InfoQ Homepage Agile Content on InfoQ
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QCon Live: What's Happening at QCon London This Week?
This week, the fourth annual QCon London is in progress. Starting on March 8th with tutorials and ending on March 12th with a "meet the speakers" social, there will be a lot happening. This article describes the many ways that readers can follow along with the events at QCon as they are happening.
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What is Story Point? Are they Necessary?
Michael de la Maza asks the question what exactly is a Story Point? He went looking for an answer and found many: “Story points represent nebulous units of time.” or “Story point is a random measure used by Scrum teams. This is used to measure the effort required to implement a story.”
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The Open UP Debate
Following on from the discussion of the various flavours of Unified Process, there is some debate about the OpenUP process framework - is it Agile, or a reactionary result of the move to lighter processes?
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Uncovering Serious Flaws of Agile and Scrum
Software development is known to be a creative process. The failure of traditional methods, where the dynamic environment of software development was ignored, made Agile methods fairly popular. There has been a growing adoption of Agile methodologies, particularly Scrum. However, is everything all right with Agile? Kai Gilb does not think so. He suggested that there are serious flaws with Agile.
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Rules for Better Retrospectives
James Carr recently published a list of five rules to help improve the effectiveness of retrospectives. The rules are based on his experiences in hundreds of retrospectives, both successful and not.
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Experiment Driven Development - The Post-Agile Way
TDD and BDD are now widely-used software development techniques. However, solely following TDD & BDD may still lead to missed business opportunities, or worse, a negative impact to the business. Two questions which TDD & BDD are unable to answer are: How do you measure the usage of your application? How do you get feedback from your customers? Is Experiment-Driven Development (EDD) the answer?
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Agile Team Spaces: Do's and Don'ts
Many of us, who are new to Agile, would believe that putting an Agile team together in a room gets the job done. A few of us would actually pay attention to what makes a room a team room which can enhance productivity and motivation. Many Agile teams have already shared their perspective on what would make an ideal team room. Here are a few recent ones.
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A Critique of the Pomodoro Technique
Is the pomodoro technique really all it's cracked up to be? Are we over-analyzing the issue and creating complexity where none is needed? Mario Fusco shared his critique of the pomodoro technique with InfoQ and we are sharing it with our readers along with many others.
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The Various Flavors of Unified Process
The Rational Unified Process(RUP) was developed through the 1990's as a framework for software engineering best practices. Features such as iterations, simplicity, focus on value and regular feedback were identified as being important for Asuccessful software engineering. A number of authors have built methodologies that adapt UP to different project domains. This article examines some of them.
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Deciphering Burndown Charts
Burndown charts are considered to be one of the most useful information radiators on an Agile team. It is a graphical representation of amount of work left to do (y-axis) versus time (x-axis). The interesting part is that the analysis of the burndown chart can reveal multiple pointers on how the team is doing and what can they do to improve further.
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QCon London in One Month: 103 Speakers, 107 Sessions, 500+ Attendees
QCon London is in 1 month! The final schedule is now online and features 103 speakers and 107 sessions on key topics designed for senior developers, team leads, architects in enterprise software development shops. The last chance to save £196 expires in 2 weeks.
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Scrum/Agile Failings or the Theses of Uncle Bob Martin
In response to a question about the Inherit Shortcomings of Scrum/Agile - Uncle Bob Martin penned (in the spirit of Martin Luther), 7 theses: No Technical Practices, 30 Day Sprints are too long, Scrum Master sometimes turns into Project Manager, Scrum carries an anti-management undercurrent, and others.
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Is Scrum Certification Having Another Makeover?
Scrum Certification is one debate that refuses to die down. First, it was about the hollow nature of certification for which there was a comment “Pay the tuition, sit through a couple days of class, and you're in”. Subsequently a new format was devised, which too failed to enthuse the Agilists who were against this certification philosophy. Is there another makeover on the anvil?
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What Really Motivates Workers
In a recent Harvard Business Review article Teresa M. Amabile and Steven J Kramer challenged the commonly held mnagement belief that Recognition is the most motivating and positive factor in the workplace. Their multi-year study tracked the motivation and emotions of hundreds of knowledge workers and identified POGRESS as the single most important factor for individual motivation in the workplace
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Comparing Velocity Across Teams
A common project management criticism is that since the story points vary across teams, there is no way to ascertain one teams progress with respect to the other. Amongst Agilists there is a general consensus that comparing velocity across teams is an anti pattern and is best avoided lest the overall productivity should suffer.