InfoQ Homepage Agile Content on InfoQ
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Do Stand-ups Stand Up for Larger Teams?
The daily stand-up meeting helps the team members make a commitment to each other about what they aim to achieve in the day and identify obstacles to progress, if any. However, many Agilists believe that the conventional stand-ups break down quickly as the team size increases.
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Virtual Panel: Is the Backlog a Vital Artifact and Practice or Waste?
Mary Poppendieck, Ron Jeffries, Jeff Patton, David West, Steve Freeman, and Jason Yip give us their take on backlogs and their importance to successful Agile teams.
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Lean 'Standard Work' Applied to Software Development
One component of the Toyota Production System is the concept of standard (or standardized) work. A recent post on the Kanban Development list asked if this concept carries over when TPS and lean are applied to software projects. Despite the fact that software development is not manufacturing, respondents did find value in applying the 'standard work' concept to development.
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What Practices Make Up YOUR Agile Development?
'Agile' is an umbrella term. As the community matures, we are going beyond specific methodologies towards each team and/or organization having a tailored set of practices. Jurgen Appelo is running a survey that could give us insight into the current state of practice.
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Transparency: A Great Leap Forward or Exposed Artery?
Agile propagandists make great claims about the advantages of being transparent about the state of their projects. They claim that this how mature relationships work and that "Honesty is the best policy". But is this true? Many of us work in dysfunctional organizations where honesty is the best way to get cheated. Surely Transparency is just not pragmatic?
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Does a Distributed Agile Team Need Heroes?
This month's issue of the Agile Journal has a case study that suggests that if you do not have a technical wizard on your team, then distributed/offshore Agile development will fail. This goes against the grain of self-organizing teams and getting away from heroes of the traditional Agile mindset.
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Five Ways To Build Team Trust
Many people have noted that the presence of trust in your agile team is a fundamental component in successfully implementing the Agile Manifesto value of "Individuals & Interactions". Esther Derby offers five concrete suggestions to help build this trust.
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Is Five the Optimal Team Size?
There have been a lot of discussions and debates about the optimal team size for maximum productivity. While most Agilists agree that smaller teams are more functional and productive as compared to larger teams, however defining the optimal team size is still a challenge.
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An Agile Approach to Code Reuse
A recent discussion on the Extreme Programming Yahoo Group explored the apparent conflict between making software reusable and the XP practice of not writing code until it is needed. Ron Jeffries and others shared insights about the costs and benefits of code reuse, as well as how and when to do it in an agile environment.
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J.B. Rainsberger: "Integration Tests Are A Scam"
Well-known agilist and TDD expert J.B. Rainsberger has begun a series of posts to explain why his experience has led him to the thought-provoking conclusion that "integration tests are a scam".
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Don’t Start What Cannot Be Done
Many Agile teams face a dilemma when picking up a new story towards the end of a Sprint. There is some time left but this time may not be enough to get a story done-done.
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Interview with Robin Dymond at Agile 2008
Robin Dymond gives an overview of Lean, how it can help take Agile to the 'next level' and why organizations that fail to change will not have successful Agile teams. Robin describes an organizational mismatch between traditional hierarchies and team structures. He believes that organizations will need to reorganize around teams to get the most out of Agile.
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Managers in Scrum
This presentation explores how the role of managers changes in Scrum. It helps managers to lead the introduction of Scrum acting as role models. It presents leadership principles that provide concrete guidance such as servant-leadership, empirical management, empowerment and respect, quality-first and continuous improvement.
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Are Kanban Workflows Agile?
Karl Scotland started a discussion examining whether the workflows or stages in a kanban system are counter to the agile ideals of cross-functional and collaborative teams. He started by noting that the stages on a kanban board can look a lot like the phases of waterfall. The ensuing discussion clarified that stages are not necessarily hand-offs, and led to other insights as well.
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Father of Use Cases Says Agile Needs to Get Smarter
At the Software Education SDC conference in Melbourne, Australia, and Wellington, New Zealand, last week, Ivar Jacobson, author of the original work on Use Cases, the Unified Modeling Language and the Rational Unified Process, said that Agile development needs to “Get Smart”.