InfoQ Homepage Culture & Methods Content on InfoQ
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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.
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All Right It Failed, What Next?
Usually failures result in anger, frustration and playing the blame game. However, failures are wasted if there is no learning from them. How can Agile teams make failures beautiful?
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Yahoo Hadoop Spinout Hortonworks Announces Plans
Yahoo spun-out its core Hadoop team, forming a new company Hortonworks. CEO Eric Baldeschwieler presented their vision of easing adoption of Hadoop and making core engineering improvements for availability, performance, and manageability. Hortonworks will sell support, training, and certification, primarily indirects through partners.
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Happiness and Self Organizing Teams
Does happiness affect our results - both positive and negative - with self organizing teams? Mark Levison shares research in psychology that shows that choice and control are interchangeable: "if people lack power, they clamor for choice, and if they have an abundance of choice they don’t strive as much for power." Does this explain successes and pains of self organization?
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Janova and EdgeCase build Testing Tool in seven Months
The experts of the software company EdgeCase have recently assisted the Enterprise Architecture Company Janova from Ohio in building a Web-based, automated testing tool. The tool is provided as a Cloud-based application that enables users to define the test scripts used for Batch Processing in plain English. For its implementation the developers leveraged the programming language Ruby.
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Windows 8 – As we first saw it
The public had its first glimpse of Windows 8 on June 1 at the D9 conference in Taipei. Windows 8, as claimed by Mike Anguilo, corporate vice president of Windows Planning, Hardware and PC Ecosystem, is designed ground up to work with "touch only" tablets and also devices with keyboard and mouse.
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PowerMockup, A New Tool for Low Fidelity Mockups
Agile teams seeking to deliver a high quality user experience often create mockups of varying fidelity to hone in on an appropriate design prior to coding (e.g. prior to sprint/iteration planning). PowerMockup is a new product for those seeking to create low fidelity mockups using a tool they are already familiar with, PowerPoint.