InfoQ Homepage Agile in the Enterprise Content on InfoQ
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Successfully Adopting Pair Programming
Jay Fields takes a look at pair programming from an adoption perspective. This article is for you if you already know what pair programming is and guidance on how to get to the point of successfully practicing pair programming. Jay goes over everything from an optimal seating arrangement, to effective coaching techniques, to calling out common mistakes to avoid.
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Case study: Distributed Scrum Project for Dutch Railways
How we customise Scrum to our local context plays a large role in the success or failure of a project. This article describes a successful, large, distributed Scrum project, which had already been scrapped once under a traditional approach. The authors share lessons learned on: project startup, product ownership, testing and the importance of estimates and effective communication.
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Book Review: Agile Adoption Patterns, A Roadmap to Organizational Success
Ryan Cooper reviewed Amr Elssamadisy's new book and found it a useful framework for designing customized adoption strategies. Rather than a single recipe of Agile practices for everyone, the reader is offered patterns and tools to help determine which practices will most effectively help them reach their own organization's specific goals.
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Choose Feature Teams over Component Teams for Agility
Feature teams, common enough in small groups, are all too rare in large product development - but they can be a key to scaling with agility. This article analyses how feature teams resolve weaknesses of component teams, and points out key issues to address when transitioning. It is an excerpt from "Scaling Lean and Agile Development," by Craig Larman and Bas Vodde, to be published later this year.
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Improvement, Success and Failure: Scrum Adoption in China
This recent inquiry, by InfoQ China editor Jacky Li, picked 5 very different cases of Scrum adoption in China, which got different results, and asked: Why did you use Scrum? How did you adopt it? What problems did you encounter, and why did it succeed or fail? Despite the small sample size, it's an interesting comparison, pointing out that improvement doesn't ensure success.
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Kanban Applied to Software Development: from Agile to Lean
In this InfoQ article Kenji Hiranabe applies lessons learned while working with Japanese manufacturers. While many Agile teams are optimizing only a portion of the value stream, Hiranabe proposes a simple way to adapt lessons from Lean Manufacturing's "Kanban" visual tracking system to make process visible to more of the organization, for better communication and process improvement.
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Interview: IBM Architect Bertrand Portier on joining MDD and SOA
In the wake of the latest product announcement from IBM, InfoQ talked to Bertrand Portier about a RedBook that presents a Model-Driven-Development approach to service construction. The concepts are general enough to be applied to product stacks other than IBM.
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Book Review: The Responsibility Virus Helps Fear Undermine Collaboration
Do "empowered" organizations outperform their command-and-control competitors? Business school dean Roger Martin saw this promising approach fail too frequently. His diagnosis: he calls it the Responsibility Virus, and offers tools to help those who would treat the Virus in their own workplace. Reviewer Deborah Hartmann found this book a good explanation of why process is not enough.
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AgileAdvert Video Winners Announced
At Agile2007's Google reception, the audience voted to make the (very sad) clip "Developer Abuse" the number 1 video, thereby making "Matthew" (name changed to protect the innocent) this year's AgileAdvert famous Agilist. Five more videos were also recognized, sporting singing, dancing, a beating, "outside the box" thinking, expletives (deleted), and charming children (not all in one video!)
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Book Excerpt: Scaling Software Agility
"But does Agile scale?" Emerging stories and case studies indicate that it certainly does. InfoQ brings you two excerpts from Dean Leffingwell's book "Scaling Software Agility: Best Practices for Large Enterprises". Chapter 1 presents how Agile methods respond to the need for competitive advantage, and Chapter 2 revisits "Why the Waterfall Model Doesn’t Work".
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SOA and Agile: Friends or Foes?
SOA aims at making the entire enterprise agile by using services as the building blocks for applications. Agile software development aims at making organizations agile by introducing practices that increase communication and feedback. Which is right? Which is better? Are we comparing apples and oranges? Can they be used together, and if so, how? Join us in the discussion!
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Case Study: Targeted Practice Adoption using Patterns
It's easy to forget what originally motivated us, once we're implementing Agile. Teams spin, trying to figure out which practices to start with, unsure which will have the biggest impact, or how they fit together. Amr Elssamadisy and John Mufarrige propose a customized adoption approach to help teams decide where to focus first - an alternative to adoption of pre-packaged methodologies.