InfoQ Homepage Agile Techniques Content on InfoQ
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Agile Presentations Prevalent at SDWest 2007
Dr. Dobb's SDWest is a well known developers' conference taking place this week. Although this is not an 'Agile' conference, numerous presentations and the first two keynotes are from the Agile world. The SDWest Show Daily, an online news source for the conference, has reported on topics of interest to Agile practitioners, from TDD to SOA.
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Fun: Planning your Life with Index Cards
We've all heard the apocryphal stories: "I planned my reno, move, wedding..." using Scrum. Mike Mason of Thoughtworks admitted on his blog: "this whole Agile thing has messed me right up", and shared a picture of his own personal taskboard.
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InfoQ Presentation: Scott Ambler on Database Refactoring
A sound code base is not sufficient to deliver quality software that evolves as user needs change. Some teams, ready to evolve their code, find themselves hamstrung by a hard-to-change database design. Scott Ambler, in this Agile2006 video, talked about how DBAs can use Agile's iterative and incremental approach to help make teams responsive to changing customer needs.
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GreenPepper aims to Improve Collaborative Testing
Pyxis Technologies officially launched their testing product GreenPepper last July, at Agile2006. Expanding on the kind of features offered by FitNesse, it is a platform intended to improve collaboration between business experts and software developers. Now, having taken the time to respond to feedback, Pyxis is offering a more complete product with the GreenPepper 1.1 Release.
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When is Scrum Not Scrum?
Tobias Mayer has written a new piece describing the ways in which Scrum teams should sometimes diverge from standard practice. But perhaps more interesting is his brief notice of being ejected from the Scrum Alliance.
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Tutorial: TDD with Selenium and Castle
Dan Bunea shows how TDD can be applied in .NET using Selenium RC and Castle. Test first principals provide architects a way to quickly jump into active development early in the application development lifecycle. The benefits of TDD are a drastic reduction in defects as well as increased flexibility in the code base since the application evolves quickly through an iterative process.
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Agile Methods and Startup Companies
Jessica Livingston's much anticipated book Founders at Work is finally available, featuring numerous interviews with successful entrepreneurs, including Steve Wozniak, David Heinemeier Hansson and Paul Graham. Although not targeted at agile software developers, anyone familiar with agile methods will recognize the advice on how to build software.
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Agile Planning Reduces Stress for Business and Developers
In The Freedom of Limited Capacity, Agile coach Mishkin Berteig wrote about what happened when he used Agile planning practices on his own business. By making his long work queue visible, he now had a better way to grapple with reality. Paradoxically, he also experienced a reduction in his stress level - in spite of his very visible backlog! The same effect has been observed on Agile teams.
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Case Study: Developing a Custom Agile Practice Adoption Strategy
Teams can get sidetracked by process when implementing Agile: they spin, trying to figure out which practices to start with, unsure which will have the biggest impact, or how they fit together. In their InfoQ case study, Amr Elssamadisy and John Mufarrige develop a customized adoption approach to help a team decide where to focus first - an alternative to adoption of pre-packaged methodologies.
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Agile Coaching Advice
A recent posting at Avanoo's "Meditations on Meaning" relates seven tips to successful debating, but the advice applies equally well to successful coaching for agile development teams.
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InfoQ Article: Reflecting on Success: Good Agile Karma
Agile relies heavily on discipline, rather than genius. We're told that average teams, even in the early stages, can achieve dramatic performance improvement if they are disciplined. As we do these things, the effects of our words and actions actively create, and re-create over time, the environment in which our teams and projects operate - for good or ill.
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InfoQ Interview: Alistair Cockburn
At Agile2006 InfoQ interviewed Alistair Cockburn, methodology creator, author and long-time leader in the Agile community. Topics discussed ranged from the history of the Agile movement to the future of methodologies, with a look at User Stories and Use Cases along the way. This interview uncovers how his research for IBM may have sparked the creation of the Agile Manifesto.
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Debating the Merits of Pair Programming
Mike Arace writes about his negative early impressions of pair programming. Are the benefits of pair programming worth the costs?
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Enhancing Scrum with "The Core Protocols"
Alex Champandard has written a piece on using Scrum within the game development industry, and how Scrum can be augmented with Jim and Michele McCarthy's "Core Protocols."
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Reading List: Agility and Discipline Made Easy
It's always interesting to check out what's at the top of your colleagues' reading pile... This week, it's a selection from the reading list of InfoQ's architect and co-founder, Alexander Popescu. Alex thought so much of this book, he recommends it to all team participants.