InfoQ Homepage Architecture & Design Content on InfoQ
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Burn Stories Not Tasks
Developers commonly break user stories into tasks to facilitate distributing the implementation work across the team, and allow tracking of progress at a finer level of granularity. Unfortunately, a story can explode into a list of non-trivial tasks so large that the story is not deliverable by the end of the iteration. Ron Jeffries suggests: "Do stories as a unit, not broken into tasks."
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Panel: BayAPLN Agile Expert Panel
During QCon San Francisco 2008, InfoQ and BayAPLN, a local group of Agile Project Leadership Network (APLN), organized a panel comprised of Agile experts which answered questions from the audience. The panelists were: David Chilcott, Moderator, Polyanna Pixton, David Hussman, Sue Mckinney, Pat Reed.
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Moore's Law Is Too Slow
Advances in "cloud computing", clustering, and general-purpose computing with commodity GPUs suggest compute power per dollar may increase significantly faster than Moore's Law predicts.
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Eventually Consistent, Revisited
Building reliable distributed systems at a worldwide scale demands trade-offs between consistency and availability. Last month, Amazon’s CTO Werner Vogels posted an article describing approaches to tolerate eventual data consistency in large-scale distributed systems.
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Programming Languages: 2008 Review and Prospects for 2009
In the beginning of last year, Ehud Lamm launched on Lamba the Ultimate a thread about programming languages predictions for 2008. Several subjects popped up: concurrency, functional programming, future of Java, Ruby, C++, and many others… What really happened in 2008 and what are the prospects for 2009? Bloggers have addressed these questions on demand of James Iry, echoing at last year thread.
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QCon London 2 Months Away; Special Discounts by Jan 15th
InfoQ's 3rd QCon London (March 11-13) is a couple of months away and will again feature 15 tracks, 100 speakers, and excellent learning and networking opportunities. The last chance to save £295 expires next week January 15th!
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Windows 7 Beta Is Available
In a keynote address at Consumer Electronics Show 2009 (CES), Steve Ballmer, Microsoft’s CEO, announced Windows 7 Beta and a new version of Windows Live. Windows 7 Beta is available for download for MSDN, TechBeta and TechNet customers and will be widely available starting January 9th.
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Debate: Is SOA Dead?
Burton Group's Anne Thomas Manes wrote an obituary for SOA, saying SOA met its demise on January 1, 2009, when it was wiped out by the catastrophic impact of the economic recession. InfoQ has collected industry reactions.
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Article: Making TDD Stick: Problems and Solutions for Adopters
In this article, Mark Levison addresses the difficulties encountered by developers willing to adopt TDD, the reasons why many start using TDD but give up after a short period of time, and what could be done to help developers make TDD a habit.
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Requester Pays: A New Amazon Business Model
Amazon has introduced a new business model for its S3 web services called Requester Pays. Businesses using S3 can mark up data buckets so their transfer will be paid by data requesters instead of being paid by their owners as it is now. Used in conjunction with DevPay, the new model opens new business opportunities for companies willing to share their data with others.
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Data Integration Software XAware 5.2 Supports Data-First Design and Data Services Design Wizard
The latest version of XAware, an open source data integration software, offers data-first design feature. XAware development team recently announced the general availability of XAware 5.2 version.
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Erlang Bindings for Windows Azure
One of the advantages of a REST architecture is that is makes it much easier to implement cross-language bindings. To wit, Sriram Krishnan has created a set of Azure bindings for the concurrent programming language, Erlang.
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New Patches for 1.8.x Fix Memory Leaks And Improve Performance
A few patches by Brent Roman promise to fix a long standing issue of memory leaks, particularly for continuations, for Ruby 1.8.x. They also happen to improve performance.
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Ramnivas Laddad on Making AOP Choices With AspectJ and Spring AOP
Spring AOP/AspectJ combination offers many choices, whether they are AOP system, syntax or weaving related options, and a clear understanding of all those choices is important to apply them pragmatically when using Aspects in enterprise applications. Ramnivas Laddad said just one kind of AOP won't fit all applications and choosing the right combination will help developers be successful with AOP.
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The Correct Ratio of Agile Testers to Developers? It Depends.
An long-standing question in the software development world is: what is the correct ratio of testers to developers? A recent thread on the Scrum Development list asked how agile impacts this ratio. The answer to the first question seems to be 'It depends'. The answer to the second question, according to Elisabeth Hendrickson, is that agile teams can do more testing, with fewer testers.