InfoQ Homepage Agile Content on InfoQ
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Presentation: Agile Project Management Planning and Budgetting
What happens to planning when teams "self organize"? Agile methods are empirical: plan it, do it, evaluate, plan again. David Hussman reviews practices for planning a project, release, iteration.
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Holacracy - The Self-Organizing Enterprise
The fit between Agile teams and traditional enterprises can be challenging. Agile may highlight or exacerbate pre-existent dysfunctions, in areas a project manager may not be well-placed to address, so those involved in Agile roll-outs are thinking about alternate ways to organize the enterprise. Holacracy, created at Ternary Software, suggests that self-organization can extend outside IT.
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Opinion: Agile Forgets the Human Factor
Kevin Brady, self-declared Agile critic, has a problem with Agile software development approaches: he feels that while they look great on paper. they fail to work in reality because they forget the human factor. Commenters on his blog entry question whether Agile or poor implementation lie at fault.
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Put People First in Agile Distributed Testing
Baiju Joseph's new article on StickyMinds argues that, in order to build an effective testing team for distributed Agile, we need to focus on individuals and interactions over processes and tools. Based on the author's experience in setting up distributed agile testing teams, he lists numerous criteria that must be met in order to reach this goal.
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Choosing a Continuous Integration Server
In the first of a series of articles on continuous integration Paul Duvall compares three popular continuous integration servers, Continuum, CruiseControl, and Luntbuild. He considers criteria such as features, longevity, target environment, and ease of use.
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New Forums at AgileSoftwareDevelopment.org
Agile veteran Ron Jeffries is a believer in the value of dialogue. So he's offering the Agile community a new resource, an Agile Forum, hoping it will be a brand-neutral, consultant-neutral place, open to and shared by everyone who is interested in advancing him- or herself in Agile, or in bringing Agile to the world. In XPmag, Ron's made an open invitation to both participants and volunteers.
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InfoQ Article: When and How to Formalize Business Rules
The terms "Agile software development" and "Business Agility" are confusing: are they orthogonal or complementary? James Taylor says that for even the most complex systems, Agile development can deliver business agility - particularly when supported by the right technology. For business rules he recommends a Rules Engine, and provides guidance in how to distinguish rules from requirements.
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No Bug Database?
James Shore, a recognized speaker and writer in the Agile space, has had a crazy idea: Get rid of your bug database. He's not advocating that teams ignore problems; but bug databases are often so packed with questions, feature requests, and defects that there's little hope of their all being resolved. Shore and some others in Extreme Programming circles think there's a better way.
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Opinion: Code Coverage Stats Misleading
John Casey recently spent some time refactoring Maven's assembly plugin, using coverage reporting to mark his progress and make sure he didn't break anything as he went. It didn't exactly go as planned - but at very least it was a learning experience. His conclusion: when you're seeking confidence through testing, perhaps the worst thing you can do is to look at a test coverage report.
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Conferences - Does Size Matter?
Agile2006 welcomed over 1100 participants from 29 countries, and offered over 200 different presentations. The exhilaration of a large crowd is undisputable, but now that it's over, it's important to look at the feedback in preparation for next year. Ron Jeffries has made an open invitation for feedback on his blog. Others are planning complementary, smaller events. What's the consensus?
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Selling Your Good Ideas
In this month's edition of StickyMinds, communications consultant Naomi Karten has written a short article "Developing Sales Savvy" which may help your new ideas reach the ear of a resistant colleague. She notes that, while sometimes you just get lucky, there are other times when *how* you sell can be as critical to your success as what you sell.
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InfoQ Interview: Jim Johnson, Creator of the CHAOS Chronicles
InfoQ editor Deborah Hartmann interviewed the creator of the CHAOS Chronicles, Standish Group founder and chairman Jim Johnson. The Standish Group's statistics on project failure are widely quoted, as they have been since the first survey results came out in 1994. Jim spoke with Deborah about his research, and the role of Agile in changing the IT industry.
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Is Project Status Relative?
Scott Ambler introduces a term for a familiar project phenomenon: the "green shift" that occurs when people rework status reports to make them more politically palatable to management. But can management actually handle the truth?
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Agile Coach = Agile Secret Police?
Software engineer Paul Tyma, in a recent blog entry, tells us "I don't get this new craze of a job called 'Agile Coach'. I mean, everything I've read about Agile and XP seems dead simple." Though not a proponent of Agile, Tyma has done XP, so perhaps there's a basis for his view that an Agile Coach is not so much a 'coach' as "a hall monitor or a secret police officer."
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Book Excerpt: Agile Retrospectives
InfoQ brings you an exclusive chapter excerpt from the recent book "Agile Retrospectives: Making Good Teams Great", by Esther Derby and Diana Larsen. These expert facilitators show how teams can run focused, helpful retrospectives themselves, without an outside facilitator. We asked the authors a few questions about the making of their book.