InfoQ Homepage Culture & Methods Content on InfoQ
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The "Consulting" Contract
Coach Michael Spayd tells us that both contractors and permanent employees can play a "consultant" role, and should think about developing consulting contracts or "designed partnerships" with their clients - not about the exchange of money, but to help create stellar results for the client while working in a manner that adheres to their own values and preferences.
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Don't Let Miscommunication Spiral Out Of Control
We miscommunicate every day, with results ranging from trivial to catastrophic. In this seasonally themed article, J. B. Rainsberger shares one of his secret weapons - the Satir Communication Model. It's a thinking tool to help us analyze troubling conversations, and to more deeply understand the people around us, building trust, the first step towards building an effective team.
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Book Excerpt and Review: Release It!
'Release It!: Design and Deploy Production-Ready Software' by Michael Nygard, which is nominated for a 2008 Jolt Award, discusses what it takes to make production-ready software and explains how this differs from feature-complete software. InfoQ spoke with Nygard about the areas that the book covers and some questions around how the book's philosophy fits in with concepts such as Agile.
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Offer People Reasons to Love Your Remote Meetings
With an increasingly global workforce, face-to-face meetings are becoming rarer these days. In their place, we more frequently conduct business with a very different experience using a teleconference line supported by desktop sharing tools. Tips and tricks effectively facilitating these interactions, an emerging and important skill, are covered in this article.
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Using singleton classes for object metadata
So you have a bunch of objects - let's call it an object graph - provided by some API. Now you want to to process the objects - which requires some intermediate data, for instance: the process creates some metadata that needs to be stored with the objects. The problem: where to store the metadata? We'll show how to use Ruby singleton classes to handle this problem.
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The Seven Fallacies of Business Process Execution
After 8+ years of intense research, the promises of BPM have not materialized: we are still far from having the ability to use the business process models designed by business analysts to create complete executable solutions. Some argue that we need to re-engineer BPM standards. In this paper we explore a new architecture blueprint for BPMSs that offers a cleaner alignment between SOA and BPM.
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Key Takeaway Points and Lessons Learned from QCon San Francisco 2007
This article presents the main takeway points as seen by the many attendees who blogged about QCon. Comments are organized by tracks and sessions: Keynotes, Architectures you've always wondered about, Architecture Quality, How much REST do we need?, Java in Action, Architecting for Performance & Scalability, Java Emerging Technologies, Challenges in Agile, Bleeding Edge .NET, The Rise of Ruby.
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A Leaner Start: Reducing Team Setup Times
How long does it take a newcomer to become an effective member of your team? Learning integral to agile methodologies, but the learning needs of the newcomer are different from established team members: in a standup meeting, "I did (unintelligible) yesterday" offers them more questions than answers. Pat Kua suggests some practices that specifically reduce the "setup time" for new team members.
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Iterative, Automated and Continuous Performance
Iterative and continuous are terms that are often used in reference to testing of software. This new InfoQ article takes a look at whether the same concepts can be applied to performance tuning. Along the way topics such as tooling and mocks are discuss in regards to how they need to be adjusted for performance in respect to testing for functional requirements.
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Book Review: Implementation Patterns
Kent Beck's new book, Implementation Patterns, is a book about writing code in Java. The patterns in this book are based on Kent's reading of existing code as well as his own programming habits. The patterns in this book are meant to be a coherent view of how to write code people can understand that serves human as well as economic needs.
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AgileEVM: Measuring Cost Efficiency Across the Product Lifecycle
In this InfoQ article, Tamara Suleiman explains AgileEVM, an adaptation of traditional Earned Value Management (EVM) metrics, designed to fit a Scrum project management framework. Compatible with traditional EVM metrics, it allows both Agile and traditional projects to be tracked within a single program, giving important early warnings of trends across the entire product life cycle.
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Book Review: The Responsibility Virus Helps Fear Undermine Collaboration
Do "empowered" organizations outperform their command-and-control competitors? Business school dean Roger Martin saw this promising approach fail too frequently. His diagnosis: he calls it the Responsibility Virus, and offers tools to help those who would treat the Virus in their own workplace. Reviewer Deborah Hartmann found this book a good explanation of why process is not enough.