InfoQ Homepage Collaboration Content on InfoQ
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Handling Your Team's "Rotten Apple"
Recently there has been an active discussion in the Scrum Development Yahoo Group about handling an "under-performing" team member. In the 130+ response thread, "Rotten apple in Scrum team", talk ranged from advice for the primary question, to talk of team morale and who manages it, to the classic debate of measuring individuals, to distinguishing whether a team is really a "team", and more.
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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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Scrum of Scrums - Issues and Value
The Scrum of Scrums meeting "is an important technique in scaling Scrum to large project teams. These meetings allow clusters of teams to discuss their work, focusing especially on areas of overlap and integration." Allan Shalloway asked for people's experience "on Scrum-of-Scrums for coordinating teams vs scaling Scrum to the enterprise" he sees problems in with large groups (350 people).
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Co-location Transition, Tips and Concerns
What are the tricks to successfully transitioning from cubicles to a team room? What are the concerns? Ideas include: make the change an experiment, make sure everyone is heard.
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MS Experience Yields Distributed Agile "Dos and Don'ts"
Ade Miller has published a paper on distributed agile development, highlighting the challenges of trying to do distributed agile development, along with recommendations for addressing these challenges based primarily on the experiences of teams within the Patterns and Practices group at Microsoft.
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Working Group Formed to Produce Reusable Agile Contracts
Traditional software contracts have often pitted the customer and vendor against each other. Several Agilists in the past have taken a stab at defining an Agile contract which improves the relationship between the customer and the vendor. A working group is collaborating on OpenPlans taking a step further in this direction and coming up with a reusable Agile contract.
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Presentation: Jim McCarthy and 11 Commitments For a Shared Vision
In this presentation filmed during Agile 2008, Jim McCarthy talks about 11 commitments team members should adhere to if they want to achieve a state of shared vision. Such a state empowers a team to reach their full potential and ultimately attain greatness.
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Agile Games for Learning
At Agile 2008, Don McGreal and Michael McCullough ran a session that showed how to use games and exercises to help improve our understanding of Agile principles and practices. After the conference they created the Tasty Cupcakes as a repository for all Agile games.
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Agility Means Truthfulness
Talk about agile can often tend toward the tangible things that people do day-to-day, toward the "process of agile", but true agility is really less about process and more about principle. Travis Birch presents his perspective about some of these more intangible aspects of agile, namely "truthfulness".
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Article: "Who Do You Trust?" by Linda Rising
During Agile 2008, Dr. Linda Rising held a presentation centered on experiments conducted many years ago, presenting how deep, powerfully affecting, and difficult to avoid are human “prejudices” and “stereotypes” as seen from the perspective of psychology and cognitive science. The article, written by Tsutomu Yasui, is a summary of that presentation.
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Interview: Erich Gamma Discusses Jazz, Eclipse, JUnit and Design Patterns
In this interview from QCon London 2008, Erich Gamma discusses the Jazz project, why Eclipse has been successful, the strict Eclipse release schedule, JUnit, Design Patterns, how to identify a design pattern, design patterns and the 'Don't Repeat Yourself' principle, the design pattern community, and whether dependency injection is a design pattern.
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Presentation: When Working Software Is Not Enough: A Story of Project Failure
In this presentation filmed during Agile 2008, Mitch Lacey talks about a real life project that was on the verge of being successful, but was deemed as unsuccessful by the customer. Considering that "the true measure of project progress is working software", Mitch and his team delivered the software, but the client was not satisfied.
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Behavior-Driven Development for Everyone
Behavior-Driven Development is nothing new but has steadily risen to the forefront as an excellent technique for technical and non-technical participants to collaborate on a software project. Several frameworks exist to aid the development of software in the BDD (Behavior-Driven Development) mindset, with one particular framework trying to make it as <i>easy</i> as possible for everyone.
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Can Authors Use Agile Methods?
Can Agile methods be used to write a book? For a growing number of authors (Lisa Crispin, Janet Gregory, Alistair Cockburn, James Shore, Shane Warden and Jurgen Appelo) the answer is resounding yes.
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Presentation: Martin Fowler and Dan North Talk Over the Yawning Crevasse of Doom
In this presentation filmed during QCon London 2007, Martin Fowler and Dan North talk about the communication gap existing between the developers and the customers or users. Closing this gap is extremely important in order to create successful software.