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  • Presentation: Ken Schwaber on Code Quality as a Corporate Asset

    Scrum co-creator Ken Schwaber spoke at Agile2006 on code quality as a corporate asset. InfoQ presents video of his talk, The Canary in the Coalmine. Schwaber discussed how a degrading core codebase paralyses a team and negates any Agility gained through process improvement. He proposed strategies for management to identify, track and stop this downward spiral.

  • Experience Report: UK Identity-Fraud Firm uses Agile to Ship in 9 months

    Garlik, a UK based identify-fraud security company shared some of their recent success with Agile in an article on computer weekly. They built their main product, Datapatrol, from concept to completion in just 9 months and attributed their success to Agile practices and having a skilled dev team.

  • Mind Maps Foster Thorough Test Design

    In Better Software magazine, Robert Sabourin's article "X Marks the Test Case: Using Mind Maps for Software Design" shows how the practice of Mind Mapping helps with test design. The author says: "If you've run through the standard design approaches and still need that killer test case, try mind maps." And he goes on to suggest how to get started.

  • Casestudy: Effects of Scrum, 9 months later

    Richard Banks tried to introduce Scrum into his oraganization last year, resulting in "anarchy" due to not properly following the Scrum rules. Richard tried again and this time did it right. 9 months later, Richard looks back at how Scrum has changed his organization for the better.

  • Sharing What's Worked: Patterns for Adopting Agile Practices

    Organizations adopting Agile naturally ask these questions; "Where do I start?", "What specific practices should I adopt?", "How can I adopt incrementally?" and "Where can I expect pitfalls?" In this article, Amr Elssamadisy gives a glimpse into an ongoing effort to document Agile practice adoption patterns: Participants at XPday Montreal took a stab at "Simple Design" and "Pair Programming."

  • Common misconceptions about paired programming

    Paired programming is an agile practice that is the source of much debate. Martin Fowler has posted an article on common misconceptions with paired programming, suggesting that pair programming is not a requirement of XP, it does not halve productivity, and others.

  • InfoQ Book: Scrum Checklists

    SPRINT-iT and InfoQ have teamed to provide a new resource for Scrum teams: a downloadable quick-reference filled with basic definitions and checklists, intended to give trained teams confidence in accomplishing their first Sprints. This is an important resource, because early successes can increase acceptance of Scrum in their organizations and pave the way for greater management support.

  • TestDriven.NET 2.0 released

    TestDriven.NET 2.0 was released last week. TestDriven.NET 2.0 supports the TDD framework and supports all version of Visual Studio .NET. TestDriven.NET is a Visual Studio plug-in providing support for Nunit, MBUnit, and Visual Studio Team System.

  • Use Test Categorization for Agile Builds

    Everyone agrees that developer testing is important, but ever-lengthening build times can discourage running these tests with optimal frequency. Andrew Glover's new IBM DeveloperWorks article outlines a strategy to use categorized tests to ensure end-to-end system soundness, including examples on how to automatically sort and run tests by category, resulting in dramatically reduced build times.

  • European Leadership Summit at the Agile Business Conference 2006

    "Agile Business Conference 2006," will take place next week in London, Europe's largest Agile conference. The first day is dedicated to the Agile Project Leadership Network's "European Leadership Summit." The conference is specifically created to provide practical information to managers and leaders, and it allows attendees to interact directly with industry experts.

  • Gauntlet: Borland's Continous Integration server with defect isolation and trending

    Borland in early October released a beta of Gauntlet continous integration server. Like any continous integration server, Gauntlet automates build and testing but also provides change sandboxing, reporting and trending, failure correlation, replay alongside existing repositories, and easy access to build, test, and run previous project versions.

  • Book Excerpt: Agile Software Development, 2nd ed.

    In this updated classic on Agile software development, Alistair Cockburn adds reflections from five more years of practice and research. InfoQ brings you Chapter 1, in which he's compared software development with another team-cooperative game - rock climbing - and two common comparison partners, engineering and model building, in order to explore alternate ways of thinking about the work we do.

  • 2nd Edition of Alistair Cockburn's Classic Book Published

    Agile Software Development: The Cooperative Game (2nd ed.) by Alistair Cockburn launched this week, adding new insights in several new "Evolution" chapters. This seminal book for Agile practitioners is now expanded, addressing timely topics like: the controversial relationship between Agile methods and user experience design, Agile and CMMI, and writing "custom contracts."

  • How does Agile Development Shape Up in 2006? The VersionOne Survey

    VersionOne Software this autumn conducted a global "State of Agile Development" survey, showing that changing requirements and priorities, and time-to-market are drivers in the move to Agile adoption. Companies of all sizes were represented, up to the large global corporations, and every industry vertical, from financial services, health care, and education to video games, government, and defense.

  • Danube Releases ScrumWorks v1.8

    ScrumWorks, the free Agile project tracking software from Danube Technologies, this week announced the release of version 1.8, which adds a Product Import feature to bring existing projects into the tool, a number of customer-requested changes and significant performance enhancements.

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