InfoQ Homepage Agile Content on InfoQ
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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.
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IT Hiring Trend: Business Savvy Mandatory
Ziff Davis' August surveys find that IT is growing in all sectors, leading to increased IT hiring. And though execs express a significant preference for IT professionals with a head for business over technical wizards, they anticipate these will be hard to find. Particularly in demand are professionals in project management, business-process redesign, business analysis and systems integration.
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Opinion: Inability to Adopt Agile May Signal Bigger Problems
Peter Coffee, IT industry veteran, blogged on the recent Digital Focus survey of the state of Agile practice, noting that obstacles to Agile adoption are also general danger signs of development dysfunction.
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Welcome to InfoQ's Agile Community Site
On InfoQ our Agile editors/practitioners scan the web to bring you news that helps you keep up with new ideas to improve your own Agile practice, as well as exclusive videos and articles on important and novel subjects. Here we bring you a tag cloud, a introduction to the site with some background on Agile and a few resources for newcomers, as well as the public AgileEvents calendar.
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Tackle Testing Debt Incrementally
Technical debt can shorten a product's life. But when technical debt mounts, it can be difficult to see how to pay it off. In her StickyMinds column, Johanna Rothman explains practices to help teams start paying off that debt - thereby easing their product's development and maintenance for a long time.
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Industry Survey Reveals The Bitter Truth About IT ROI
A Ziff-Davis CIO Insight survey on Business Value reveals little improvement in how, or how well, IT is measuring value, even though most firms now try to use metrics such as IRR, NPV, return on assets, or activity-based costing. There's no consensus or consistency on which measures to use, or when to use them. And half of respondents doubt that the measures are even accurate.
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NAG Continuous Integration Monitor Announced
Digital Focus has announced their open source "NAG" continuous integration tool, which monitors the stability of multiple application servers and notifies users of software build failures via audible and visual cues. Ready now for Apache Continuum, and already working to support Cruise Control, Lunt Build, and Ant Hill monitoring, this tool is specifically designed to support Agile teams.
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Interview: Real-World Agile for .NET Developers
Kathleen Richards interviews Robert C. Martin about his new book, co-authored with his son Micah: "Agile Principles, Patterns and Practices in C#," which puts Agile practices to work in a .NET environment,
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Tips for Effective Kaizen Process Improvement
Agile software development and Lean Thinking go hand-in-hand for many practitioners. Six-Sigma blackbelt Mike Wroblewski has blogged some lessons learned from a recent kaizen session. People are a key variable in both manufacturing and software environments, so his lessons learned in manufacturing are also interesting for Lean Software practitioners using kaizen events for process improvement.
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Survey: The State of Agile in Practice
In March Scott Ambler surveyed over 4,200 people to discover the actual rate of Agile process adoption and effectiveness. His conclusion: Agile is not only growing in popularity, it's working so well that adopting an Agile approach appears to be an incredibly low-risk choice. Ambler recently published not only his conclusions but also the raw data he collected.
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Opinion: Working in isolation breeds mistakes
Should the team room be a sanctuary? or a jazz improv session? On butUncleBob.com, Tim Ottinger blogs about his belief that the quiet bullpen is where mistakes are born, and allowed to breed.
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Interviewing for Agile Teams Podcast
Team dynamics can dramatically affect team performance, so staffing teams well is a critical success factor. Rob Myers, an Extreme Programming coach, has recorded a podcast "Interviewing Techniques for Staffing Lean-Agile Teams."