InfoQ Homepage Agile Techniques Content on InfoQ
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Getting Agile with Eclipse Continuous Integration
The Eclipse "Callisto" release includes agility-enhancing features, including a new version of the testing tools developed in the "TPTP" project. In their online presentation, project committers Scott E. Schneider and Joe Toomey say that by using TPTP in the Continuous Integration cycle developers gain more powerful test types, better/more extensible reporting, and easy platform coverage.
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InfoQ Book Review: Agile Java Development with Spring, Hibernate and Eclipse
Matt Morton asked the question "Can Java be as Agile as the Dynamics (Ruby, Python, Groovy)?" and went to Anil Hemrajani's book to find out. He found a readable, useful book, and helps idenfity the right audience for this book.
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Test Driven Development Has Become the Norm
In his June article "Test-driven development is the combination of test first development and refactoring" on Dr. Dobbs Portal, Scott Ambler cuts to the chase, as usual: TDD has become the norm. So, do you want to implement it now, or wait for competetive pressure to make it necessary? This article lays out the reasons to consider it, and debunks some widespread misconceptions.
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"Agile Practice" Patterns Wiki is Up
At XP2006, Amr Elssamadisy announced a new wiki site for collecting Agile Practice Patterns. Well, it's up and ready to go, already loaded with patterns from ChiliPlop 2006 and XP 2006 conferences.
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Health Check: Has Your Team Got Rhythm?
Agile work keeps things simple by putting in place some basic patterns. Sometimes, when problems arise within the process, complex solutions can be averted by simply re-establishing a rhythm in the cycle of releases, iterations, days, stories/features. Agile Journal, in their Metrics edition, published three articles which mention the importance of rhythm as a diagnostic.
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"Agile People Do Get It" -- Uncle Bob
Last week, Cedric Beust ranted against the way Agile test practices, particularly TDD, are evangelised in "Agile People Still Don't Get It". He complained about "Agilists' dishonesty ... They offer you all these nice ideas, but they never - ever - disclose the risks and the downsides". He raises a valid point. This week Jeff Langr (the Agile culprit), Bob Martin and others blogged responses.
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"Literate Testing" for Readable JUnit Tests
How much time do you spend puzzling out the intention of a test? Robert Chatley, Tom White and Brian Marick have been using a more natural sentence style to make Java tests easier to read, calling it "Literate Testing".
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Security and Reliability Techniques Revealed for Agile Teams
Agile methods such as Extreme Programming (XP) and Agile Unified Process (AUP) do not explicitly address security and reliability, yet these are issues which are often critical to your success. It is possible to address these issues, and more, on software development teams while still remaining agile.
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Article: Reducing Legacy Code Woes
Incremental Test Driven Development is fine for new code... but few get to start from scratch. Jared Richardson, author of "Ship It!", shows how to handle the legacy code that everyone eventually inherits. Use his Build, Automate, Test approach to create a safety net that helps you identify and eliminate unintended side effects, to ensure your code continues to work the way you want it to.
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Strategies for Remaining Focussed on Your Project's Goal
Catalysts' Christoph Steindl describes strategies for how you can stay focused on the true goal(s) which your project team is chartered to achieve via effective use of strategic objectives maps and related agile project management strategies.
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Strategies for Initiating an Agile Project
This article describes what happens during "Cycle 0" to kick off an agile project. This includes feasibility assessment, initial requirements modeling, initial architectural modeling, building the initial team, and initial estimating and planning.
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Watir Adds Support for Modal Dialogs
Watir is a very popular testing tool for web apps. The newest release adds support for Internet Explorer modal dialogs, which are common in enterprise applications.
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Should We Manage Both Features and Tasks?
Although it keeps people busy, managing tasks is neither interesting nor useful. Managing value created provides greater leverage and greater risk management. Jon Kern blogged last week on creating good features (rather than tasks) by focusing on value and testability. But do we sometimes need to manage tasks, too? David Anderson used the Theory of Constraints to back an unexpected answer.
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Keep those Stand Up Meetings Short and Sweet
Keeping the daily Scrum, or standup meeting, short is a challenge. Many of us are familiar with the "Talking Stick" used by some indigenous peoples to run run well organized tribal meetings. It's an elegantly simple way to keep a group focused and respectful. Kane Mar, a west coast XP coach has blogged about how a number of teams have adapted this idea. But seriously - using a Pig?!
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Imagine the End, to Begin Well
Agile trainer and coach Andy Pols has reported that at SPA2006, retrospectives guru Norm Kerth described the practice of "Kick-Off Retrospectives", which ask participants to imagine how they will answer at a future retrospective: "What was so good about this project that you'd like to repeat it on future projects?" This can set expectations and inform the team's planning for collaboration.