InfoQ Homepage Agile Content on InfoQ
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Enabling and Sustaining High Performing Teams
Agile practices should foster high-performance self-organizing teams. It is important that high-performance equals value delivery, to ensure that the team solves the right problem. It is also important to create an environment where high-performance can flourish which requires thinking and action at a management level. We examine three commentators perspectives on enabling high performance.
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Is Velocity Killing Agile?
Velocity, the measure of work completed by the team divided by the time taken to complete it, is increasingly being used to manage the productivity of a team and as a comparison between teams. Jim Highsmith, Mark Levison, and Scott Ambler discuss the misuse of velocity as a productivity measure.
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Are Project Managers the Problem?
Do projects succeed in spite of the project manager role? A recent Computerworld article suggests that poor selection and promotion of project managers is at the root of most project failures. This article takes a deeper dive on this notion.
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IT Projects: 400% Over-Budget and only 25% of Benefits Realized
An alarming study by Flyvbjerg and Budzier published in the Harvard Business Review has made everyone stand-up and take notice. The coherent advice being that IT projects are much more riskier than we think.
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Software Development as Risk Management
Should software development look to finance for planning risk and uncertainty? That question recently surfaced in a debate about the “Last Responsible Moment” decision making practice in agile software development. This article covers some recent trends and debate around using finance concepts for risk management and planning in software development.
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The Questions when Measuring Agile Adoption
There have been numerous attempts over the years to determine the best way to measure the effectiveness of an Agile adoption. Some recent articles have reignited the debate around the most useful metrics.
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Can Agile Development Work in Hardware Projects?
With the take up of Agile approaches in the software world, some commentators in the hardware space have been asking how these techniques can be applied and used in the development of hardware-intensive systems. Two recent articles provide advice and guidance on possible ways to gain the benefits of Agile development in the hardware realm.
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Known vs Unknown
Whether to use waterfall or agile methods should be determined by how well known the problem and solution are. That is the assessment from David J Blant, owner of Scrumology.
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Stop Thinking During Refactoring
Refactoring is a technique for changing the internal structure of the program without changing its external behavior. On the face of it, refactoring seems to involve a good amount of thinking, however, too much thinking could be detrimental as well.
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Moving Ops from black to white box
During his talk at DevOps Days in Gothenburg Mitchell Hashimoto, co-author of Vagrant and system admin at Kiip, proposed an experience-based roadmap for moving organizations from a traditional black box ops culture to an (ideal) white box culture where developers are free to change the production environment.
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Sustainable Pace – What’s it mean and how to achieve it?
The Agile Leaders newsgroup recently had a discussion on establishing and maintaining a sustainable pace of work, often in the face of organizational pressure for teams and individuals to work longer and longer hours. The contributors provided some concrete ideas and specific advice, as well as discussing why this situation occurs.
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Individuals and Interactions are Important, but so are Processes and Tools
There has been a lot of discussion recently about the tension inherent in the Agile Manifesto value "individuals and interactions over processes and tools". This item examines some of the points that have been made.
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Is it Time to Stop Estimating User Stories?
Most new Agile teams transition from hours based estimates to relative estimation using story points, but do we even need estimates at all?
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Tasktop Sync Supports Application Lifecycle Management Synchronization
The new release of Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) tool Tasktop supports an ALM synchronization solution that addresses the visibility and traceability needs of the software development teams. Tasktop team announced the release of Tasktop Sync 1.0 version last month. They also recently released Tasktop Dev 2.1 version which builds on Eclipse Indigo release of Mylyn 3.6.
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How Long Would it Take to Build the Product?
This is one the frequent questions asked by the customer. It is a question that makes an Agile team uncomfortable. On one hand, estimating an entire product functionality without actually starting work is ridden with flaws, however in many circumstances, it is a practical question which teams cannot ignore.