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  • Failure to Learn Stifles Productivity

    Amr Elssamadisy and Deborah Hartmann have written an article asking us to consider that there may be one common attribute to all software development projects that, if focused upon and improved, can make productivity soar.

  • Review: Continous Performance Management

    Steven Haines from Quest has published an article demonstrating the use of performance analysis tools in the continuous build cycle as best practice and makes some thought provoking points about the cost of not doing so.

  • Blocking: Useful? Dangerous? Ethical?

    George Dinwiddie commented on a discussion that took place in the eXtreme Programming yahoogroup about "blocking" as described by Scott Ambler: "This is a great example of something that I call blocking, where you produce the paperwork, attend the meetings, pretend to care, ... to make it look as if you're following the 'official process'".

  • ObjectMother - a Forgotten Testing Tool

    One of the earliest techniques for writing tests using TDD did not use mocks and stubs, but used the actual business objects instead. By creating a set of factories that instantiated, composed, and executed methods on business objects, real objects, in a non-initial-state of their lifecycle, could be created for testing purposes. The name coined for this pattern was ObjectMother.

  • Is Selenium worth the pain?

    Is Selenium worth the pain? Atlassian developer Nick Menere has asked that very question on the Atlassian Developer Blog. In his blog post Menere looks at the roadblocks found while trying to use Selenium to test two new Ajax features of JIRA 3.10.

  • Does specific technology knowledge matter when recruiting?

    Does technology matter when it comes to recruiting developers? Or is the way of thinking the only thing that’s really important? In a time when many job advertisements are flooded with technology buzzwords, Dan Creswell found an Amazons recruitment ad that solely focuses on thinking and understanding.

  • Presentation: Applying Agile to Ruby

    In this presentation, Fred George talks about the application of agile practices in the enterprise and how they can help with the adoption of Ruby.

  • QCon San Francisco (Nov 7-9) Schedule & Speakers Posted

    The schedule and 44 speakers (another 20 to be confirmed soon) has been posted for QCon, InfoQ's new enterprise software development conference coming to San Francisco Nov 7-9. Some of the speakers include Martin Fowler; Rod Johnson (Spring Creator); the architects of Second Life, Orbitz, Yahoo! & Linked-In; Erik Meijer (LINQ Creator); and many more!

  • Mingle 1.0 Released: Reactions

    Mingle, agile project management software from ThoughtWorks Studios has been released. InfoQ covers the pricing, community reactions and features.

  • Iteration Types

    What is an iteration in the Agile world? How is it different than previous ways the software community has performed iterations? Are there different types of iterations, and does it matter? The ScrumDevelopment list has been recently discussing type A, B, and C sprints (sprint = iteration in Scrum terminology) as defined by Jeff Sutherland and the ideas are relevant the the wider Agile community.

  • Book Excerpt: How to Improve your Continuous Testing

    Continuous Integration has become a standard development best practice - but it's not always done well. Tests take up much of an application's build time, and poorly constructed test suites can cause long builds, whereupon teams start to circumvent agreed-upon CI practices just get the time to code. InfoQ presents advice and examples in Chapter 6: Continuous Testing from a new CI book.

  • InfoQ Interview: Experiences with Planning Poker

    In this fourteen-minute interview, Nils Haugen described "Planning Poker," a simple mechanism for arriving at estimates collaboratively, which has additional team building benefits and improves team estimates over time. Haugen shared his views on why this technique is an important tool for Agile teams in this InfoQ interview.

  • Has Agile Crossed the Chasm?

    Carrying on from last year's survey, Scott Ambler published the 2007 Agile Adoption survey this month. InfoQ provides some analysis of his findings and asks readers how they would approach getting a single view of Agile trends from across the community.

  • Testing and Quality Control the only Certification Needed?

    A new certification for software developers that is neither about in depth knowledge of programming languages, nor any modelling and design techniques, was suggested by Reginald Braithwaite. Only one subject would be on the examination list - "Testing and quality control". Safety has to be the prerequisite to any software development job. For the rest marketplace will decide.

  • Kaizen in Lean Software Development

    Lean methods employ Kaizen, or continuous improvement, to reduce waste and improve results on a regular, even daily, basis. On the leanagilescrum group, Alan asked, "Are there known techniques for facilitating kaizen activities within Lean/Agile software development?"

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