InfoQ Homepage Agile Content on InfoQ
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The Creeping Featuritis Chart
Creeping Featuritis is an insidious sort of product rot, reducing useful software into heaps of expensive widgets and aggravating help features. Peter Abilla brings us a chart by Kathy Sierra, capturing what it looks like from the customer's point of view, and reminds us to "focus on the customer and abandon the competitor-focused strategy all-together."
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Measuring Performance in the Adaptive Enterprise
Traditional thinking has turned budgets into fixed performance contracts that force managers at all levels to commit to specified financial outcomes, despite the fact that many of the underlying variables are beyond their control. As Agility increases the futility of this exercise becomes apparent. Thought-leader Jim Highsmith proposes a helpful alternative more harmonious with Agile values.
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Naked Agile and Naked Skydiving
Prompted by recent discussions on the ScrumDevelopment list, Alistair Cockburn and Jeff Patton sound a call to focus on the basics: "Listening, Designing, Coding, Testing. That's all there is to software. Anyone who tells you different is selling something."
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Throwing the Keyboard is Not the Answer
Conflict is inevitable at work. Sooner or later, you will disagree about what to test, when to test, or how long to test software. How you approach the conflict affects the outcome and, more lastingly, how you feel about the exchange. On StickMinds last week, Esther Derby looked at some of the ways we approach conflict and how they affect solutions - and relationships.
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Tech Stories Need to Include People and Technology
Brian Marick, reflecting on conversations heard at Agile2006, blogged about his concern that some of us are telling stories from the purely human or social viewpoint, while other are telling technology-only stories, noting that that XP isn't a story you can tell well without talking about both of these. Marick encourages us to include both when we communicate in and about projects.
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Agile, Orthodoxy and a Message From God
A long and complex thread on the ScrumDevelopment list, set off by the phrase "Agile 2.0," has been exploring the past and future of Agile methodologies (for good or ill) including so-called "next generations" approaches like AUP, MSF Agile, and AMDD. Ron Jeffries, Ken Schwaber and Scott Ambler are just a few of the serious agilists who participated in this lively conversation.
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Does Agile Dispense with Project Managers?
Agile does away with many of the tasks by which Project Managers formerly measured their own performance. The Product Owner and Dev Team take on these activities, leaving PMs confused and wondering: "Am I redundant?" Agile coach Michele Sliger offers some reassurance, mapping PMI PMBOK practice areas to new Agile practices in her whitepaper "A Project Manager's Survival Guide to Going Agile".
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Hanselminutes Podcast on Scrum Project Management
Scott Hanselman, a Certified Scrum Master at Corillian, has posted a podcast on the Scrum project management methodology. He uses Scrum in his own projects and feels that Scrum makes Agile approachable and easy to grasp. He goes over just-in-time task-level estimation, velocity, how burndown charts help forecast delivery dates, and the concept of when a feature can be considered really "done".
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InfoQ Article: Using Logging Seams for Legacy Code Unit Testing
Ian Roughley shows how to use logging seams to easily create unobtrusive unit tests around legacy classes, without needing to edit class logic as well as avoiding behavior changes.
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Mary and Tom Poppendieck Discuss Their Next Book
Bob Payne interviewed Mary and Tom Poppendieck at Agile2006 about their next Lean book, which focuses even more on software than the last. Mary summarizes it as "So you think Agile is a good idea: now what?" saying it will help people get started with Lean, going beyond the recipes of the first book to provide practical information and case studies to help teams do their own process experiments.
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Leveraging the Wisdom of Project Newcomers
Experienced newcomers can't be onboarded like programmers just out of school. The experienced professional will have specific but difficult-to-anticipate gaps that will impede their performance. In addition, this provides a great opportunity to get a fresh but experienced feedback on your processes. Gannthead.com offers some pointers wrapped in three fictional Dr. Phil episodes... (really?)
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Microsoft Counting On Scrum and XP
When Microsoft launched SQL Server 2005 last fall, ending a five-year wait for major revisions, Steve Ballmer acknowledged "It's been a bit long in the making, we're committed to a much closer cycle time."eWeek reports that they will do this using agile development methodologies, such as XP and Scrum. Yet they won't mandate methodology, stressing product quality instead to encourage improvement
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Reviews Mixed on Google's New Project Hosting Service
Last week Google announced a new hosting service for open-source projects. Developer comments around the web have been mixed. Some developers have been impressed with the service while others feel underwhelmed.
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InfoQ Article: Agile - The SOA Hangover Cure
Carl Ververs, an expert on SOA Integration writes about the application of "Agile" development philosophies and methodologies in order to build a sustainable and valuable SOA system.
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Agile Alliance Announces Leadership Changes for 2007
On Friday, following the close of the Agile2006 conference, the Agile Alliance announced their new leaders for the 2006-2007 program year. At the annual conference, Agile Alliance members voted seven new members to its board from the slate of candidates mailed out earlier this year, increasing board membership by two members to its maximum of 12.