InfoQ Homepage Agile Techniques Content on InfoQ
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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?
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Does the Agile Community Need a Maturity Model?
Periodically an Agile Maturity Model or a Framework for Agile Adoption shows up on the radar. There are also several consulting companies performing Agile 'readiness assessments' as a precursor to helping their clients 'become' Agile. Are these indications of an unfulfilled need in the community?
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Is Pipelined Continous Integration a Good Idea?
Sometimes, when the team and/or code-base get large, the CI server starts to slow down. The cycle between builds grows and the feedback degrades – a build may take an hour or more to respond with a pass/fail, and by that time several people may have checked in their code into an already broken build. To address this issue, many teams “pipeline” their CI - but is this a good strategy?
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xUnit.net - Next Generation of Unit Testing Frameworks?
Jim Newkirk, creator of NUnit, has announced a new Unit Testing Framework called xUnit.net. The proclaimed successor to NUnit is supposed to get rid of NUnit's mistakes and shortcomings and add some best practices and extensibility to the framework.
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Agile Bibliography Wiki
George Dinwiddie announces the Agile Bibliography Wiki to track readings on the subject of agile, particularly those that are useful to back up a point, or which are useful references, and invites the community to help fill out the reading list.
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Are Automated Agile Tools Tactile Enough?
Can the bonding that takes place when a developer picks a story card off the task board and takes it over to her desk ever be replicated in a system? InfoQ delves into social informatics, and addresses the effects it has on the Agile way.
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Why do Agile Adoptions Fail?
Although agilists focus much of their energy on helping their agile projects succeed, it is helpful to periodically stop and consider what causes some agile projects and agile adoptions to fail. Armed with this knowledge, perhaps one can avoid these same pitfalls.
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InfoQ Article: Lean Kanban Boards for Agile Tracking
"Big Visible Charts" aren't unique to Agile - Lean manufacturing also has its Kanban Boards. "Kanban" roughly means "card or sign," and each Kanban card is "pulled" onto the board only when the work represented by an "in progress" card is retired. In this InfoQ article, Kenji Hiranabe proposes using Kanban Boards to track Agile project status (Time, Task, and Team) to enhance collaboration.
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Failure to Learn Stifles Productivity
Amr Elssamadisy and Deborah Hartmann have written an article asking us to consider that there may be one common attribute to all software development projects that, if focused upon and improved, can make productivity soar.