InfoQ Homepage Agile Techniques Content on InfoQ
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Can Product Owner and Scrum Master be Combined?
Many short staffed teams or small organizations consider combining the role of Scrum Master (SM) and Product Owner (PO) into one person. Is it advisable? Have other people done it? What are the options? Matt Gelbwaks, Dan Rawsthorne and Tom Mellor, among others, share their experiences.
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Using a "Snake On The Wall" To Quantify Impediments
Kevin Schlabach discusses using a "Snake On The Wall", a lightweight approach targeted at helping your team get a better handle on the things that are slowing the development process.
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Managing Change Requests in Scrum
Tracking change requests in Agile is often associated with being at odds with the Agile principle of "Responding to change over following a plan". However, in certain situations it might be necessary to track change requests. An interesting discussion on the Lean Agile Scrum group tries to look deeper into the 'Why' and 'How' of tracking change requests.
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Interview: Scott Ambler On Agile’s Present and Future
In this interview, InfoQ’s Chief Editor, Floyd Marinescu, interviewed Scott Ambler, Practice Lead for Agile Development at IBM, on the current status of the Agile community and practices having a look at the perspective of the Agile’s future.
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How Agile Benefits the Individual
A recent discussion on the ScrumDevelopment list shed light on the ways in which agile development practices directly benefit the individuals involved. The consensus was that an environment ideal for individual growth can be created by the implementation of agile practices such as inspect-and-adapt, pair programming, test driven development, and constant collaboration and communication.
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Agile Usability
Jakob Nielsen, usability guru and author of Usability Engineering, raises the concern that Agile methods are a threat to traditional approaches to designing usability. He goes on to propose solutions so that usability designers can work together in the Agile world. In addition Alistair Cockburn, while generally supporting Jakob, takes issue with a few of his points.
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Faster Test Runs With Clover's Test Optimization
The recent release of Clover 2.4 highlights a new "Test Optimization" feature that offers to speed up CI builds and allow developers to spend less time waiting for their tests to run. The feature leverages "per-test" coverage data to selectively run only the tests impacted by your code changes.
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Co-location Transition, Tips and Concerns
What are the tricks to successfully transitioning from cubicles to a team room? What are the concerns? Ideas include: make the change an experiment, make sure everyone is heard.
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Careful With Your Coverage Metrics
Christian Gruber takes some time to clarify the TDD stance on using code coverage metrics. He discusses what code coverage metrics do and don't tell you, how TDD fits into the picture, and how one might be best advised to use their code coverage metrics.
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Presentation: Reaching Hyper-Productivity with Outsourced Development Teams
In this presentation filmed during Agile 2008, Jeff Sutherland, co-creator of Scrum, and Guido Schoonheim, CTO of Xebia, present an actual case of reaching hyper-productivity with a large distributed team using XP and Scrum.
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"Sprint": a Misnomer?
One of agile development's most fundamental concepts is working "iteratively" - running a project by delivering progressively better versions of the product at recurring interim milestones. Each methodology has its metaphoric label for this; the two most prevalent are XP's "iteration" and Scrum's "sprint". Kevin Schlabach talks about how the word "sprint" may be a bad metaphor.
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Presentation: Technical Lessons Learned Turning the Agile Dials to Eleven
In this presentation filmed during Agile 2008, Craig Smith and Paul King present what happens when one tries to be super Agile. Practically, they employed most currently used Agile practices on several projects, then they experimented with new ideas leading them to better results, increased productivity and quality.
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Kanban as Alternative Agile Implementation
Kanban systems for software, derived from the Toyota Production System, are an iterationless approach for scheduling work. Instead of using a time boxed iteration and planning meeting, the pulls stories from the backlog only when it has completed its previous work. Dave Nicolette thinks that its important to expand our repertoire beyond the basics become familiar with other tools like Kanban.
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Iterating To Acquire Knowledge, Not Just 'Business Value'
At first glance, most agile methodologies define simply that stories be developed in order by business value. In many cases though, it is prudent to blend increasing business value with deliberate steps in "knowledge acquisition". Alistair Cockburn describes how to do this blending effectively, and how to leverage it to deliver the right feature set at the right time.
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Handling Absence in Scrum Teams
Absence of a team member whether planned or unplanned can potentially affect the velocity of an Agile team. A discussion on the Scrum Development group tries to find ways to deal with absence.