InfoQ Homepage Agile Content on InfoQ
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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.
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Interview: Luke Francl Explains Why Testing Is Overrated
In this interview filmed during RubyFringe 2008, Luke Francl explains his position towards testing. While supporting unit testing, he thinks testing is not going to reveal all application defects. Development teams should practice code reviews and usability tests which are likely to discover bugs not visible though other methods.
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Article: InfoQ Editors' Recommended Reading List
Members of the InfoQ editorial team discuss a number of books which have influenced how we think about software development, architecture and managing projects.
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Backlog Lacks the Backbone
Backlogs have been under criticism for some time now. Mary Poppendieck goes to the extent of suggesting that product backlog should be eliminated if it is not satisfying the desired purpose. On similar lines Jeff Patton suggested using story maps instead of flat backlogs which help focus on the system being developed.
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Spolsky vs Uncle Bob
The last few weeks, a public dispute has been going on between Joel Spolsky and Robert C Martin (Uncle Bob) about Test-Driven Development and about the SOLID principles of OO design. Here is a summary and review of the match.