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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.

  • 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?

  • Uncle Bob On The Applicability Of TDD

    Following up a pot-stirring blog where he asserted that "anyone who continues to think that TDD slows you down is living in the stone age", Bob Martin takes a stab at providing some deeper insight into the real applicability, role, and benefit of TDD.

  • Who Moved Our Project Stakeholder

    A project stakeholder for an Agile team is a person having a valuable stake in the success of the project and could also be potentially holding the cash strings for the project. However, sometimes it is very difficult to get time slices from the project stakeholder. In other extreme cases, the stakeholder might seem to be uninterested or completely missing in action.

  • Improving Distributed Retrospectives

    Many consider the retrospective to be an agile team’s most powerful tool for continuous improvement. The retrospective captures learning and insights while experiences are fresh, and the lessons are immediately applied to the teams on-going work. A discussion on the Retrospectives Yahoo Group examined how to adapt a retrospective to work across multiple sites, with a distributed team.

  • Jean Tabaka at Agile Australia 2009

    Jean Tabaka spoke at the Agile Australia 2009 conference in Sydney on 15+16 October. Her keynote talk titled "12 Agile Adoption Failure Modes", in which she identified a dozen common roadblocks that can prevent effective transformation to Agile techniques in organizations.

  • Is Leading Self-Organisation like Conducting an Orchestra?

    Traditional management models don't tell leaders how to support their Agile teams without undermining their emerging self-organisation. Allusions to musical performance and "conducting the orchestra" abound - but not all are in agreement. Is the "conductor" model a good practice or an anti-pattern? In his TED talk, conductor Itay Talman shows that it may depend on what we think a conductor does.

  • QConSF Nov 18-20 Coming Up: Highlights and Most Popular Sessions, Join us!

    QconSF is coming up in less than a month and due to the growth in registrations we've added a new Ruby track featuring Ruby inventor Yukihiro "Matz" Matsumoto, a popular 'Java Puzzlers' talk presented by Google Chief Architect and Java Guru Joshua Bloch and Android Core Library lead Bob Lee, and more. This 3rd QConSF will be the best ever.

  • Agile's "One Essential Ingredient"

    There has been plenty of debate on what skills a developer needs, or what practices an organization must adopt for agile to be successful. But while undeniably important, is this really what's at the heart of agile success? Mark Schumann suggests that agile's "one essential ingredient" is not ground-level agile technique, but rather is the agile mindset within management ranks.

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