InfoQ Homepage Agile Techniques Content on InfoQ
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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.
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What does it mean to be Agile - survey results
The Agile Manifesto was written almost ten years ago in February of 2001. Since then the environment has continued to change and thousands of people across the world have tried to apply the twelve agile principles to their daily work life. Laurie Williams has been conducting research to understand how well the Agile Principles have stood the test of time and use? She discusses some early results.
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Agile Development Conference Delivers the Goods
The Agile Development Practices conference was held this past June 6-11 in Las Vegas. Hosted inside the Caesar's Palace Conference Center, this event showcased excellent sessions, speakers and content. Several good sessions on testing, a keynote by Johanna Rothman on people and culture, and some fine presentations on Scrum and Kanban made for an excellent conference.
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The Decision to Refactor
Refactoring is the process of changing a software system in such a way that is does not alter the external behavior of the code yet improves its internal structure. The idea of improving an already written code is appreciated in most Agile teams. Continuous improvement is is something that these teams strive for. However, improving the already existing code involves time and money. Is it worth it?
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Consistently Not Done, Done, Done at the End of Sprints?
Do you consistently have stories that don't meet your "definition of done" at the end of your sprints? Is the team tieing the hands of the product owner?
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Agile Architecture - Oxymoron or Sensible Partnership?
A number of commentators have been talking about the perceived dichotomy between Agile techniques and architectural thinking. This post investigates some of the tensions between Big Up Front Design (BDUF) and You Aint Gonna Need It (YAGNI) thinking and looks at how the two approaches can in fact work together in complimentary ways.
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Chris Matts on the Timing of Commitments, Interview Part 2
InfoQ continues its interview with Chris Matts, this week focusing on real options and how this strategy for making decisions.
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Agile Testing Challenge
Gerald Ford International Airport has a parking lot fee calculator and Matt Heusser noticed that it was buggy. So he issued a challenge to testers around the world: Find the bugs in ParcCalc. The respondents included James Bach, Selena Delesie and many others.
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A Roundup On The Lean Software and Systems Conference Buzz
The Lean Software & Systems Conference went down a few weeks ago in Atlanta, and InfoQ has followed much of the buzz since. Check out what we've collected from the vast pool of great blogs, articles, notes, videos, pictures, presentations and more that have surfaced since the event.
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What IS Agile? A Useless Theoretical Question or Necessary Clarity for Success?
A quick search on your favorite browser looking for recent articles on 'agile software development' or its derivatives will return a surprisingly diverse set of ideas on what Agile is. Is this good? Is this bad? Or is this writer just filling white-space to get an article out on Monday, May 10th?
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Chris Matts on the Agile Community as a Learning Machine
Chris Matts, known for his work on real options and feature injection, discusses the current state of the Agile Community. He suggests that the community is a learning machine and is currently failing.