InfoQ Homepage Culture & Methods Content on InfoQ
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Swarming: What's the Point?
Agile teams are encouraged to focus all their effort, as much as possible, on one story at a time--a practice known as "swarming." But why do this? What are the benefits you can expect to see by swarming each story?
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Hearing From Real Customers at Agile 2011
The Working with Customers stage at Agile 2011 is looking for stories and submissions from customers of agile teams. The stage explores the interactions between the customer community and Agile development teams, focusing on the non-technology functions as well as the Agile development teams themselves. In this item the stage producers answer questions and appeal to real world customers.
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Scrum Project Estimation Beyond the Near-Term?
How can you estimate the effort required for an entire Scrum project when Scrum only recommends doing task breakdowns for the next one or two sprints? Should we even try to estimate project effort in the mid- to long-term?
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Entity Framework Code-First CTP5
Earlier this month the ADO.NET team released CTP5 of their Entity Framework Code-First library. The library is meant to provide a code-centric workflow for developers when working with data.
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NIST Cloud Computing Twiki Launched
Today NIST began sending users their credentials for their Cloud Computing twiki, of which Kevin Jackson was one of the first to be granted access. The intent of the NIST working group is to promote cloud computing adoption and overcome the current percieved barriers of security, interoperability and portability.
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Getting the Customer Involved
Agile methods place a strong emphasis on customer feedback and interaction. Projects with involved customers have much higher chances of success than projects which lack customer interaction. So, how do Agile teams keep the customer involved.
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How To Complete Stories Without Leaving Bugs Behind
What can you do when unacceptable numbers of stories are "done" with development, but they still have many quality problems?
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Does Agile Limit Financial Rewards for an Individual?
Tom Reynolds mentioned an interesting comment, that he had heard about the reluctance of people to move to Scrum. The reason quoted was that Scrum would have a direct impact on their financial rewards as it places a lot of emphasis on teams and not the individual.
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Should We Move a Failed Story Back?
What should we do with a story on our task board when it fails testing?
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A Mono Update
Last week Miguel de Icaza published a long post listing all the work the Mono team at Novell has been doing since the move to GitHub in July 2010. Much of the new work has been around language development and MonoDevelop improvements.
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Sonar 2.4: Architecture Constraint Rules and Maven 3 Support
The latest version of open source code quality management tool Sonar supports architecture constraint rules and custom dashboards. SonarSource team recently released Sonar 2.4 version which also includes Maven 3 support and an update center to install and upgrade Sonar plugins.
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Agile/Scrum Retrospectives–Tips and Tricks
Retrospectives and feedback loops are at the heart of any successful Agile/Scrum implementation. They’re the tool we use to help teams improve. Yet in two day introduction to Agile classes they often get glossed over. Lacking time trainers (including this one) often race through the topic outlining only one simple type of retrospectives.
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Code is the Culprit! Always?
Multiple reasons can be quoted for the failure of software projects. Some projects fail because of bad requirements, others due to cost and schedule overrun and few simply due to bad management. If we do a root cause analysis, would all of the failed projects lead to bad code as the main culprit? Always?
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Released: Windows Phone 7 Developer Guide
This past weekend, the Patterns and Practices team at Microsoft released the final version of the Windows Phone 7 Developer Guide on MSDN. The guide was built in an open community fashion on Codeplex by the team this past year and has been downloaded over 5000 times.
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Is the Agile Retrospective Prime Directive Patronizing?
Angela Harms recently blogged about the Agile Retrospective Prime Directive. She discusses how the language of the prime directive around "everyone doing their best" could be seen as patronizing and insulting to team members. Other commentators who have discussed the intent of the Prime Directive include Esther Derby and George Dinwiddie. How useful is the Retrospective Prime Directive?