InfoQ Homepage Agile Techniques Content on InfoQ
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Learning from History - or not
Consultant and author Gerald M. Weinberg has been in the computer industry for over 50 years; he raises concerns about the seemingly inevitable hype cycle associated with new techniques and how the industry so seldom seems to learn from previous cycles. In a similar vein Elisabeth Hendrickson recently blogged about the impact of "fake agile". They also provide some advice on how to improve.
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Do We Need an Iteration Zero?
There are usually multiple things which need to be done before the start of a project. Teams usually use 'Iteration Zero' to put all necessary systems in place in order to start delivering business value in subsequent iterations. Is this the right way?
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Building Trust with Your Team
Wanjun Zhuang asked the members of the LinkedIn Agile Coaching group about earning trust with his new Agile team. His team members consider him a manager and are not open with sharing because they consider him someone who is checking up on them. There has been a significant amount of diverse advice that is potentially very useful to any (software) team.
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Lean Startups
The lean startup movement is growing and all over the world local user groups are meeting to discuss, learn, and build successful businesses. But what is a lean startup? Is it two hackers in a garage, or is it more?
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Testing in the Cloud
Cloud testing is a testing approach in which the power of the cloud is harnessed. This is mostly done either to decrease the amount of time taken to test or to simulate real world traffic for an application. Moreover, in order to meet the scalability demands of high traffic web applications, tests need to scale as well.
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Kanban Boards from Sys Admin to Sales
Mattias Skarin, co-author of InfoQ's popular mini-book on Kanban and Scrum, shares a set of kanban boards that can be used to visually manage anything from system administration, to development teams with multiple clients, to sales.
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What Agile Architecture and Hurricanes have in Common
In a recent presentation at SATURN 2011 Eric Richardson has drawn some analogies between architects in an agile environment and hurricane meteorologists. For example, both produce various forecasts respectively documents, use many kinds of data sources as inputs, and employ different techniques to acquire data. The question arises is: what can architects learn from meteorologists?
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Code is Liability, the Less the Better
In lean manufacturing, the definition of inventory is pretty clear. It is the extra material, work in progress material and material queued up for the next bit of work. Lean emphasizes on reducing the inventory because there is always an inventory handling costs. In software development, often requirements are seen as inventory, what about the code?
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Continuous Deployment: Easier Said Than Done
Continuous deployment is often described as an Agile or a Lean technique where all the code written for the application is immediately deployed into production. There are numerous perceived benefits including reduced cycle time and reduced time to market for bug fixes and new features. However is it as easy as it sounds?
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Representing Agile Testing
Several members of the Agile community describe different styles for expressing user story tests and the testing of an entire theme.
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How To Split User Stories
Many new Agile teams have difficulty splitting their user stories small enough to work well with Agile techniques. In several articles, members of the Agile community provide guidance on how to split user stories effectively.
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Application Build and Continuous Integration Patterns
Julian Simpson, Principal Consultant at The Build Doctor, has compiled a set of patterns for maintaining a fast and reliable application build process and avoiding some Continuous Integration (CI) pitfalls. He also presents a number of patterns for deployment automation and testing in production-like environments.
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Possible Solutions to the Single Product Owner Problem
A Product Owner arguably, is one of the most demanding roles in Scrum. Product Owner is, single handedly responsible for the success of the project and is expected to lead the development effort by conveying the vision to the team. He is expected to help the team produce maximum business value. Is this expecting a lot from a single role?
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Kanban in the Home
Practitioners are finding interesting applications of Kanban concepts in the home, far from the office and factory floor.
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Product Owner Patterns
The Product Owner role is regularly debated and discussed. The challenges of the role and the responsabilities encompased by it are a frequent source of discussion and advice. Recently there has been discussion about common aspects of the role and the important activities a product owner needs to ensure happen on an agile project, and the difference between the product owner and product manager