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  • So you want to be a famous Agilist? Here's Your Chance!

    Agile Advert is running a micro movie contest - all you have to do is create an advertisement for Agile, upload it, and get your friends to vote for you. The top 5 videos will be selected via the public's online votes and will be announced at Google's Agile 2007 party.

  • Writing Maintainable Code

    Sam Gentile, Oren Eini (aka Ayende), and Frans Bouma have an ongoing debate in the .NET community about how to write maintainable code, which several others have joined. The debate mainly focuses on the question, if Test-Driven-Development (TDD), O/R-Mappers (ORM), Model-View-Presenter/Controller (MVP/MVC), and other best-practices help to improve the maintainability of software.

  • Agile, Architecture and the 5am Production Problem

    What does "just enough architecture" mean? Can we agree on this? The answers from FDD and XP seem divergent. Michael Nygard, author of Release It! unravels the story of a production problem which typical Agile approaches would not have prevented, asserting that Agile teams may need to attend more to architecture, if they want to sleep through the night once it's deployed in the real world.

  • Moonlight in 21 days

    In preparation for ReMix07 in Paris, the Mono team filled out the bones of their implementation of Silverlight with very impressive results.

  • Fun: New Programmatic Certification - WOMM Programme

    Jeff Attwood outlined a new programmatic Certification programme, WOMM (Works On My Machine), as an humorous mechanism for highlighting broken builds in a continuous build environment.

  • Presentation: Obie Fernandez on Agile DSL Development in Ruby

    Our own InfoQ Ruby editor gives you a primer on using Ruby to develop DSLs with our exclusive presentation from the JAOO conference in Denmark.

  • Second Annual 'State of Agile Development' Survey

    The second annual State of Agile Development Survey, sponsored by the Agile Project Leadership Network and VersionOne has been released. The survey is described as taking "5-7 minutes to complete approximately 20 questions". The results are completely anonymous, and will be presented at Agile 2007. Three Amazon gift certificates will be randomly drawn for participants.

  • Human Computer Interaction (HCI) and Agile compatibility

    Design in the Human Computer Interaction (HCI) world involves working with the user to understand the problem and come up with a user interface – typically on paper - of the entire system before turning it over, in Big Design Upfront (BDUF) manner, to the rest of the development team to build. So how can Robert Biddle claim that HCI has home-grown practices that are very similar to those of Agile?

  • Separating Views from Business Logic with Acropolis

    Microsoft's GUI toolkits tend to encourage developers to tightly couple business logic with presentation. Comparing the original VB and ASP or WinForms and ASP.Net, one sees very little change in this regard. Acropolis is different though, and for the first time since MFC it looks like Microsoft is taking the concept of separation of concerns seriously.

  • Agile Certification beyond the CSM...

    Scott Ambler delves once again into the subject of Agile Certification, airing the pros and cons of current certifications (namely the CSM), discusses potential elements of future qualifications. Is the ground swell of opinion growing for a wholesale change in Agile Certification, or is the CSM evolving enough to maintain community integrity?

  • Microsoft and Agile - Divergent Agendas?

    Martin Fowler has questioned Microsoft's grip on leading-edge developers. MS has threatened one developer with legal action over his TestDriven.Net extension for VisualStudio Express, and MS development of an incompatible rival to NUnit has alienated many developers. Is there a widening divide between MS and the Agile community, as each pursues different a vision? Now's the time to speak up.

  • Microsoft Releases eScrum 1.0 TFS-based Project Management Tool

    Microsoft has released eSCRUM 1.0, a Web-based project management tool for Scrum built on the Visual Studio Team Foundation Server platform. Project interaction is via web-based UI, Team Explorer, Excel, or Project. It provides a single place for all Scrum artifacts such as product backlog, sprint backlog, task management, retrospective, and reports.

  • Can Agile Separate Team Concerns from Organizational Ones?

    When it comes to agile methods, almost everyone agrees that agility can apply to the software development team and to the organization. This raises some questions: To what extent can the one be separated from the other? Can an agile team succeed if the organization around them doesn't wish to adapt to an agile approach?

  • Ruby x Agile: Matz explores the relationships between Ruby and Agile

    Ruby creator Yukihiro Matsumoto recently starred in the first of six short videos exploring the relationship between Ruby and Agile methodologies. Matz features along with Kenji Hiranabe and Shintaro Kakutani. Kenji is a self confessed ‘Agile agitator’ and Japanese translator of multiple XP/Agile books. Shintaro is a strong Ruby proponent.

  • Does Cost Accounting Cause Crappy Code?

    Cost accounting , the standard accounting approach to analyzing the monetary value of a project, treats all parts of a project independently and encourages local optimization. Local optimization of costs means that you focus on task completion time. A focus on minimizing task completion time means that you don't have time for refactoring and other niceties - they are too expensive.

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