questions than answers. Pat Kua suggests some practices that specifically reduce the "setup time" for new team members.
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Surprising criticism from parting Microsoft development lead
Jay Bazuzi, once Development Lead for the C# Editor, is leaving Microsoft, and he wrote some surprisingly harsh parting words for his friends before he left; things like “OO isn’t a fad” and that “It’s OK to use someone else’s code”.