InfoQ Homepage Agile Content on InfoQ
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Comparing Apple, Google and Microsoft
A Gartner webinar (PDF) compares three major players in the software industry today - Apple, Google and Microsoft –, trying to see where they stand today, and how IT decisions will be affected by their competition with each other. TheOpenSourcery compared the same companies from a different perspective: agility and openness.
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Swarming: What's the Point?
Agile teams are encouraged to focus all their effort, as much as possible, on one story at a time--a practice known as "swarming." But why do this? What are the benefits you can expect to see by swarming each story?
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Hearing From Real Customers at Agile 2011
The Working with Customers stage at Agile 2011 is looking for stories and submissions from customers of agile teams. The stage explores the interactions between the customer community and Agile development teams, focusing on the non-technology functions as well as the Agile development teams themselves. In this item the stage producers answer questions and appeal to real world customers.
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Scrum Project Estimation Beyond the Near-Term?
How can you estimate the effort required for an entire Scrum project when Scrum only recommends doing task breakdowns for the next one or two sprints? Should we even try to estimate project effort in the mid- to long-term?
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Getting the Customer Involved
Agile methods place a strong emphasis on customer feedback and interaction. Projects with involved customers have much higher chances of success than projects which lack customer interaction. So, how do Agile teams keep the customer involved.
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How To Complete Stories Without Leaving Bugs Behind
What can you do when unacceptable numbers of stories are "done" with development, but they still have many quality problems?
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Does Agile Limit Financial Rewards for an Individual?
Tom Reynolds mentioned an interesting comment, that he had heard about the reluctance of people to move to Scrum. The reason quoted was that Scrum would have a direct impact on their financial rewards as it places a lot of emphasis on teams and not the individual.
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Should We Move a Failed Story Back?
What should we do with a story on our task board when it fails testing?
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Agile/Scrum Retrospectives–Tips and Tricks
Retrospectives and feedback loops are at the heart of any successful Agile/Scrum implementation. They’re the tool we use to help teams improve. Yet in two day introduction to Agile classes they often get glossed over. Lacking time trainers (including this one) often race through the topic outlining only one simple type of retrospectives.
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Code is the Culprit! Always?
Multiple reasons can be quoted for the failure of software projects. Some projects fail because of bad requirements, others due to cost and schedule overrun and few simply due to bad management. If we do a root cause analysis, would all of the failed projects lead to bad code as the main culprit? Always?
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Is the Agile Retrospective Prime Directive Patronizing?
Angela Harms recently blogged about the Agile Retrospective Prime Directive. She discusses how the language of the prime directive around "everyone doing their best" could be seen as patronizing and insulting to team members. Other commentators who have discussed the intent of the Prime Directive include Esther Derby and George Dinwiddie. How useful is the Retrospective Prime Directive?
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How to Convince the Product Owner to Prioritize the Backlog?
Scrum works most effectively with a prioritized product backlog. Prioritizing the backlog is part of the product owner role, but what can you do when your product owner won't prioritize the backlog because he or she doesn't see the value in prioritization?
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Released: Aldon Agile Manager
Last week on December 1st Aldon released the Aldon Agile Manager and InfoQ spoke with Dan Magid, Chief Product Strategist of Aldon, about this new product. Agile Manager is a free agile project management tool meant to provide better planning, prioritization and collaboration.
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How To Pay Down Technical Debt
Technical debt can be difficult to connect directly to customer value, but delivering customer value is what Agile processes are all about. So how can we track and reduce technical debt in an Agile development environment?
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Get Back To Work!
Hitting a kanban limit introduces slack into an organization by temporarily stopping the work that feeds into a bottleneck. So how can you convince management that introducing a kanban limit (i.e. stopping work) could actually be a good thing?