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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
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Domain Driven Design and Development In Practice
In this article, Srini Penchikala discusses Domain Driven Design and Development from a practical stand-point. The article looks at architectural and design guidelines and best practices that can be used in a DDD project. It also talks about the impact of various design concerns like Persistence, Caching, Transaction Management, Security, Code Generation etc in domain model implementation effort.
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The Agile Coach, from A to Z
Agile approaches introduce a new leadership role, the "Agile Coach," which is not familiar from traditional methodologies. What's so important about this role? Is it just a new name for an old role? Why does Monster.com list 54 positions with this title? Patrick Kua of ThoughtWorks lists 26 useful answers to this question, in the form of an A-to-Z primer.
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Creating Product Owner Success
The role of the Scrum Product Owner is powerful, but challenging to implement. Success can bring a new and healthy relationship between customers/product management and development, even competitive advantage, but it comes at a price: organizational change is often required. In this article Roman Pichler looks at what it takes to succeed as a Product Owner.