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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.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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?

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • Interview With Aslak Hellesøy on Cucumber For .NET

    InfoQ has interviewed Aslak Hellesøy, the creator of Cucumber on its recent support for .NET. Cucumber is an acceptance testing tool for Behaviour Driven Development (BDD). At Agile2009, InfoQ’s Mark Levison reported from the Functional Test Tools Workshop that Matt Wynne and Richard Lawrence started to work on a .NET solution for Cucumber, later to be named Cuke4Nuke.

  • Agile is Micromanagement

    Micromanagement, often has a negative connotation associated with it. It is a management style where a manager closely observes or controls the work of his or her subordinates or employees. Usually Agile development and micromanagement may seem to be opposite ends of spectrum however, they are more related than what meets the eye.

  • Tasktop Pro 1.6 Supports Task Management for C/C++ Projects and Automated Time Tracking

    The latest version of Tasktop Pro, Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) integration suite for Eclipse IDE, supports cross-repository linking, task management focus for C/C++ Projects and agile ALM tool integration. Tasktop Technologies, creators of Eclipse Mylyn and Tasktop, announced last week the release of Tasktop Pro 1.6 version. The new release also supports automated time-tracking feature.

  • What is a Good Agile Metric?

    What is an appropriate Agile Metric? If traditional measures like: Earned Value, Hours Worked, Lines of Code, Code Coverage for Tests are not well suited to Agile Projects, then what is? What rules can we define that will help us choose good Agile metrics?

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