InfoQ Homepage Agile Content on InfoQ
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Article: Successfully Adopting Pair Programming
Jay Fields presents several concrete strategies to go from "I think pair programming is a good idea" to "our team is successfully practicing pair programming and loving it!" He covers everything from pairing stations (the physical layout of your office space), to coaching tips, to common mistakes that those new to pair programming make.
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Achieving Agility Needed for Business Survival
An increasing number of organizations are embracing Agile development as a survival tactic in these turbulent economic times. This in turn has lead to a number of pundits examining what attitudes and attributes their teams need to be successful. Business agility is important, but how is this agility achieved?
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RFactor: Ruby Refactoring Support for Text Editors
RFactor is a Ruby refactoring tool that aims to bring automated refactoring support to text editors. We talked to its developer Fabio Kung to learn how it works and what's planned for the future.
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Being A Better Product Owner
Anyone who has spent any time on an effectively executed agile project can attest to the fact that the Product Owner's (or, in XP, the "Customer's") collaboration with the development team plays a key role in the success of a team. Peter Stevens offers a bit of advice to help people in these roles do this well.
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Story Driven Development Recipes with Cucumber
Behavior Driven Development's (BDD) popularity cannot be denied. By simplifying DSL writing, Ruby allowed the birth of many BDD frameworks. Cucumber is one of them and can also be used to test Java, .NET and Flex and more.
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Empirical Studies Show Test Driven Development Improves Quality
A paper first published in the Empirical Software Engineering journal reports: "TDD seems to be applicable in various domains and can significantly reduce the defect density of developed software without significant productivity reduction of the development team." The study compared 4 projects, at Microsoft and IBM that used TDD with similar projects that did not use TDD.
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QCon London 2 Weeks Away: Day Passes & InfoQ Discount Available
QCon London is just 2 weeks away, and we’d like to present all InfoQ members with an extension of our Feb 22nd discount, as well as announce that day passes are now available. QCon features over 80 sessions, 15 tracks and unprecedented speaker lineup including Sir Tony Hoare, Martin Fowler, Rod Johnson, and many others.
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Agile Is a Culture Not a Process
Jeff Patton explains why thinking of agile as culture and not just process explains resistance and difficulty in teaching and learning the approach. Furthermore he suggests that culture generates process, and therefore we should focus on culture first before process and techniques
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Keep Focus By Tuning Out Your Computer
Agile practitioners have come to understand the negative effect “context-switching” has on productivity when it comes to your projects and teams. To what degree do the same ideas apply at the daily task and personal interaction level, and what can people do to avoid micro-level multi-tasking problems? Phil Gerbyshak offers some advice.
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Presentation: Joshua Kerievsky Presents 10 Important Points for Agile Transitions
Joshua Kerievsky has distilled his company's years of experience helping their clients transition to Agile software development into 10 points. This presentation puts this advice in context with war stories and a Q&A session.
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How to Ensure Early Death of a Distributed Agile Project?
Challenges of Agile adoption and execution get amplified when working in a distributed mode. Distributed Agile brings its own share of challenges in terms of geographical separation, varied timezone, cultural differences etc. Killing a distributed Agile project is not very difficult.
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Information Radiators: Is low tech really better?
The Extreme Programming Yahoo Group has been discussing the pros and cons of low tech information radiators, such as task boards, compared to high tech tools. The original poster preferred a physical task board to a spreadsheet, but found himself unable to explain why to his boss. The ensuing discussion uncovered a variety of reasons to choose simple physical means of reporting information.
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Interview with Brian Marick at Agile 2008
Brian Marick discusses what he means by micro-scale-retro-futurist-anachro-syndicalism and why we should go back to the roots of Agile. He talks about what he thinks were the mistakes in the Agile Manifesto, how it has lead to the state of the Agile community today, and how we can build better systems by making them so that they are much more easily tested.
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Requirements Come Second - What Comes First?
Allan Kelly sites an article from MIT's Sloan Management Review about why it is important to get a team's technical competence and ability improved before focusing on business-IT alignment. This, he claims, is one of the reasons Agile software development has been so successful. Allan's point indirectly touches on a recent community debate about successful, valuable, Agile adoption.
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Assess Your Agility With 'ABetterTeam.org'
Sebastian Hermida has put together a free online tool to help teams get a better understanding of how well they're doing adopting agility. The site, abetterteam.org, is based on the "Assess Your Agility" quiz Jim Shore and Shane Warden include in their book, The Art Of Agile Development.