InfoQ Homepage Agile Content on InfoQ
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Agile Australia 2009 Conference
The Agile Australia 2009 conference is running in Sydney on 15 & 16 October. Over 25 sessions with local and international speakers.
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When to Extend an Iteration/Sprint
The sprint is about to finish and you discover that you can't deliver an important story. What do you do? Extend the sprint? Put the story back in the backlog? The team consistently overestimates how much work they can get done in a sprint? What to do?
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Empirical Studies on Software Quality Mythology
Microsoft has released a summary of research findings that challenge traditional software-engineering mythology. Can code coverage really improve product quality? Does TDD take more time? What impact does a distributed team have on quality? Are assertions useful?
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Feedback and Feedfoward: Best of Both Worlds
Feedback is a situation in which an output from an event of the past has a potential relevance in the future. Agile places a lot of importance on soliciting and providing feedback with every step in order to build a quality product. On the other hand Feedforward is, to give someone suggestions for the future and provide help in terms of future direction.
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QCon Keynote: Techie VCs Talk About Trends & Opportunities
In the first keynote at QCon San Francisco on Wednesday Nov. 18th, VCs Salil Deshpande of Bay Partners and Kevin Efrusy of Accel Partners will be discussing trends and opportunities that they have seen in the software development space. If you have any questions or comments that you would like to pass along please add them to this article, and Salil and Kevin may address them in the keynote.
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Forrester Releases Free Research Report on Lean for Business
Forrester Research, in preparation for their Business Technology Forum next week, has released an analyst report for free download, entitled "Lean: The New Business Technology Imperative." Aimed at management, it discusses Lean as a whole-business imperative, and its impact on IT, cautioning: "Don’t get so caught up in eliminating waste that you forget to create value and increase flexibility."
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Wrong and Right Reasons to Apply Kanban
Kanban's aim is to minimize WIP (Work-In-Process), or inventory, between processes by making sure that the upstream process produces parts only if its downstream process needs it. Of late, Lean and Kanban are growing in popularity. More and more companies are setting up Kanban Boards, limiting WIP and eliminating Muda. Michael Dubakov investigated the wrong and right reasons for applying Kanban.
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Pomodoro - An Agile Approach to Time Management
A personal time management approach known as "The Pomodoro Technique" is becoming quite popular with agile practitioners. Pomodoro includes a number of practices similar to those used by an agile team: time-boxing, frequent opportunities to inspect-and-adapt, estimation, a preference for low-tech tools, and an emphasis on maintaining a sustainable pace.
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Agile 2009 Conference Retrospective
A month has passed since Agile 2009 and there is now a good variety of feedback on the conference, the sessions and what participants found most valuable.
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Opinion: Pair Programming Is Not For The Masses
Pair Programming continues to be one of the most debated and controversial practices of recent years. Most proponents don't falter in their praise of the benefits, but many of even these same people will admit they struggle to get pairing really going in their shops. Why? Obie Fernandez opinions 10 reasons why this might be so.
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Sprint Planning: Story Points Versus Hours
There is a constant, long drawn debate on the benefits of using either story points or hours for sprint planning. Mike Cohn is big on breaking User Stories down into tasks, which are then estimated in hours. Jeff Sutherland on the other hand suggested that some of the best teams that he has worked with burn down story points.
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Leading Lean & Agile – it’s all about people
Mary and Tom Poppendieck have published a new book titled "Leading Lean Software Development: Results Are Not the Point" in which they examine the importance of leadership in Lean/Agile transformations and provide guidance for organisations making the transformation.
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MP3 Downloads Now Available, 5 Agile 2009 Presentations Posted
A new and frequently-requested feature has been added to InfoQ - MP3 download of interviews and presentations for registered users! To start with, MP3s will be available for the Agile 2009 presentations, which are also now becoming available on InfoQ.
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Retrospective of Retrospectives
Once all your teams use Agile and are busy implementing local improvements, what happens to the larger organization formerly called "IT" or "Systems Development"? A coach with a large Agile program shared the strategy they designed to let the larger community spot trends and benefit from all this learning. Paulo Caroli calls it "Retrospective of Retrospectives".
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Functional Test Tools Workshop
A group of people interested in improving the state of the art in Automated Functional Test Tools gathered for an annual workshop the Sunday before Agile 2009. Among the topics covered: Lightening Talk demos of various tools, Porting Cucumber to .NET, Documenting existing functional test tool capabilities in a spreadsheet and the limits of Capture/Playback tools.