InfoQ Homepage Culture & Methods Content on InfoQ

Articles

RSS Feed

Newer Older

Why BPEL is not the holy grail for BPM

In the Business Process Modeling world there is still an ongoing standards debate. In this article, Pierre Vigneras of the Bull BPM team, discusses problems with one of those standards - BPEL. Pierre walks us through a simple parallel process and discusses the numerous issues practitioners face in trying to express an unstructured flow based on a structured model.

Pierre Vigneras
on Oct 21, 2008
Culture & Methods

"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”. This article is a summary of that presentation.

Tsutomu Yasui translated by Kazuteru Tajima
on Sep 23, 2008
"Systems Development": a New Discipline for a New Education

Educator Dr. Dave West discusses “Systems Development”, a new discipline emphasizing humanity, craft, design, creativity, innovation, and emergence - in stark contrast with current university disciplines. West proposes a better educational experience, replacing the sterility of today’s classrooms and labs with the workshop, or “bottega.”

Dr. Dave West
on Sep 12, 2008
Tips from a Top Sports Team Coach

In team sport, as in software development, the team factor is crucial for success. In fact, team sport shows many inspiring parallels to software development. This article outlines 9 essential principles top-coach Marc Lammers discovered while building the world’s best field hockey team, and maps them to software development practices

Urs Peter
on Aug 20, 2008
Case study: Distributed Scrum Project for Dutch Railways

How we customise Scrum to our local context plays a large role in the success or failure of a project. This article describes a successful, large, distributed Scrum project, which had already been scrapped once under a traditional approach. The authors share lessons learned on: project startup, product ownership, testing and the importance of estimates and effective communication.

Marco Mulder Martin van Vliet
on Aug 12, 2008
Book Review: Applied SOA

Applied SOA is a new book on Service Oriented Architecture written by 4 leading SOA practitioners that aims at making you successful with your SOA implementation. In particular, this book is going to help you tie your SOA initiative with your Enterprise Architecture, IT Governance, Core Data and BPM initiatives.

Jean-Jacques Dubray
on Aug 04, 2008
Book Review: Agile Adoption Patterns, A Roadmap to Organizational Success

Ryan Cooper reviewed Amr Elssamadisy's new book and found it a useful framework for designing customized adoption strategies. Rather than a single recipe of Agile practices for everyone, the reader is offered patterns and tools to help determine which practices will most effectively help them reach their own organization's specific goals.

Ryan Cooper
on Jul 21, 2008
Debunking Common Refactoring Misconceptions

In comparison to Java, an emphasis on continuous refactoring is still relatively new in .NET. Besides having few ardent proponents, many myths linger around what refactoring really is and how it applies to the development process in general. Danijel Arsenovski, author of Professional Refactoring in Visual Basic, attempts to dispel some of these myths.

Danijel Arsenovski
on Jul 16, 2008
Choose Feature Teams over Component Teams for Agility

Feature teams, common enough in small groups, are all too rare in large product development - but they can be a key to scaling with agility. This article analyses how feature teams resolve weaknesses of component teams, and points out key issues to address when transitioning. It is an excerpt from "Scaling Lean and Agile Development," by Craig Larman and Bas Vodde, to be published later this year.

Craig Larman Bas Vodde
on Jul 15, 2008
User Story Estimation Techniques

One of the great things about working as a consultant is the ability to try out many different ideas and adapting your personal favorite process to include things that work. This article gives the details about user story estimation techniques that Jay Fields has found effective.

Jay Fields
on Jun 30, 2008
An Introduction to Lean Thinking for Software

For Agile developers only familiar with Scrum or XP, it may be unclear how Lean relates to what they do. This article introduces Lean Thinking and how it enhances software development. Ning Lu of ThoughtWorks China identified the biggest obstacle to Lean or Agile as the mind-set developed during the period of large-scale manufacturing.

Jacky Li
on Jun 23, 2008
Using Numbers to Communicate - in the Spirit of Agile

It's an old story. Techies cave in to the business guys because they don't know how to push back. The problem? Developers use numbers primarily for computation, but the business uses numbers to make decisions. In this story the "Spirit of Agile" encourages a developer to turn non-computational problems and issues into number language.

Linda Rising Barbara Chauvin
on Jun 13, 2008

Newer Articles

Older Articles

InfoQ Software Architects' Newsletter

Articles