InfoQ Homepage Agile Content on InfoQ
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What can Math and Psychology teach us about Agile?
With Agile, we avoid early commitments to gain flexibility later. APLN members Chris Matts and Olav Maassen have noted a connection here with the math behind financial options. Their article introduces "Real Options," applying both psychology and financial math to our thinking about Agile practices. They propose it will help us refine our agile practices and take agile in new directions.
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Article: Unit-Testing XML
In this exclusive InfoQ article, Stefan Bodewig explains how to use the XMLUnit Java framework to write tests in the presence of XML.
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InfoQ Turns One Year Old!
InfoQ officially launched exactly one year ago today, and what a year it has been! Our mission is to be the world's source for tracking change and innovation in the enterprise software development community; in keeping with that mission InfoQ has published a crazy amount of content, launched our QCon event in London, launched InfoQ China, and have reached over 135,000 unique visitors/month.
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Can Virtual Teams Ever Work?
Co-location is one of the cornerstones of Scrum, so the increasing trend toward non-co-located teams raises questions on how Agile can work in such an environment. David Churchville has blogged some common distributed team scenarios, and offered solutions to common pitfalls of delivering Agile projects using different types of distributed teams.
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Agile2007 Conference Program Announced
The Agile2007 conference program was announced today to entice those still on the fence about attending this year's event in Washington, D.C. from August 13-17. Of note: a keynote by Erich Gamma on "Scaling-up Agility The Eclipse Way," the APLN Leadership Symposium, a new Research-in-Progress Workshop on Agile Software Engineering and the new Conference-Within-A-Conference, fondly known as CWAC.
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Incremental Software Development without Iterations
David Anderson described how his team is using a kanban system for their sustaining engineering (maintenance and bug fixing) activities. Iterations have been dropped although software is still released every two weeks. Work is scheduled, monitored, and run via a "kanban board" and daily stand-up meetings.
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Frequent Retrospectives Accelerate Learning and Improvement
When we seek process improvement by discarding traditional SDLC rules, how should we work? Retrospectives are a tool teams can use to reflect on their process and improve it gradually over time. In this article, Rachel Davies offers help for teams who have ideas for improvements but are not sure how to get them off the ground.
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Promising Your Way to Agility
In Harvard Business Online this week, Donald L Sull and Charles Spinosa wrote about the practice Promise Based Management - using promised commitments in the organisation to enable organisational agiity, encourage entrepreneurship and stimulate collaboration.
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Aligning Agile with Enterprise Goals
Agile methods have achieved a level of success and respect within development teams, but it is not always easy to extend these methods beyond the development team. In Investing in Agile: Aligning Agile with Enterprise Goals, Dan Murphy and Dave Rooney stated that IT project management has evolved with agile methods, but that the enterprise hasn't followed suit.
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100% Test Coverage?
How much testing is enough? The answer varies depending on whom you ask. On one end of the spectrum, some say you should strive to achieve 100% test coverage. Others say it doesn't matter, that you should just rely on the quality of the tests, and that measuring test coverage does not tell you anything about the quality of the tests and the code being tested.
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If Agile is So Good, Why Isn't Everyone Doing It?
On CIO.com, Thomas Wailgum wrote about why, despite the evidence, Agile adoption remains at a steady, rather than explosive growth. He posde questions to CIO's of a number of Fortune 500 organisations in his article "How Agile Development Can Lead to Better Results and Technology-Business Alignment."
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Brian Marick Proposes Refocusing the Agile Alliance
In response to his "disquiet in the state of Agile", Brian Marick proposed a refocusing of the Agile Alliance. After Rachel Davies stepped down from being the chair of the Agile Alliance, Marick ran on the platform of following through on his proposal, and was elected. Brian Marick is looking for help to "stir things up". Join in the conversation and add your voice.
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Refactoring the Agile Manifesto
The Agile Manifesto is six years old. Many have become disillusioned with Agile as it has spread and (inevitably?) been diluted. Post-agilism has been discussed even before Agile has become truly mainstream. Some have suggested that we have learned much over these years and the Agile Manifesto needs to be updated.
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Interview: Linda Rising on Collaboration, Bonobos and the Brain
Seasoned practitioners packed a small room at Agile2006 to hear Linda Rising's "Are Agilists the Bonobos of the Software Community?" where she shared her thoughts on the evolutionary roots of teamwork. In this InfoQ interview, Linda talked with editor Deborah Hartmann about how writing her book "Fearless Change" led her to read on the science of the human brain and the social rituals of apes.
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Accurate Estimates - the ultimate oxymoron?
Amit Rathore questions the value of real time task based estimates in the planning and execution of software projects, taking a lean stance on what they bring to the software delivery party.