InfoQ Homepage Agile Content on InfoQ
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Return on Investment for Automated Testing
Test automation is often seen as a way to reduce the costs of testing, increase test coverage and effectiveness, and shorten testing cycles. However, the transition to automated testing is rarely fast and never free, there are real trade-offs to be made. Aspire systems has created a test automation ROI calculator and made it publicly available.
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A Fresh Wave Of Agile Certification Criticism
The topic of agile certification has been a common kernel of much recurring debate within the community for a long time. Is it desirable? Is it possible? Is it a farce, a scam? There has been recent wave of discussion arguing against certification, largely in reaction to a new company claiming to provide such "agile certification".
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Critical Security Vulnerability Found in Quicksort
In what is sure to become one of the most wide-reaching security vulnerabilities yet known, a researcher with L0pht Heavy Industries has uncovered a flaw in the standard implementation of the Quicksort algorithm. InfoQ spoke with Dildog of L0pht to learn more about this vulnerability and it's ramifications.
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Ideal Iteration Length
One of the frequent questions in Agile adoption is related to the ideal iteration length. Teams usually gravitate between iteration lengths ranging from a week to two months. Choosing the right iteration length is an important decision and the success of Agile adoption depends a lot on the right iteration size.
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Focus Improvement on Bottleneck Constraints
In My Framework is More Productive than Your Framework, Ken DeLong examines approaches to making software projects more productive. He finds that despite the hype about frameworks, languages, and project management tools, these tend not to be the bottlenecks. Ken believes that the largest productivity gains are likely to come from improved communication, code readability, and debugability.
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Presentation: A Kanban System for Software Engineering
David Anderson presents a brief history of the kanban system through case study reports from teams at Microsoft and Corbis. Kanban acts to limit work-in-progress and focus the team on achieving a continuous flow of value to the customer and innovates on accepted agile management practices by providing an iteration-less process with a regular release cadence.
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Models of Apprenticeship
Uncle Bob Martin recently wrote about his experience with apprentices and what he considers key to progressing from apprentice to journeyman. He describes two hypothetical apprentices: Sam, a developer who has apprenticed with the same master and had the same year fifteen years in a row. Jasmine has changed jobs (and therefore masters) a number of times - growing her skills along the way.
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Bamboo Continuous Integration Server Adds Amazon EC2 Build Agents
Continuous Integration (CI),test first development and daily builds are fundamental agile practices. Together they support high performance teams, but also generate a significant, often variable demand for resources. Atlassian's Bamboo CI Server 2.2 includes a feature to Run Builds Remotely in Amazon EC2.
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Performance Engineering in an Agile Project
Performance Engineering is an important software development discipline that ensures that applications are architect-ed, designed, built and tested for performance. However, mostly in traditional projects the scope of performance engineering is limited to performance testing. This is a sure cause for concern.
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Inducting Newbies On Large Agile Projects
Anand Vishwanath suggests for large agile projects that using a small scale "simulation project" might be the best approach to getting the newbies into the groove, and provides a recipe for how to go about doing this.
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Book Excerpt: Agile Testing
InfoQ brings you an excerpt from Agile Testing, a book is for testers on an agile team, test and quality assurance managers transitioning to agile development, and agile teams learning how to approach testing.
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More on Scrum Certification Test
Mishkin Berteig, a Certified Scrum Trainer, took the Beta CSM Exam on Orlando Scrum Gathering this March, and posted his feedback on Agile Advice.
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Story Mapping Gives Context to User Stories
The Scrum notion of 'backlog' is a single, prioritized list of user stories for the team to implement. This works well for organizing what the team should work on in the near term, e.g. during sprint planning. At the Orlando Scrum Gathering, Jeff Patton described story mapping. This is a way of organizing stories that provides richer context and can help with release planning.
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Interview: Tim Bray on the Future of the Web
In this interview made during QCon SF 2008, Tim Bray talks about why he is not convinced with the buzz surrounding Rich Internet Applications and shares his ideas on Cloud Computing. He also expresses his opinion regarding the debate REST vs. WS-* and the future directions web technologies will be taking.
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Agile Governance: The Bridge Between Management and IT
Traditional project governance is used to describe the rules and processes that need to exist to ensure a successful project. At first glance the concept of governance and Agile seem to be incompatible however, most Agilists would agree that just enough governance might do more good than bad for the Agile project.