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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.
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How Should a Product Owner Participate in a Planning Poker Session?
During planning poker, a product owner should explain the user stories to the development team, but he or she should not try to unduly influence the development team's estimates.
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Crowdsourced Testing, Changing the Game
Crowdsourcing is the process of requesting a large group of community, a crowd, to perform a task which is traditionally done by a select set of people in an organization, most likely employees or contractors. Crowdsourced testing is the powerful combination of combining web and cloud economics with the effectiveness and efficiency of crowdsourcing. Could this be a game changer?
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Explaining Refactoring to Management
How can one explain the importance and value of refactoring to people in management who have never coded? How can one justify the expense of slowing down code delivery?
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Managing the Agile Team Environment
It is a well known fact that people leave managers, not organizations. Though, Agile teams are known to have camaraderie amongst team members, however the relationship of the manager with the team members and the organizational ecosystem as a whole holds the key to being an successful Agile manager.
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Testing Techniques for Applications With Zero Tests
Agile techniques recommend having adequate unit and acceptance tests to build a robust test harness around the application. However, in the real world, not all applications are fortunate enough to have a test harness. In an interesting discussion on the Agile Testing group, members suggested ways to test applications which do not have any automated tests.
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Do Story Points Relate to Complexity or Time?
Many Agile teams use the terms Story points and Complexity points interchangeably. Agile teams believe that they are better than hours just because they are based on complexity and relative size. Mike Cohn suggested that it is wrong to use story points to depict the complexity of developing a feature, they are all about the effort.
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Remote Customer, Remote Developers and a Project in Crisis
Though collocation is one of the prime recommendations of Agile, more and more projects are executed in a manner in which the teams are distributed. Safari Asad started an interesting discussion on the Scrum Development group to discuss about a project in crisis, which not only had a remote customer but also had remote developers.