InfoQ Homepage Agile Techniques Content on InfoQ
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Does TDD Really Ensure Quality?
Analysis of a recent study by the National Research Council of Canada's Institute of Technology into Test Driven Development turned up some interesting observations regarding the value that this approach adds, including whether, in fact, it adds any more value to the quality process than testing after development.
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Iterating and Incrementing to 'Get What You Need'
In "Don't know what I want, but I know how to get it", Jeff Patton described a few ways in which Agile teams and business users miscommunicate, and argued that the agile community needs to be clear about the terms 'iterating', 'incrementing' and 'shippable'.
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Mythical Agile Shortcuts
Going agile seems a pretty trivial task. We pair up, write unit tests, integrate regularly and support our teams with an easy to manage framework such as Scrum. In reality, however, this is not the case. All too often the benefits are not achieved and team does not function as expected. Ross Petit's recent article sheds some light on why things go wrong when the rubber hits the road.
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Creating Better Metrics
A recent article in The Economist pays tribute to three of the finest graphics from the last two centuries. What can be learned from these graphics to improve the display and the quality of agile development metrics?
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The Power of Checklists
In a recent New Yorker article, Atul Gawande describes how Dr. Peter Pronovost is dramatically decreasing infection rates in hospital intensive care units with "stupid little checklists". If simple checklists can save lives, can they improve your agile development team?
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RSpec 1.1 - A Step Up for BDD advocates
RSpec has become a poster child for both Domain Specific Languages and Behavior Driven Development (BDD), a type of Test Driven Development. The new RSpec 1.1 release adds improved support for Rails and other improvements.
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Autotest - a hidden tool gem
Autotest runs your tests whenever you save your files - actually, it's smarter than that. We take a look at how a tool like Autotest helps Ruby developers be productive without needing an IDE.
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Evidence Based Scheduling and FogBugz 6.0
Joel Spolsky recently posted an article about Evidence Based Scheduling. The post focuses on managing and identifying good estimates, in turn allowing the project manager to forecast the probability of delivering on a given date, adding a new method of measurement to the agile project manager's toolbox. InfoQ investigates the theory behind the practice, and its implementation in FogBugz 6.0.
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How Long Should Retrospectives Last?
The original definition of a retrospective, as presented by Norm Kerth, was a 3 day, offsite meeting. In, Agile Retrospectives, we are given 5 phases to be covered, but no specific guidance on time. In her recent article, Rachel Davies suggests that we have 30 minutes per week under review. How long should a retrospective last to be effective?
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Opinion: The Implicit Backlog
Last week, we reported on the wastes that are attributed to having a Product Backlog. This week, to keep it interesting, we'll report on the wastes present when a Product Backlog is absent.
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Lisp for Agile Teams
When the developers at Paragent needed to build a web-based IT administration tool, with a bare minimum of time and money, they did it with... Common Lisp? InfoQ asked Paragent CTO Tim Latchey why they chose Lisp, and what it offers to agile development teams.
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Agile Alliance - Functional Testing Tools
The Agile Alliance held a Functional Testing Tools Visioning Workshop in Portland, OR. InfoQ captures the zeitgeist from community reactions. Join the mailing list and participate.
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Holding a Program in Your Head
Your code: is it that stuff you store in version control or, as Paul Graham argues, "... your understanding of the problem you're exploring"? Graham has written an essay offering eight suggestions for developers trying to understand the code on which they're working - some of which seem to contradict the advice of the agilists.
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High abstraction level of DSLs to reduce the testing burden?
Inconsistencies between the user interface and user’s expectations can be an important source of bugs. According to Leonardo Vernazza, this is due the fact that the user and the UI do not talk the same language. Using a DSL, characterized by a high abstraction level, would be instrumental for avoiding the risk of translation errors and would therefore reduce the testing burden.
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Are Product Backlogs Wasteful?
Planning the features to be developed is an important part of software development. In Scrum, the list of features desired but not yet implemented is typically called the backlog (or product backlog). This is meant to be lightweight, but can it still be wasteful?