InfoQ Homepage Culture & Methods Content on InfoQ
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Visualizing Agile Projects using Kanban Boards
In the spirit of "information radiators and “big visible charts” Kenji Hiranabe proposes using Kanban Boards to organize three viewpoints (Time, Task, and Team) so the whole team understands the current status of the project and can work in an autonomous, motivated and collaborative manner.
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AgileAdvert Video Winners Announced
At Agile2007's Google reception, the audience voted to make the (very sad) clip "Developer Abuse" the number 1 video, thereby making "Matthew" (name changed to protect the innocent) this year's AgileAdvert famous Agilist. Five more videos were also recognized, sporting singing, dancing, a beating, "outside the box" thinking, expletives (deleted), and charming children (not all in one video!)
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The Secret Sauce of Highly Productive Software Development
When Agile teams get stuck in the just-average Norming stage, rather than continuting to the exciting, high Performing stage of teamwork, sometimes they're suffering from an invisible "learning bottleneck" that stunts team performance. Agile practices require us to take time to reflect and learn - and a team that learns quickly succeeds.
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Book Excerpt: Continuous Integration means Continuous Testing
Continuous Integration, a basic XP practice, has now become an accepted development best practice. InfoQ presents Chapter 6: Continuous Testing, with advice and examples for writing good tests to ensure system quality, from the book "Continuous Integration: Improving Software Quality and Reducing Risk," which aims help teams make CI a transparent "non-event".
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Implementing Automated Governance for Coding Standards
Most development organizations of a significant size have some form of coding standards and best practices. Simply documenting these standards and keeping them up to date can be a significant challenge and enforcing them even harder. Our organization has found that enforcing coding standards and best practices in an automated fashion through our build process has been highly effective.
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Designing Collaborative Spaces for Productivity
The typical Agile team may work in a common "teamroom", but personal space is also needed. Teams find out fast enough that some of the creature comforts left behind in their former traditional spaces were there for good reasons. This article shares the collected wisdom of dozens of teams who created their own work spaces, as collected by several experienced Agile coaches.
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Eric Newcomer on the future of OSGi
Eric Newcomer, co-chair of the OSGi Enterprise work group, talks about the evolution of OSGi and it's relationship to SOA and ESB. He discusses how he thinks OSGi will evolve over the coming years and whether or not it makes sense for Sun to adopt OSGi as the container model of choice."
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Agile, Architecture and the 5am Production Problem
Can refactoring and unit testing really create robust “working software” that survives the real world? In this story adapted from his book Release It! Michael Nygard contends that "abstractions leak": we need to attend to architecture, even in Agile projects, to guard ourselves against the 5AM failures that occur when foundational abstractions misbehave.
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Unit-Testing XML
There are many occasions where software creates XML output: XML documents are used for data interchange between different applications, web application create (X)HTML output or respond to AJAX requests with XML, and this has to be tested as much as anything else. In this article, Stefan Bodewig explains how to perform those tests with the XMLUnit framework he has co-authored.
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"Real Options" Underlie Agile Practices
Whether we realise it or not, "freedom to choose" is a principle underlying many Agile practices. By avoiding early commitments, we gain flexibility in the choices we make later. In this article, Chris Matts and Olav Maassen propose that an understanding of "Real Options" allows us to develop and refine new agile practices and take agile in directions it hasn't gone before.
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Interview: Jezz Santos about Software Factories
InfoQ had a chance to talk to Jezz Santos, a trusted expert advisor for the Web Service Software Factory and the creator of one of the world’s first implementations of a software factory (the EFx Factory), which demonstrates some of the advanced features of a future generation of software factories to come from Microsoft. We questioned him on his view of the Microsoft Software Factory Initiative.
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How To: Live and Learn with Retrospectives
Traditional SDLCs say how interactions within a team and between teams should happen; a prescription that doesn't always fit or isn't followed consistently. Rachel Davies explains how retrospectives allow teams to improve their processes by reviewing past events and brainstorming new ideas, and shows how to facilitate a retrospective for your team.