InfoQ Homepage Agile Content on InfoQ
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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.
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Do We Need an "Agile Team Lead" Role?
Patrick Wilson-Welsh, Chris Beale, Gary Baker, John Huston, Daryl Kulak, and others are attempting to popularize the idea of a new role, the "Agile Team Lead", to supplant many of the existing leadership roles found in and around agile teams.
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When Agile Success is Eventually a Failure
It is often assumed that once the pilot Agile teams are successful, the process of Agile adoption is on the right track. Dave Nicolette shares very intriguing insights into situations where the adoption failed even after very successful pilot implementations.
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Individual Rewards on a Scrum Team
In a recent LinkedIn discussion the question was asked "Should we have an individual recognition reward on a Scrum team". This prompted some intense debate with points both for and against.
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Software Katas - Practice in Public Makes Perfect
Thought leaders in the agile community are talking about software katas - where one practices specific exercises until they are memorized. Robert Martin has calls them "performance art". Lately there has been an increase in blog posts and sites devoted to katas. The latest addition: weekly screencasts at katas.softwarecraftsmanship.org.
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System/Acceptance Testing with Time and Dates
Unit Testing Time and Dates is an often talked about problem with relatively simple solutions. More difficult is the acceptance/system testing with Time. What strategies are used?
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Refactor or Rewrite?
The goal of refactoring and rewriting is to improve the sanity of the system by improving the code readability, structure and clarity. A clean code would be easier to maintain and enhance. However, on many occasions Agile teams have a tough time deciding between the two.
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Test Driven Development and the Trouble with Legacy Code
Alan Baljeu was trying to use TDD with his large, legacy C++ code base. He found that the principle of the simplest thing that could possibly work was causing him trouble with the amount of rework.
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Looking Inward To Stop An Agile "Decline And Fall"
Discussions about agile's "decline and fall" have been a somewhat recurring theme here on the AgileQ, and in the community in general, centering around sentiments that people aren't adopting agile effectively, that they're doing it wrong and screwing it up. Kevin Schlabach poses the idea that the agile community itself, by not growing new leaders, has a hand in causing this.
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Tips to Select a Pilot Project for Agile Adoption
One of the most important factors which influences the success of Agile adoption is the set of learnings derived by applying Agile to a pilot project. These learnings significantly influence the organization to go ahead with Agile or fall back to their usual process. A wrong type of pilot could end up aborting, which would be a poor advertisement for the new process.
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Mindfulness and Agile Teams
At Oredev 2009 Marc Lesser gave a keynote titled "accomplishing more by doing less". Although not directly about Agile development, the topic will resonate with many Agile practitioners and is related to the success of self organizing teams.
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ScrumBan - Evolution or Oxymoron?
Kanban workshops, courses and conferences are springing up, and practicing Agilists are investigating what this method, adapted from Lean, offers their teams. Attractive benefits are cited, from revealing bottlenecks to happy teams experiencing more "flow". But thought leaders warn that Kanban's laid back approach is "kryptonite" to Scrum's call to resolve impediments immediately.