InfoQ Homepage Agile Techniques Content on InfoQ
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Software Katas - Practice in Public Makes Perfect
Thought leaders in the agile community are talking about software katas - where one practices specific exercises until they are memorized. Robert Martin has calls them "performance art". Lately there has been an increase in blog posts and sites devoted to katas. The latest addition: weekly screencasts at katas.softwarecraftsmanship.org.
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System/Acceptance Testing with Time and Dates
Unit Testing Time and Dates is an often talked about problem with relatively simple solutions. More difficult is the acceptance/system testing with Time. What strategies are used?
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Test Driven Development and the Trouble with Legacy Code
Alan Baljeu was trying to use TDD with his large, legacy C++ code base. He found that the principle of the simplest thing that could possibly work was causing him trouble with the amount of rework.
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Mindfulness and Agile Teams
At Oredev 2009 Marc Lesser gave a keynote titled "accomplishing more by doing less". Although not directly about Agile development, the topic will resonate with many Agile practitioners and is related to the success of self organizing teams.
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ScrumBan - Evolution or Oxymoron?
Kanban workshops, courses and conferences are springing up, and practicing Agilists are investigating what this method, adapted from Lean, offers their teams. Attractive benefits are cited, from revealing bottlenecks to happy teams experiencing more "flow". But thought leaders warn that Kanban's laid back approach is "kryptonite" to Scrum's call to resolve impediments immediately.
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Uncle Bob On The Applicability Of TDD
Following up a pot-stirring blog where he asserted that "anyone who continues to think that TDD slows you down is living in the stone age", Bob Martin takes a stab at providing some deeper insight into the real applicability, role, and benefit of TDD.
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Improving Distributed Retrospectives
Many consider the retrospective to be an agile team’s most powerful tool for continuous improvement. The retrospective captures learning and insights while experiences are fresh, and the lessons are immediately applied to the teams on-going work. A discussion on the Retrospectives Yahoo Group examined how to adapt a retrospective to work across multiple sites, with a distributed team.
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Agile's "One Essential Ingredient"
There has been plenty of debate on what skills a developer needs, or what practices an organization must adopt for agile to be successful. But while undeniably important, is this really what's at the heart of agile success? Mark Schumann suggests that agile's "one essential ingredient" is not ground-level agile technique, but rather is the agile mindset within management ranks.
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26 Hints for Successful Agile Development
Keith Swenson, recently compiled a list of 26 hints for Agile software development. Keith suggested that he frequently collects nuggets of wisdom on various topics and the list is a distilled set of hints which really matter for Agile software development.
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XP or Scrum, Either, Both, or Neither?
Which is better? Scrum or XP? Is there one that is more applicable than the other or is there another alternative?
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Where has the innovation gone?
Some commentators are questioning the level of innovation happening in the Agile space. Does iterative and incremental development lead us away from innovation towards reusing old solutions, building on what we already know rather than creating truly "out of the box" solutions. Adding an R&D stream is suggested as a way to bring innovation into Agile projects.
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Dissecting Technical Debt
The term "technical debt" was coined by Ward Cunningham. It describes the obligation that a development team incurs when it chooses a design or construction approach that is easy to implement in the short run but has a larger negative impact in the long run. Agilists provide their view point on what should be considered a technical debt and how it could be classified.
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When to Extend an Iteration/Sprint
The sprint is about to finish and you discover that you can't deliver an important story. What do you do? Extend the sprint? Put the story back in the backlog? The team consistently overestimates how much work they can get done in a sprint? What to do?
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Pomodoro - An Agile Approach to Time Management
A personal time management approach known as "The Pomodoro Technique" is becoming quite popular with agile practitioners. Pomodoro includes a number of practices similar to those used by an agile team: time-boxing, frequent opportunities to inspect-and-adapt, estimation, a preference for low-tech tools, and an emphasis on maintaining a sustainable pace.
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Opinion: Pair Programming Is Not For The Masses
Pair Programming continues to be one of the most debated and controversial practices of recent years. Most proponents don't falter in their praise of the benefits, but many of even these same people will admit they struggle to get pairing really going in their shops. Why? Obie Fernandez opinions 10 reasons why this might be so.