InfoQ Homepage Agile Techniques Content on InfoQ
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Sprint Planning: Story Points Versus Hours
There is a constant, long drawn debate on the benefits of using either story points or hours for sprint planning. Mike Cohn is big on breaking User Stories down into tasks, which are then estimated in hours. Jeff Sutherland on the other hand suggested that some of the best teams that he has worked with burn down story points.
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Functional Test Tools Workshop
A group of people interested in improving the state of the art in Automated Functional Test Tools gathered for an annual workshop the Sunday before Agile 2009. Among the topics covered: Lightening Talk demos of various tools, Porting Cucumber to .NET, Documenting existing functional test tool capabilities in a spreadsheet and the limits of Capture/Playback tools.
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PairWithUs: On-Demand Agile Software Development Video Examples
One thing well known by most programmers is that the best (only?) way to learn programming technique is by example; specifically, watching someone else doing it. Antony Marcano & Andy Palmer's 'PairWithUs' gives people a great place to do just that.
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Need an Answer to Context Switching? Get Disturbed
Context Switching is defined as changing focus and attention from one task to the other in relatively short periods of time. It is widely considered harmful for the team member and the project that he is working on. Charles Miller mentioned a few ways of how they handle context switching at Atlassian.
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Ruby Static Analysis Tools Roundup: metric_fu, Simian, Saikuro and More
Code quality tools for mainstream languages have reached a certain level of maturity, but tools for Ruby are still growing and become more important as Ruby spreads from early adopters to the early majority. InfoQ takes a look at the available code quality tools in the Ruby space.
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Key Elements of a Successful Agile Retrospective: Preparation and Participation
Agile retrospective helps the team examine what went well during the past sprint and identify the areas of improvement for the future sprints. However, sometimes the exercise of conducting a retrospective ends up as a futile effort due to lack of preparation. Moreover, key members of the team end up either not attending or not participating in the meeting.
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Lean Is More Than a Toolset
Alan Shalloway urges people to understand that behind Lean's practices are important principles that practitioners would be wise to recognize.
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Handling Project Termination
Terminating a sprint in Scrum is a rare event, but it does happen. An abnormal sprint termination can be called by either the team or the product owner. Most of the times terminating a sprint or the project leaves a sense of bad feeling. Robert K. Hurley and Joseph T. Jimmerson discussed the ways to deal with the trauma of a terminated project.
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The Minimum Viable Product - a tool for exposing value
In a recent interview on Venture Hacks (Advice for Entrepreneurs) commentator Eric Ries discussed the concept of the Minimum Viable Product (MVP) – doing “just enough” to meet customer needs in order to get a product THAT PEOPLE WILL PAY FOR to market as soon as possible.
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Measuring Agile Performance with the Agile Triangle
Traditional software development teams were supposed to work within the confines of the software 'Iron triangle'. The three sides of the triangle are Scope, Schedule and Cost. Jim Highsmith suggested that the Iron triangle, imposes a lot of constraints on the flexibility of the Agile teams and suggested an alternate Agile Triangle.
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How to Transfer Knowledge in an Agile Project
Knowledge transfer is characterized by transfer of understanding, about a context, from one unit (individual, team, department, organization) to another. In a series of interesting experiments, Steve Bockman tried to figure out the best way to transfer knowledge in an Agile project.
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Categorizing Tests
What's the difference between unit tests, functional tests, system tests and integration tests? What about developer tests, story tests, and acceptance tests? There seems to be no consensus on naming and categorization of tests although they are central to many Agile development processes. A discussion on the TDD discussion group examines these categorizations and attempts to clear the waters.
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Two Types of Agile Documents - No More, No Less!
The Agile Manifesto suggests “ Working software over comprehensive documentation”. This has led many teams to believe that there is no need for documentation in Agile projects. Critics of Agile use limited documentation in Agile to showcase the weakness of Agile methodologies. Eelco Gravendeel suggested that there are just two types of documentation in Agile.
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Enabling the Last Responsible Moment in Deployment
An interesting question can be asked during a design decision: "Does this approach create a commitment" rather than "is this the right design?". A conversation on the KanbanDev Yahoo! group explores this question, different approaches to implement an effective answer, and the benefits to be reaped by this approach.
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Comparing Value, Velocity and Value Velocity
An implicit assumption made by most Agile teams is that 'value' is directly proportional to the 'velocity' of the team. While this may be true in some cases, however mostly, the team velocity gives little indication on the true value delivered.