InfoQ Homepage Agile Content on InfoQ
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Opinion: Agile Success Is Not Dependent on Agile Techniques
The marvelous successes of Agile teams in the past, present, and future are fact. But so are the failures: the cases of 'fragile' adoption, 'we suck less' adoption, and many other cases where Agile teams fail to produce great software and/or fail to effect the organization as a whole. Is this something that can be addressed and 'fixed' or is Agile development only useful for a some teams?
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Adaptive Reuse - Lessons from civil engineering
Software engineers frequently take issue with the sequential development processes that are believed to be at the core of civil engineering – in answer to the “why can’t you build software like they build bridges” criticism sometimes levered at software development. The reality is that civil engineering projects frequently apply approaches that Agilists will recognise.
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Agile Retroflection of the Day
Retroflection is a concept in which one substitutes self for environment, as in doing to self what one wants to do to someone else or doing for self what one wants someone else to do for self. Introspection is a form of retroflection that can be pathological or healthy. Based on a similar concept Yves Hanoulle started the Agile Retroflection of the day project.
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Minibook: Scrum and Kanban: Making the Most of Both
Scrum and Kanban are two flavours of Agile software development - two deceptively simple but surprisingly powerful approaches to software development. So how do they relate to each other? The new InfoQ minibook by Henrik Kniberg and Mattias Skarin, Kanban and Scrum - making the most of both, clears up the fog so you can figure out how Kanban and Scrum might be useful in your environment.
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Estimating Business Value
The traditional agile approach to prioritization is that user stories of higher business value should be implemented before ones of lower business value. The concept is simple, but implementing it well relies on having a mechanism to assess business value. Pascal Van Cauwenberghe has recently described an approach to defining business value, called "Business Value Modeling", which may help.
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Overlapped or Synchronized Sprints?
When a Scrum project grows, so do the team members. The suggested way of managing a growing team is to split the team into multiple teams keeping in line with the Agile recommended team sizes. However, there could be multiple communication and coordination problems when each team starts working in a sprint of their own.
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Reasons for Delay in an Agile Project
A delay, in general, is getting something done later than it was scheduled for thereby causing distress and inconvenience. Likewise, a delay is considered to be a waste in the Agile terminology. A delay causes discontinuity and thereby causes other wastes like relearning, task switching etc. A few Agilists discuss the common delays and ways to resolve them.
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Stabilization Sprints, A Necessary Evil or Pure Waste?
Stabilization sprints are an additional number of sprints added to the end of the normal development cycle before shipping the product. As the name suggests, they’re usually added to shake down the product one last time and drive the last of the bugs. Do they belong in Agile environment or should "Done" be enough.
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Five Benefits of Feature Teams
Mike Cohn and others present their case to why you should consider structuring your teams around software "features" rather than software "components".
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When ScrumMaster Becomes the Impediment ...
A ScrumMaster as the name suggests is the guardian of the scrum process. He is a change agent supporting his team and socializing Scrum throughout the organization. He ensures smooth functioning of the team by eradicating impediments and keeping the team shielded from distractions. However, in certain scenarios, Agile teams feel that the Scrum Master is the biggest impediment.
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QCon London March 10-12 Announced
The 4th annual QCon London (March 10-12) has been announced and registration is open! QCon London has become a mainstay conference for the UK and European software development community. This year continues in our tradition of practitioner-driven high quality content with over 15 tracks and 100 speakers including keynotes from GoF author Ralph Johnson and Smalltalk Guru Dan Ingalls and more.
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Social Contracts Facilitate Team Commitment
Formalised social contracts provide a structure to help reduce the fear, uncertainty and doubt associated with organisational change, and can enable an Agile transition to go more smoothly. Israel Gat provides an example of the social contract he used at BMP Software.
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Teaching Games - Fun or Serious Business?
Michael McCullough and Don McGreal, creators of the Tasty Cupcakes teaching games website, have published an article on "Fun Driven Development." The economic downturn hasn't squeezed these games out of our training programs - in fact, they've become a staple where Agilists gather to exchange ideas. Here's a little history and some starting points for using games with your teams.
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What do you do, Testing or Checking?
Software testing is an empirical investigation conducted to provide stakeholders with information about the quality of the product or service under test. However, this definition does not talk about sapience which brings about a subtle difference between testing and checking. Michael Bolton talked about this difference and the reason why there should be a difference between the two.
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Maintainable Automated Acceptance Tests
Automated tests that are brittle and expensive to maintain have led to companies abandoning test automation initiatives, according to Dale Emery. In a newly published paper, Dale shares some practical ways to avoid common problems with test automation. He starts with some typical automation code and evolves in ways that make it more robust, and less expensive to maintain.