InfoQ Homepage Agile Content on InfoQ
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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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26 Hints for Successful Agile Development
Keith Swenson, recently compiled a list of 26 hints for Agile software development. Keith suggested that he frequently collects nuggets of wisdom on various topics and the list is a distilled set of hints which really matter for Agile software development.
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XP or Scrum, Either, Both, or Neither?
Which is better? Scrum or XP? Is there one that is more applicable than the other or is there another alternative?
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Where has the innovation gone?
Some commentators are questioning the level of innovation happening in the Agile space. Does iterative and incremental development lead us away from innovation towards reusing old solutions, building on what we already know rather than creating truly "out of the box" solutions. Adding an R&D stream is suggested as a way to bring innovation into Agile projects.
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Dissecting Technical Debt
The term "technical debt" was coined by Ward Cunningham. It describes the obligation that a development team incurs when it chooses a design or construction approach that is easy to implement in the short run but has a larger negative impact in the long run. Agilists provide their view point on what should be considered a technical debt and how it could be classified.
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Agile Testing Requires Cross-Functional Teams and More
The first things many think about when considering Agile Testing are tools, automation, when and how to test, and the role of testers on a team. These are all very worthy topics. But which of these things are needed for success and which are nice-to-have?
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Ladies: Please, Would You Submit a Proposal?
Although it's widely accepted that diversity leads to innovation and performance, visible leadership in the IT community often doesn't represent the diversity of the community itself. What can be done to increase diversity in the leadership of our high-tech communities? One suggestion is to actively help a more diverse group to get their talks accepted at conferences.
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The 'Agile Developer Skills Workshop' Is Underway
Having a means to fairly and reliable assess the skills of agile developers has been a hot topic for quite some time. The 'Agile Developer Skills Workshop', led by Ron Jeffries and Chet Hendrickson, is now entering its 2nd day of trying to produce a real solution to the problem.
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Testing Heuristics - Thinking like a tester
James Bach and Elisabeth Hendrickson are two of the context driven testing community. James recently spoke at the STANZ conference and provided a guideline for approaching testing, and Elisabeth provides a heuristic checklist to help identify valuable testing activities.