InfoQ Homepage Agile Content on InfoQ
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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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Agile Team Size
Using Agile methods with large teams is a reality - the old Agile = Small Team equation is no longer valid. Nonetheless, team size is still an issue. How important is team size and what, if anything, should we do about it?
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InfoQ Article: Creating a Collaborative Workspace
We may imagine an extremely Agile team as working in a minimalist teamroom, surrounded by whiteboards. But that isn't enough - some of the comforts left behind in our traditional spaces were there for good reasons. In this InfoQ article several experienced coaches offer advice from experience, on creating collaborative team spaces that work.
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JUnit 4.4 Released
The release of JUnit 4.4 sees the inclusion of the assertThat method, offering easier reading and new flexibility to the JUnit library.
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Do Agile Methods Require Documentation?
Some believe that agile methods do not require (or cannot support) documentation of any kind. Ian Cooper examines this belief against the Agile manifesto and against specific agile methods.
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Are Agile Development Practices Detrimental to Architecture and Design?
Is iterative and incremental development à la Agile practices - where one builds only what is required per iteration - detrimental to good design? Does Scrum encourage ignoring architectural issues? Can design and architecture evolve effectively without the technical Agile practices? Does test-first development lead to good design? Or does the red-green-refactor loop stall at local-minima?
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InfoQ Presentation: DSDM and Lean Explained
This second Agile2006 Agile Styles video looks at DSDM and Lean. Jean Tabaka covered the history and principles of the venerable DSDM methodology, founded in 1994 and now accepted in the UK for use on government contracts. Mary Poppendieck gave real examples of how the 7 Lean principles provide competitive advantage, and discussed the relationship between quality, speedy delivery and low cost.
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Gordon Pask Award Nominations 2007
The nominations for the Gordon Pask award 2007 were announced at the end of June. The award is given yearly for contributions to Agile Practice and targets those who have something to say or something to show, but whose reputation is not already widespread, and comes with a travel sponsorship to encourage the spread of ideas at conferences.
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A Growing IT-Business Gap: Agile to the Rescue?
A recent survey indicated that the gap between IT and Business is growing and that might signal a change in how enterprise technology is run. There are increasing reports of IT not meeting business needs. Does Agile address these issues - and if so where is the evidence?
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Time for Change: Agile Teams in Traditional Organisations
Agile teams seem to be meeting more resistance, as they scale up and move from "early adopter" territory into the mainstream. Does this mean Agile can't work in more traditional organisations? Not necessarily, say coaches Michael Spayd and Joe Little, in a new InfoQ interview: what's needed now is an awareness of the need to facilitate organizational change.
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Working with Mingle
InfoQ had some time with Mingle project engineer Jay Wallace, to use ThoughtWorks' much anticipated Mingle software and demonstrate to us how it differentiates itself from other products by being a truly agile project management tool.
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Agile Measurement - A Missing Practice?
Tom Gilb and Lindsey Brodie have written an article that suggests that Agile methods have a major weakness - that of lack of quantification. They argue that all qualities can be expressed quantitatively and present a new process, PLanguage, which looks very much like Scrum with an explicit measurement step. Are they right? Are Agile methods such as Scrum and XP in need of explicit measurement?