InfoQ Homepage Culture & Methods Content on InfoQ
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Adopting Agile in an Environment of Fear
Agile adoption and transformation is sometimes effective, and sometimes not. Is there a common thread to the failures? Does fear have anything to do with it? And what can we expect if we start an agile adoption initiative in an environment that is full of fear?
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Upcoming Agile Coach Camps
Agile coaches facilitate the transformations of teams and organizations to agile methods. Agile coach camps are open space unconferences where coaches gather to share and learn. There are two upcoming coach camps, one in Bletchley Park in the UK, the other in Columbus Ohio in the US.
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Selenium 2 (a.k.a Selenium WebDriver) Is Released
The Selenium team has recently released Selenium 2 (a.k.a. Selenium WebDriver), a major update to the poplar test framework for web applications.
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Systemic Constellations at Agile Coach Camp Montreal
Todd Charron is reporting about the Agile Coach Camp Canada 2011, in Montreal, Quebec where Michael Spayd demonstrated a powerful coaching technique called Systemic Constellations. Systemic Constellations comes from family systems therapy and was developed by Bert Hellinger.
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Sales and Agile, Oil and Water?
Sales, by its very nature is supposed to be Agile. A good sales person would inspect the situation, adapt to make the stakeholders comfortable and inspect by asking relevant questions to finally present a valid solution. However, it becomes a problem when the sales person tries to become too agile by offering silver bullets. Is this a regular phenomenon? Can it be solved?
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The Legacy of Eli Goldratt
On June 11th 2011, Dr. Eli Goldratt, inventor of the Theory of Constraints (TOC), passed away. Eli’s first, and most famous book was the "The Goal", it defined the TOC. His legacy will continue to indirectly influence the agile by the embodiment of his ideas in techniques we apply every day.
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Is Technical Debt Still a Useful Metaphor?
A discussion has been taking place on the LinkedIn Agile Alliance group questioning if "technical debt" is still a valid metaphor in today's global software development world. This discussion has surfaced a strong support for the effectiveness of the metaphor even after 20 years.
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The Manifesto Overload
By definition a Manifesto is a public declaration of principles and intentions which describes the motives, reasoning and demands of a group. One of the more popular manifestos is the Agile Manifesto but there has been quite and epidemic since then.
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Nurturing Self-organizing Teams
Rashina Hoda achieved her doctorate researching self-organizing Agile teams. She recently spoke to InfoQ about the work she's been doing and the results of her research. She discusses some of the factors that enable self-organization, looks at some of the risks and pitfalls that self-organizing teams face and provides some advice on how to create a culture that nurtures self-organization.
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Scrum Alliance Strengthens CSP Certification, Announces Beta
The Scrum Alliance announced plans to strengthen the Certified Scrum Professional (CSP) designation into "a certification program that meets worldwide standards for structure and testing required for accreditation." The CSP designation, goes beyond the CSM as it requires experience applying agile in the workplace. Details for a beta program will be in the next Scrum Alliance Newsletter.
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MapR Releases Commercial Distributions based on Hadoop
MapR Technologies released a big data toolkit, based on Apache Hadoop with their own distributed storage alternative to HDFS. The software is commercial, with both a free edition, M3, as well as a paid edition, M5. M5 includes snapshots and mirroring for data, Job Tracker recovery, and commercial support. MapR's M5 edition will form the basis of EMC Greenplum's upcoming HD Enterprise Edition.
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Value-based Architectural Decisions in Agile Development
Jeromy Carriere, chief architect at eBay, received the Architecture in Practice award at the recent SATURN 2011 conference. He described how economical accountability and ownership for architectural transformations set the ground for autonomous yet consistent design decision-making by the agile teams.
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Web 3.0 - Cult or Culture?
In a recent article by Jonathan Strickland for HowStuffWorks the author addresses Web 3.0. This "long anticipated and disruptive new technology" is supposed to increase the possibilities of users and providers. But what exactly is the Web 3.0?
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Mary Shaw and Dave Garlan have been honored for pioneering Research in Software Architecture
The Special Interest Group on Software Engineering (SIGSOFT) of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) have awarded Mary Shaw and Dave Garlan the Outstanding Research Award 2011. Both computer scientists have pioneered the work on Software Architecture at the Software Engineering Institute of the Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh.
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Using Xbase to Define a Generic Graphical View
Jan Koehnlein, a core committer of the Xtext project, introduces how Xbase can be used to declaratively create graphical views of a given model, which is otherwise achieved by a hard-wired transformation between the model and its graphical representation.