InfoQ Homepage Agile Techniques Content on InfoQ
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Fixture Gallery, a New Quick Reference For FitNesse How-To
Fixture Gallery is a new open doc cookbook by Gojko Adzic for FIT/FitNesse tests. It provides developers with a quick overview of the most important fixture types and concepts for agile acceptance testing using the FIT framework.
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New Agile Community Site Launch
A new site Agile Commons has recently been born, as a result of collaborative work between Rally employees and their customers. It has been launched as an ideas exchange platform funded by Rally & Hivemind, with the aim of becoming the leading resource for Agile minded people, by inviting different types of organisations, Linked In groups to discuss and exchange agile ideas in a single place.
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Understanding Business Value
Aside from "Agile" itself, "Business Value" may be one of the most widely used buzzwords around the floors of any fresh agile project. But, how many of these projects actually have a good understanding of what they really mean when they're saying it? Joe Little presents his thoughts on this very question.
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Cockburn on Testing: Real Programmers have GUTs
In a moment of relaxation, Alistair Cockburn had the insight that we may be quibbling over inconsequentialities: "test before" or "test after," what's important to professional programmers is Good Unit Tests. Eureka!
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Pragmatic is the new black - Reality Driven Development
Taking an empirical approach, Reality Driven Development promotes the idea of rigorous experimentation as a way to improve the user experience and technical qualities of software development.
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Crunch Mode And Making Superstars Average
James Golick and Reg Braithwaite discuss the often overlooked realities of how putting teams into "Crunch Mode" can have undesirable results. The discussion looks at various ways applying pressure to a team often results in putting your project into not better but worse shape and how teams and managers might benefit by taking a different approach.
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Is the ScrumMaster-as-Blocker a Pattern to Follow or a Smell to Avoid?
So, you are on a development team that is adopting Agile or thinking of going in that direction. If you are adopting Agile by starting small, you probably are working against-the-grain in your organization. You may have heard that there should be a role that protects the team from the rest of the non-Agile world that might be useful
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TDD: Essential Skill or Architectural Landmine?
At JAOO '07 Bob Martin asserted: "it is irresponsible for a developer to ship a line of code he has not executed in a unit test." In this InfoQ video, Martin debated with another well respected software thought leader, Jim Coplien, on this and other topics, including Design by Contract vs. TDD and how much up-front architecture is needed to keep a system consistent with the business domain model.
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Continuous Integration And Version Control for Databases
After asserting that one must, as a rule, always version their database work, Scott Allen detailed an approach to making the best of versioning databases. Allen presented a comprehensive, practical approach to creating a baseline, using change scripts to manage schematic revisions, controlling programmatic database objects, and handling branching and merging.
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TDD/BDD Leading To Incomplete Unit Tests?
Peter Ritchie raised concern about TDD and BDD keeping practitioners from writing good unit tests. He cites an over-reliance on “interaction testing", a core mantra and essence of TDD and BDD, as a driver with tendency to result in incomplete unit testing.
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Does Continuous Production Lead To Extreme Agility?
The idea of continuous production has been around for some time, with Cal Henderson revealing in 2005 that Flickr releases code to production about every 30 minutes. InfoQ investigates continuous production and explores the effects it has on the product lifecycle, and in turn the host organisation.
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Right-Size Your User Stories
For those using User Stories, getting them right is one of the difficult aspects of an Agile process - they can drive or bog down your work. Pat Kua recently addressed a key question: How much detail should you put in your story? The answer, of course, is "it depends" on where you are in the process.
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Unconsciously Agile? (Rhythms of Agile Development)
Damon Poole wrote recently that many of us maybe practicing Agile development without even realizing it. It turns out that many of us maybe showing signs of the Agile disease without knowing it.
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Measure Teams, Not Individuals
Michael Dubakov recently expressed warning against the measurement of individual velocity and individual estimate accuracy. His view: measurement of these metrics not only provides no more useful information than is already available with their team-level equivalents, but may also have a tendency to encourage teams into behaviors that reduce effectiveness.
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Are Iterations/Sprints Waste or Value to Agile Teams?
Although many people consider iteration to be a key characteristic of agile software development, some question whether or not they're important, and add value to an agile method, or if they're superfluous, or even wasteful. InfoQ has assembled a roundup of arguments on the subject, to help agile teams decide if iterations are important for them.