InfoQ Homepage Agile Content on InfoQ
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Refactoring Not a Substitute for Design
A member of the stack overflow community asked "Is design now a subset of refactoring?" The question highlights a common misunderstanding about the agile approach to emergent design. A common agile mantra is: "Test. Code. Refactor. Repeat!" This approach doesn't replace design; it simply spreads the work out over the life of the project.
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Interview: Software Design Helps Being Agile
In this interview made by InfoQ’s Deborah Hartmann during Agile 2008, Rebecca Wirfs-Brock talks about software design, the need for good design and the technical debt that might accumulate slowing down the development process. The conclusion is that agile developers should not disregard design.
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Adopting The Whole Enchilada
Recently InfoQ reported on Jim Shore's 'The Decline and Fall of Agile', which highlighted a trend for organizations to adopt "Agile" (in name) but fail to adopt what it means to be Agile (in practice). Community leaders such as Joshua Kerievsky, Martin Fowler, and Ron Jeffries have taken Shore's post a few steps further recently, posting their own thoughts on what's going on with this situation.
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Presentation: Agile Methods and User Centered Design
In this presentation filmed during ThoughtWorks’ Quarterly Technology Briefing, Dave Robertson and John Johnston explain what the Agile and User Centered Design’s (UCD) common denominators are, common values being the most important one in their opinion.
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Succession, an Agile Approach to Evolving Architecture
Kent Beck wrote 'First One, Then Many' to explain the application of Succession to software design. Succession is a technique for evolving the architecture of a system from 'just enough for now' to what will eventually be needed. The example given is for a system that only needs to process one transaction today, but will eventually need to process many.
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Announcement: Agile 2009 and XP 2009 Conference Submissions Ending Soon
The two flagship conferences for the Agile community occur each summer. This year Agile 2009 will be held Chicago during the week of August 24th while XP 2009 will be held in Sardinia (Italy) the week of May 26th. Submissions are still being accepted for both conferences for two more weeks.
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"Good Design" Means ...?
It's not news that at the heart of successful software systems (and, frankly, fulfilling software careers) is good design. Also not news is that defining what "good design" really means has been at the heart of many debates, papers, talks, books, discussions, and more for ages. To help, J.B. Rainsberger and Scott Bellware offer some advice to follow until that one true definition comes along.
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Interview: Similarities Between Interaction Designers and Agile Programmers
In this interview taken during Agile 2008, Alan Cooper, the father of Visual Basic and supporter of interaction design, talks about his contact with the Agile movement and the similarities discovered between Agile programmers and interaction designers.
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Agile Risk Management
Risk management is an activity directed towards the assessing, mitigating and monitoring of risks. Agilists suggest ways to effectively manage risk and use it to make better commitments to the stakeholders.
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Track Velocity, Not Time Spent on Tasks
A member of a new agile team asked the Scrum Development list how to keep track of the actual time engineers spend on tasks, and how this relates to the agile concept of velocity. Velocity is the agile metric for tracking how fast the team is completing features, and thus how long it will take to complete a project. The group's opinion was that tracking time spent isn't necessary or useful.
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Measure Agile Productivity in $
Earlier Scott Ambler posted an article of how to measure productivity on agile teams by utilizing acceleration. Recently he followed up with another post where he answers some frequently asked questions related to agile productivity and acceleration. Specifically one question answers how to measure the amount of $ saved by an accelerating team.
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"Classic" versus "Mockist" TDD, Distinction Real?
Hot in the TDD Yahoo group is a discussion concerning the perceived continuum between the "Classic" and "Mockist" TDD. Steve Freeman, Nat Pryce, Michael Feathers, Dale Emery, and many more discuss terminology and describe their approaches. The discussion also debates whether there even really exists such a continuum, and if so, what distinguishes the approaches that represent it's extremes?
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Example Driven Acceptance Testing
Unit and Integration testing often get more importance in Agile teams as compared to acceptance testing. Gojko Adzic and Lisa Crispin suggest approaches to efficiently include acceptance tests as a part of development.
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Eclipse PHP Development Toolset 2.0 released
The Eclipse Foundation has announced the immediate availability of PDT 2.0, a major upgrade to the popular Eclipse PHP Development Tools project. PDT is an open source development tool that provides all the basic code editing capabilities developers need to get started developing PHP applications.
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Venkat Subramaniam on Facts and Fallacies of Everyday Software Development
Software development is challenging and lot of fun, but there are several factors that interrupt teams from succeeding in IT projects. These are usually not tools or technologies but it is the people that affect the success of software projects. In a keynote presentation at the recent CodeMash 2009 conference, Venkat Subramaniam talked about facts and fallacies of everyday software development.