InfoQ Homepage Agile Techniques Content on InfoQ
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Federal Funding Backs Agile Training in Oregon
Agile experts James Shore and Diana Larsen will benefit from federal funding to teach two courses in Oregon this month, from Employer Workforce Training Funds and the Oregon Department of Community Colleges and Workforce Development.
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Presentation: Prioritizing Your Product Backlog
Choosing the right features can make the difference between the success and failure of a software product. Mike Cohn presented 'Prioritizing your Project Backlog' at Agile 2008 on how a project backlog should be organized and prioritized and non-financial techniques for prioritization such as kano analysis, theme screening/scoring, relative weighting and analytic hierarchy process.
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Story-Focused Standups
A widely accepted agile practice is the daily standup meeting, in which each team member shares: what they have done since the previous standup, what they expect to achieve by the next, and anything that is getting in their way. Mike Cohn recently examined variations that shed additional light on the progress being made toward completing each user story.
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What is Sprint Zero? Why was it Introduced?
Some teams use a Sprint 0 to prepare their product backlog, the infrastructure (development environment, CI server), ... .Is this part of Scrum? Is it useful?
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Making Retrospective Changes Stick
Agile teams may find it easy to talk about change during their retrospectives, but not so easy to make that change actually happen. Esther Derby, well-known thought-leader on the human aspects of software development, recounts an experience from her personal improvement efforts to illustrate this and offer a few suggestions on how to succeed with making change actually happen.
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How to Handle Unfinished Stories?
It is not uncommon for a scrum team to get to the end of the sprint and find that they have a story that has been worked on, but is not yet done. Perhaps the story appears to be about 80% done. What should become of such stories and how should the progress made on them be tracked? These are questions that every agile team will face. In a recent blog post, David Starr shares his approach.
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Behavior-Driven Development for Everyone
Behavior-Driven Development is nothing new but has steadily risen to the forefront as an excellent technique for technical and non-technical participants to collaborate on a software project. Several frameworks exist to aid the development of software in the BDD (Behavior-Driven Development) mindset, with one particular framework trying to make it as <i>easy</i> as possible for everyone.
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Martin Fowler: Can SOA Be Done With an Agile Approach?
Agile development challenges many of the common software development assumptions. One of the most significant is the evolutionary approach to software design. Another is up-front design which is promoted by top-down SOA. In his latest article, Martin Fowler examines whether the two can coexist.
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When is Ok to Break the Rules
In “Just Ship Baby” Kent Beck, author of the JUnit Framework, reminds us that the point of all the Agile processes and practices is to produce shipping software. If they’re getting in the way of shipping software – then perhaps you need to break the rules.
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Lego Is Not Just For Kids Anymore
Lego blocks have been used for playing and building interesting structures. Michael Hunger and Takeshi Kakeda show how Lego blocks can be used as effective information radiators.
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Presentation: Agile in Practice: What Is Actually Going On Out There?
In this presentation filmed during Agile 2008, Scott Ambler talks about actual data resulting from surveys made during 2006-2008, showing how Agile is perceived and implemented within organizations. Some of the topics surveyed are: the adoption rate of Agile, the effectiveness of Agile approaches, the effectiveness of various techniques.
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Interview: Joshua Kerievsky about Industrial XP
In this interview taken by Sadek Drobi of InfoQ, Joshua Kerievsky, founder of Industrial Logic, talks about Industrial Extreme Programming which extends XP by including practices dealing with management, customers and developers.
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Presentation: Agile and Beyond - The Power of Aspirational Teams
In this presentation filmed during Agile 2008, Tim Mackinnon talks about the aspirations behind the Agile principles and practices, the desire to become efficient, to write quality code which does not end up being thrown away. Tim has a personal perspective on Agile practices and shares from his own experience.
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A Fresh Look at 'Technical Debt'
A Technical Debt Workshop was recently held to improve our industry's understanding of and approach to "technical debt", resulting in some interesting ideas. Among them, changing our perception of the problem to focus on "assets" rather than "debt", an idea now receiving quite a bit of attention by people such as Michael Feathers and Brian Marick.
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Presentation: 10 Ways to Screw Up with Scrum and XP
In this presentation filmed during Agile 2008, Henrik Kniberg talks about 10 possible reasons to fail while doing Scrum and XP. Maybe the team does not have a definition of what Done means to them, or they don't know what their velocity is, or they don't hold retrospectives.