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Agile Executive Forum 2016 Summary
The Agile Alliance hosted a one-day Executive Forum in San Jose, CA on September 19. The event attracted participants from around the world and a range of senior speakers from large organisations, and focused on how adopting agile development impacts companies and what executives need to do to help ensure successful cultural transformation, which is what agile adoption at scale is about.
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Scaling Scrum to Build a New-Technology Printer
When developing a high speed printer based on a new print technology things change often; you need an effective and flexible solution for managing a large project with many different disciplines. Océ Printing Systems decided to customize Scrum and scale it to enable collaboration and make progress transparent.
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Refactoring and Code Smells – A Journey Toward Cleaner Code
Refactoring helps to move towards cleaner code that is easier to understand and maintain. It takes practice and experience to recognise code smells: symptoms of bad design which indicate deeper problems in the code. Tools can be helpful to refactor in small steps and prevent breaking the code.
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Serverless, Microservices, Architecture, Streaming, & Culture Highlighted for QCon SF 2016
QCon San Francisco tracks are heavily focused on architecture, including topics like: Architectures You’ve Always Wondered About, Distributed Systems War Stories, Architecting for Failure, and Next Generation Microservices. You can find tracks focused on Culture, Optimizing You, & Softskills. Additionally, there are tracks that offer deep-dives in areas like DevOps, Security, and Web Tier Apps.
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Rethink Leadership: Being Ordinary to Accomplish Extraordinary Results
Ordinariness in leadership can help us to accomplish extraordinary results, argues agile/lean coach Katherine Kirk. Several more people have explored approaches that suggest to rethink leadership and go back to behaviour basics for leading people. Although these approaches are about small ordinary things, their effect may cause a revolution in the way organizations are being managed.
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Refuting the Idea of Rewriting the Agile Manifesto
Alistair Cockburn recently posted his viewpoint on the history of the Agile Manifesto, from the perspective of one of the original authors and signatories. He encourages readers to understand the perspective taken at the time by the authors, and also to explore the ongoing work of many of the original signatories. The original authors explicitly refuted the idea of rewriting the manifesto.
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How Agile and Architecture Parted and Finally Became Friends
People stopped seeing the need to define the architecture or do software design due to incorrect interpretation of the agile manifesto, argued Simon Brown. Many software developers don’t seem to have a sufficient toolbox of practices and the software industry lacks a common vocabulary for architecture. A good architecture enables agility with just enough up front design to create firm foundations.
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Agile 2016: Lee Cunningham on Scaling Agile and VersionOne
At the recent Agile 2016 conference Lee Cunningham, VersionOne’s Senior Director of Enterprise Agile Strategy, spoke to InfoQ about scaling agile, expanding agile beyond IT, identifying value and the direction of the VersionOne platform.
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Key Takeaways from the 'Agile on the Beach' 2016 Conference: Day One
At the sixth ‘Agile on the Beach’ conference, held in Cornwall, UK, several leading practitioners of agile software delivery presented the state-of-the-art and emerging trends within this domain. Key takeaways included the value of the scientific method to drive change; the use of Continuous Delivery (CD) for improving safety and speed; and the power of cognitive bias during the user testing.
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Microservices Imply a Distributed System
Moving towards microservices means moving towards distributed systems where you have to deal with latency, authorization and authentication, and messages that do not arrive, argues Sander Hoogendoorn. With microservices you can break down large systems into smaller components to regain control over the architecture.
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Experiences with Behaviour-Driven Development
Behaviour-Driven Development (BDD) recognizes that software development is fundamental to businesses of today and helps to improve how business stakeholders and software developers communicate with each other, Kevin Smith claims in a recent blog post about his experiences working with BDD.
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Benefits of Agile Transformation at Barclays
Increased throughput, reduced code complexity, less production incidents, shorter deployment cycles and higher happiness in teams; these are some of the benefits that the agile transformation at Barclays has delivered. Within the first year of the transformation, which is based on Disciplined Agile, more than 800 teams adopted agile making this one of the largest agile implementations.
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Agile in Dispersed or Distributed Teams
Cross-cultural team building enables collaboration and teamwork in dispersed or distributed agile teams. You need to invest to get the best out of a dispersed team. An exploration about what is needed to make agile work with dispersed or distributed teams.
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Getting the Data Needed for Data Science
Data science is about the data that you need; deciding which data to collect, create, or keep is fundamental argues Lukas Vermeer, an experienced Data Science professional and Product Owner for Experimentation at Booking.com. True innovation starts with asking big questions, then it becomes apparent which data is needed to find the answers you seek.
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Continuous Deployment at Coolblue
Continuous deployment results in a higher sense of responsibility and better quality of deployments, argues Paul de Raaij, technical pathfinder at Coolblue. Coding standards prevent your code base from becoming a mess, automated inspections are great for tedious and boring checks, and manual checks are great for checking if the logic or use of code actually makes sense.