InfoQ Homepage Agile Content on InfoQ
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Does Value Stream Mapping Work for Software Development?
Value stream mapping is a lean manufacturing technique used to analyze the flow of materials and information required to bring a product or service to a consumer. This process was successfully implemented in the manufacturing industry by Toyota and has been mapped to software development too. Does software development follow the same path as manufacturing?
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Who Wants This User Story?
Some user stories defy easy assignment of their benefits to a particular person. But how can we satisfy the standard "As a ... I want ... so that I can ...." user story template if we can't express who wants this work done?
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Blog Series - The State of Agile
The Agile Scout blog has put out a call for comments on The State of Agile. So far ten commentators have confirmed their willingness to contribute. The first five entries have been posted and some of their key points are reported in this news item. An eclectic group of authors from a wide range of backgrounds are providing their thoughts on how Agile has changed and where it is headed.
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Tobias Mayer on Scrum Alliance
Tobias Mayer held a high-profile role at the Scrum Alliance. He quit, and wrote a scathing blog post about the Scrum Alliance. In that post, he questions the Scrum knowledge of the leaders, questions the integrity of the Scrum Alliance board, and asserts that that the Scrum Alliance "has become the epitome of the dysfunctional organization that Scrum practitioners are committed to transforming."
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Are There Better Estimation Techniques for Experienced Teams?
The results of software estimation are important for stakeholders to take care of team allocation and budgeting. A widely prevalent technique to estimate in Agile has been Planning Poker, which is a consensus based. Does this way of estimating take too much time? Are there other methods which can be employed by experienced practitioners?
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Big Changes at Scrum Alliance
The Scrum Alliance has a new Managing Director, Donna Farmer. She issued an introductory email to Scrum Alliance members on Wednesday, soliciting feedback on the organization, and providing her email and phone number. Earlier, former creative director of the Scrum Alliance Tobias Mayer summarily quit his role in the organization, later making mention of the Scrum Alliance in a volatile blog post.
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Tips for Release Planning with Distributed Scrum
With teams in the US and India, how does one make release planning work? What if the team isn't even able to do their planning at the same time because of the time difference?
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Scrum Does Not Have a ProductMaster Role
A common question across multiple forums is about the acceptability of combining the ScrumMaster and Product Owner role. While most Agilists believe that these roles are like oil and water, there are situations where combining them might be inevitable.
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Constantine on combining Agile and User Experience
Usability and Teamwork author and consultant Larry Constantine recently wrote two articles about the “Interfaith Marriage” between experience design and agile development. He examines the inherent conflict between the agile and UX perspectives and provides some concrete advice on how to integrate the two into a creative and productive union.
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QCon San Francisco in 3 Weeks; Conference Highlights
The 4th annual QCon San Francisco is taking place just 3 weeks from now, the chance to register is quickly approaching. The program includes three conference days with over 80 speakers in 15 tracks covering a wide variety of relevant and exciting topics in software development today. Attendance has increased 15% over last year, we hope you'll be able to join us!
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Does Agile Promote Perpetual Beta?
Agile software development promotes teamwork, collaboration, and process adaptability throughout the life-cycle of the project. More often than not, this also leads to a lower time to market with a minimum marketable feature set. New features are slipped in every iteration and often the product remains in perpetual beta.
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Sociology and Scrum
The Scrum Master job requires skills in diplomacy-- and effective communication. Team members must also communicate effectively. Tools for accomplishing these "soft-skill" tasks are now freely available. A detailed book about one of these useful tools entitled SOFTWARE FOR YOUR HEAD, is over 400 pages in total, and is now available-- free to the world in PDF format.
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Selling Scrum to Your Manager?
Trying to Sell Scrum to Management? Failing and wondering why? This often happens in the days after someone returns from a CSM course ready to help change the world.
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Constraints are Advantages in Disguise
Building software is closely associated with managing a lot of constraints. These constraints might be in terms of time, money, technology, decisions, compatibility, regulatory, people, process or all of the above. Jim Bird discussed the constraints imposed by Scrum, XP and how they help in fostering creativity and building the right software.
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Agile Australia - Opening Keynotes
There were two opening keynote addresses at the recent Agile Australia conference in Melbourne - Jim Highsmith spoke on "Beyond Scope, Schedule and Cost – Optimizing Value" and Jeff Smith spoke about Suncorp's Agile transition and how they are extending Agile approaches into the wider business areas in a talk titled "Delivering Business Value with Agile".