InfoQ Homepage Agile Content on InfoQ
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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”.
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Time to Consider: How Will You Contribute to Agile2008?
The Agile Alliance will scale up their annual conference in 2008 from 1100 to 1600 attendees. To balance the potential loss of intimacy in the larger conference, they'll also try a new formula: modeled on a Music Festival, with expert-led, themed "stages". Will you present a paper, experience report, tutorial, talk ... ? With the holidays coming, now's the time to start thinking about it.
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Article: Iterative, Automated and Continuous Performance
A new InfoQ article looks at evaluating performance in an iterative and continuous manner.
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Communicating with Business Using FIT and FitNesse
Although both FIT and FitNesse are used for performing integration and acceptance testing on agile projects, people have tried to use these for general-purpose testing, with mixed results. Others have suggested that FIT should be used for tests where communicating with the business, or with a customer, is of paramount importance. Naresh Jain and James Shore have shared their experiences.
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Test Driven Development or Test Driven Requirements?
Where does one start when practicing test driven development? With the requirements or with the design? Or, put another way, top-down or bottom-up? When one starts to write a test first, without any code, what does that test represent? Both approaches are practiced in the Agile community, but there is little consensus on which provides more value.
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How Long Should Retrospectives Last?
The original definition of a retrospective, as presented by Norm Kerth, was a 3 day, offsite meeting. In, Agile Retrospectives, we are given 5 phases to be covered, but no specific guidance on time. In her recent article, Rachel Davies suggests that we have 30 minutes per week under review. How long should a retrospective last to be effective?
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Agile Meets Pragmatic Marketing
Pragmatic Marketing is a product management methodology for the technology industry which seeks to apply values and principles similar to those of agile software development. So what happens when the pragmatic marketers meet the agile developers?
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Book Review: Implementation Patterns
Kent Beck's new book, Implementation Patterns, is a book about writing code in Java. The patterns in this book are based on Kent's reading of existing code as well as his own programming habits. The patterns in this book are meant to be a coherent view of how to write code people can understand.
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InfoQ Presentation: Jean Tabaka on Surviving Meeting Burnout
Teams moving to an Agile approach may feel irritated as they move from command-and-control to a collaborative culture - which can start to look like non-stop meetings, starting first thing every Monday morning. In this InfoQ exclusive presentation, recorded at Agile2007, Agile coach Jean Tabaka shared her experiences working with teams, offering guidance on how to alleviate meeting burnout.