InfoQ Homepage Agile Content on InfoQ
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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.
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PairWithUs: On-Demand Agile Software Development Video Examples
One thing well known by most programmers is that the best (only?) way to learn programming technique is by example; specifically, watching someone else doing it. Antony Marcano & Andy Palmer's 'PairWithUs' gives people a great place to do just that.
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97 Things Every Programmer Should Know
The 97 Things series continues, after the architect and the project manager, with things every programmer should know. InfoQ talked to its editor Kevlin Henney.
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Need an Answer to Context Switching? Get Disturbed
Context Switching is defined as changing focus and attention from one task to the other in relatively short periods of time. It is widely considered harmful for the team member and the project that he is working on. Charles Miller mentioned a few ways of how they handle context switching at Atlassian.
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Opinion: Racism in the Agile Community Hinders Learning
Earlier this month we published "The Role of Project Managers in Agile" by Vinay Aggarwal which contained some non-mainstream ideas concerning self-organizing teams. Unfortunately there were racist remarks left by readers. These remarks were removed and the offenders were banned. But this brings up another question, that of, "how does racism affect or ability to write and deliver software?"
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Ruby Static Analysis Tools Roundup: metric_fu, Simian, Saikuro and More
Code quality tools for mainstream languages have reached a certain level of maturity, but tools for Ruby are still growing and become more important as Ruby spreads from early adopters to the early majority. InfoQ takes a look at the available code quality tools in the Ruby space.
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Stanford Study Shows: Maxi-Multitaskers' Performance Impaired
A Stanford University study confirms that multitasking is definitely counterproductive: maxi-multitaskers fared worst in several standard tests. Agile implementors take note: there's good reason to urge each team to work on one product, with one product owner - splitting time across many tasks is a less effective way to work.
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Key Elements of a Successful Agile Retrospective: Preparation and Participation
Agile retrospective helps the team examine what went well during the past sprint and identify the areas of improvement for the future sprints. However, sometimes the exercise of conducting a retrospective ends up as a futile effort due to lack of preparation. Moreover, key members of the team end up either not attending or not participating in the meeting.