InfoQ Homepage Agile Techniques Content on InfoQ
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Is the Agile Retrospective Prime Directive Patronizing?
Angela Harms recently blogged about the Agile Retrospective Prime Directive. She discusses how the language of the prime directive around "everyone doing their best" could be seen as patronizing and insulting to team members. Other commentators who have discussed the intent of the Prime Directive include Esther Derby and George Dinwiddie. How useful is the Retrospective Prime Directive?
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How To Pay Down Technical Debt
Technical debt can be difficult to connect directly to customer value, but delivering customer value is what Agile processes are all about. So how can we track and reduce technical debt in an Agile development environment?
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Get Back To Work!
Hitting a kanban limit introduces slack into an organization by temporarily stopping the work that feeds into a bottleneck. So how can you convince management that introducing a kanban limit (i.e. stopping work) could actually be a good thing?
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Game Theory and Agile Software Development
Game theory was initially developed in economics to understand behavior of firms, markets, consumers etc. Since then, its scope and use has expanded to various fields like politics, sociology, psychology and Agile software development.
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Do Use Cases Have a Place In Scrum?
In Scrum, requirements are commonly expressed as user stories. But is it OK to also make use of use cases in Scrum? And, if so, under what circumstances should you do so?
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Effective Agile Meetings
Meetings are expensive. An all-day team meeting costs thousands of dollars, if we calculate the cost of all the people involved along with overheads. Hence, it is pragmatic to do a fair amount of preparation for the meeting to ensure that the Agile meetings are as effective as possible.
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Does Value Stream Mapping Work for Software Development?
Value stream mapping is a lean manufacturing technique used to analyze the flow of materials and information required to bring a product or service to a consumer. This process was successfully implemented in the manufacturing industry by Toyota and has been mapped to software development too. Does software development follow the same path as manufacturing?
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Blog Series - The State of Agile
The Agile Scout blog has put out a call for comments on The State of Agile. So far ten commentators have confirmed their willingness to contribute. The first five entries have been posted and some of their key points are reported in this news item. An eclectic group of authors from a wide range of backgrounds are providing their thoughts on how Agile has changed and where it is headed.
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Are There Better Estimation Techniques for Experienced Teams?
The results of software estimation are important for stakeholders to take care of team allocation and budgeting. A widely prevalent technique to estimate in Agile has been Planning Poker, which is a consensus based. Does this way of estimating take too much time? Are there other methods which can be employed by experienced practitioners?
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Scrum Does Not Have a ProductMaster Role
A common question across multiple forums is about the acceptability of combining the ScrumMaster and Product Owner role. While most Agilists believe that these roles are like oil and water, there are situations where combining them might be inevitable.
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Does Agile Promote Perpetual Beta?
Agile software development promotes teamwork, collaboration, and process adaptability throughout the life-cycle of the project. More often than not, this also leads to a lower time to market with a minimum marketable feature set. New features are slipped in every iteration and often the product remains in perpetual beta.
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Constraints are Advantages in Disguise
Building software is closely associated with managing a lot of constraints. These constraints might be in terms of time, money, technology, decisions, compatibility, regulatory, people, process or all of the above. Jim Bird discussed the constraints imposed by Scrum, XP and how they help in fostering creativity and building the right software.
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Sprint Burndowns - Are We Measuring the Wrong Things?
Does a the traditional Sprint Burndown chart help the team? A number of Scrum teams find that tracking task hours hides the true state of the sprint and prefer other tools.
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How To Do Large Scale Refactoring
Refactoring by definition means changing the internal structure of a program without modifying its external functional behavior. This is mostly done to improve the non-functional attributes of the program thus leading to improved code quality. However, refactoring on a large scale often gives jitters to even seasoned Agilists. The community discussed a few ways of handling the scale.
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Agile 2010: Where Were the Programmer-Focused Sessions?
The Agile 2010 conference was held in Orlando from 9-14 August. A number of commentators felt there were not enough sessions focused on the technical practices and programming techniques, including Bob Martin who twittered about the lack of technical sessions. This resulted in a number of responses and the announcement of plans to launch an XP Universe conference in 2011 targeting programmers.