InfoQ Homepage Agile Techniques Content on InfoQ
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Blocking: Useful? Dangerous? Ethical?
George Dinwiddie commented on a discussion that took place in the eXtreme Programming yahoogroup about "blocking" as described by Scott Ambler: "This is a great example of something that I call blocking, where you produce the paperwork, attend the meetings, pretend to care, ... to make it look as if you're following the 'official process'".
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Is Selenium worth the pain?
Is Selenium worth the pain? Atlassian developer Nick Menere has asked that very question on the Atlassian Developer Blog. In his blog post Menere looks at the roadblocks found while trying to use Selenium to test two new Ajax features of JIRA 3.10.
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Presentation: Applying Agile to Ruby
In this presentation, Fred George talks about the application of agile practices in the enterprise and how they can help with the adoption of Ruby.
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Iteration Types
What is an iteration in the Agile world? How is it different than previous ways the software community has performed iterations? Are there different types of iterations, and does it matter? The ScrumDevelopment list has been recently discussing type A, B, and C sprints (sprint = iteration in Scrum terminology) as defined by Jeff Sutherland and the ideas are relevant the the wider Agile community.
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Book Excerpt: How to Improve your Continuous Testing
Continuous Integration has become a standard development best practice - but it's not always done well. Tests take up much of an application's build time, and poorly constructed test suites can cause long builds, whereupon teams start to circumvent agreed-upon CI practices just get the time to code. InfoQ presents advice and examples in Chapter 6: Continuous Testing from a new CI book.
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InfoQ Interview: Experiences with Planning Poker
In this fourteen-minute interview, Nils Haugen described "Planning Poker," a simple mechanism for arriving at estimates collaboratively, which has additional team building benefits and improves team estimates over time. Haugen shared his views on why this technique is an important tool for Agile teams in this InfoQ interview.
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Has Agile Crossed the Chasm?
Carrying on from last year's survey, Scott Ambler published the 2007 Agile Adoption survey this month. InfoQ provides some analysis of his findings and asks readers how they would approach getting a single view of Agile trends from across the community.
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Do Agile Methods Require Documentation?
Some believe that agile methods do not require (or cannot support) documentation of any kind. Ian Cooper examines this belief against the Agile manifesto and against specific agile methods.
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Agile Measurement - A Missing Practice?
Tom Gilb and Lindsey Brodie have written an article that suggests that Agile methods have a major weakness - that of lack of quantification. They argue that all qualities can be expressed quantitatively and present a new process, PLanguage, which looks very much like Scrum with an explicit measurement step. Are they right? Are Agile methods such as Scrum and XP in need of explicit measurement?
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Agile Certification beyond the CSM...
Scott Ambler delves once again into the subject of Agile Certification, airing the pros and cons of current certifications (namely the CSM), discusses potential elements of future qualifications. Is the ground swell of opinion growing for a wholesale change in Agile Certification, or is the CSM evolving enough to maintain community integrity?
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Ruby x Agile: Matz explores the relationships between Ruby and Agile
Ruby creator Yukihiro Matsumoto recently starred in the first of six short videos exploring the relationship between Ruby and Agile methodologies. Matz features along with Kenji Hiranabe and Shintaro Kakutani. Kenji is a self confessed ‘Agile agitator’ and Japanese translator of multiple XP/Agile books. Shintaro is a strong Ruby proponent.
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Can Virtual Teams Ever Work?
Co-location is one of the cornerstones of Scrum, so the increasing trend toward non-co-located teams raises questions on how Agile can work in such an environment. David Churchville has blogged some common distributed team scenarios, and offered solutions to common pitfalls of delivering Agile projects using different types of distributed teams.
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Frequent Retrospectives Accelerate Learning and Improvement
When we seek process improvement by discarding traditional SDLC rules, how should we work? Retrospectives are a tool teams can use to reflect on their process and improve it gradually over time. In this article, Rachel Davies offers help for teams who have ideas for improvements but are not sure how to get them off the ground.
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Refactoring the Agile Manifesto
The Agile Manifesto is six years old. Many have become disillusioned with Agile as it has spread and (inevitably?) been diluted. Post-agilism has been discussed even before Agile has become truly mainstream. Some have suggested that we have learned much over these years and the Agile Manifesto needs to be updated.
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Accurate Estimates - the ultimate oxymoron?
Amit Rathore questions the value of real time task based estimates in the planning and execution of software projects, taking a lean stance on what they bring to the software delivery party.