InfoQ Homepage Agile Techniques Content on InfoQ
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Slow Down to Speed Up Profits
General understanding suggests that, if everyone on the team works at top capacity then the team would be most productive. Contrary to this, Steve Bockman discussed that this assumption might not always be true. In some cases, it may be necessary to slow down and work at less than top capacity in order to boost productivity.
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Coping with Bugs on an Agile/Scrum Project
An often asked question is how does Scrum recommend a team to handle bugs? Should they be placed on the product backlog? Or on a separate bug list? If they’re on the backlog, does the Product Owner get to set their priority or are they automatically the most important items? Should there be a separate bug fixing sprint?
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Presentation: Three Years of Real-World Ruby
Martin Fowler talks about ThoughtWorks's experience with using Ruby on client projects for the past three years, and the creation of a Ruby-based product 'Mingle'.
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Fisheye and Crucible Add "Social Networking"
The latest releases of Fisheye 2 (source code repository browser) and Crucible 2 (code review) from Atlassian offer a completely revamped UI, one that allows developers to follow the team (a kind of social networking) as well as follow the work. Crucible 2 also supports the idea of "iterative code review."
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What is Velocity Good For?
A recent discussion on the ScrumDevelopment Yahoo! group discussed the different uses and misuses for velocity. Should velocity be used a metric for productivity? Should it be used for iteration planning? What about longer term release planning?
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An Evolutionary Perspective of Software Development
Memes, originally coined by Richard Dawkins in "The Selfish Gene" are cultural genes; ideas that propagate among people and affect the way we think and act. Julian Everett has suggested that we can look at software development practices, ideas, and culture as a collection of memes. By doing so, our understanding of what works and why can be turned on its head.
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Kent Beck Suggests Skipping Testing for Very Short Term Projects
Kent Beck suggests that on very short term projects, when you're trying to figure out if there is a viable concept, you might do less (even no) automated testing to help get off the ground quickly. This goes against all of the conventional wisdom surrounding TDD.
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Evaluating the 'Ease of Use'
Mostly usability of a system is ascertained on gut feel rather than being based on some statistical analysis. In a recent discussion on the Agile Usability group, members discuss various ways to evaluate system usability in an objective manner.
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A Comprehensive Collection Of Agile Mailing Lists
As a participant of the Agile community here on InfoQ, you've already shown you are interested in learning more about agile, and likely have ideas of your own that you're interested in contributing back. This is what you can experience in the various mailing lists that exist related to agile development. But what lists are available? Mark Levison helps to answer that question.
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Automated Acceptance Tests - Theoretical or Practical
There have been sporadic reports of successes in writing requirements as acceptance tests and automating them. This practice is only used by a small minority of the community. Are automated acceptance tests written at the beginning of each iteration just a theoretical assertion that have been proven ineffective by the lack of adoption?
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Top Ten Reasons to Love Agile Testing
What are the top ten reasons that Tester's love Agile Testing? Kay Johansen recently asked this question and got responses from many of the leading testers.
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Atlassian Acquires GreenHopper Adding Agile PM to JIRA
Atlassian announces acquisition of GreenHopper from Pyxis Technologies to add agile development support to JIRA. Also announced, the availability of a new Website, "agile@Atlassian," where the community can share perspectives on agile software development and where Atlassian engineers can explain their techniques and experience.
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Is Measuring Hyper-Productivity a Waste of Time?
In a presentation about Shock Therapy, Jeff Sutherland mentioned that Hyper-Productivity is at least Toyota level of performance which is four times the industry average. In a recent discussion on the Scrum Development group, members debate whether it is both fruitful and possible to accurately measure productivity across sprints.
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Presentation: Beyond Agile - Cultural Patterns
Willem van den Ende and Marc Evers introduce different cultural patterns you can find in software organizations, based on Gerald M. Weinberg's work, and tell how to recognize them, what behavior to expect, and how you can handle unexpected events and change. They show how different agile processes like Scrum, XP, and Lean fit in, while explaining some common agile failure modes.
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Article: Pulling Power - A New Software Lifespan
Elizabeth Keogh looks at how Kanban and Feature Injection can play into Behavior Driven Development, to work together to help identify the most important software, reduce unnecessary artifacts at each stage of development, and produce the minimum necessary to achieve a vision.