InfoQ Homepage Culture & Methods Content on InfoQ
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Simple Tools Preferred in the Agile Tools Space
Agile does not necessarily mandate or recommend the use of tools. Ideally the development could be done on a command line interface with requirements present on index cards. However, in the last few years, several tools have emerged and they have acted as a catalyst to successful Agile development. Migan and Gaia recently conducted a survey to find out the use of such tools in the Agile space.
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CloudBees introduces Hudson-as-a-Service
CloudBees introduces it's fist PaaS offering, Haas (Husdon-as-a-Service), that liberates the continuous building and testing of projects into the cloud where the IT-free setup, configuration, and elastic resource allocations can be taken advantage by anyone.
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Agile 2010 - Make Stuff People Can Use
There were a number of sessions at Agile 2010 focused on usability and user experience. Samantha Starmer from REI presented a session titled "Make stuff people can use" that provided practical advice and pragmatic ideas on bringing usability into agile projects, even when there isn't a usability expert as a member of the team.
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Re-estimate Completed User Stories for a More Accurate Velocity?
In a recent thread on the Scrum Development mailing list, Paul Battison asked whether his team should re-estimate completed stories after the sprint is done, so as to have the team's velocity reflect the actual effort that went into completing the stories.
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Interview with Ken Schwaber, Part 2
Ken Schwaber is the co-creator of Scrum with Jeff Sutherland. This is Part 2 of a multi-part interview with Ken, covering Scrum credentialing and testing, Scrum coaching, the influence of the Kanban Method for managing complex work, Ken's thoughts on the future of knowledge work, and more.
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Discussing Agile With a CFO
The Chief Financial Officer is responsible for financial planning, financial reporting, financial analysis and managing financial risks. What would be a better language than finance to explain the benefits of Agile to a CFO?
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Unique Software Degree Program Restarted
A unique university program of education in software and systems design has been restarted at New Mexico Highlands University. The program is based on experiential learning, features apprenticeships, and uses a radically restructured and accelerated curriculum. The program goal: "to produce a community of professionals capable of solving complex, "wicked," problems with computing technology.
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Slowdown in Virtualization
A 2010 survey suggests that companies have slowed their efforts to virtualize their data centers. The survey was conducted by InformationWeek and is the second in an annual series. The key finding: almost 20% fewer companies expect to have 25-49% of their servers virtualized by 2011 and almost 10% fewer companies expect to virtualize 50-74% of their servers.
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Interview with Ken Schwaber, Part1
Ken Schwaber is the co-creator of Scrum with Jeff Sutherland. He is a signatory of the Agile Manifesto, a founder of the Agile Alliance, and responsible for founding the Scrum Alliance and creating the Certified Scrum Master program. Ken speaks candidly in this interview series.
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Should an Enterprise Architect Have an MBA?
Todd Biske, an Enterprise Architect and SOA author, started a discussion on Twitter by asking the question “Should Enterprise Architects have/get an MBA?” Some of the enterprise architects who responded to the question believe that an MBA is not mandatory but it can be very helpful.
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Should the Best Scrum Team Be Rewarded?
Should one provide a reward to the single best team in a division each quarter? How is that team to be determined? What effects will that reward have?
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How To Do Large Scale Refactoring
Refactoring by definition means changing the internal structure of a program without modifying its external functional behavior. This is mostly done to improve the non-functional attributes of the program thus leading to improved code quality. However, refactoring on a large scale often gives jitters to even seasoned Agilists. The community discussed a few ways of handling the scale.
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Developer Survey: Challenges and New Technologies
Embarcadero has released the results of a survey of 600 professional developers conducted in May-June of 2010. The survey focused on identifying the "top developer trends, challenges, key initiatives, and current tools being used. The survey respondents were primarily application developers with the size of the respondents companies primarily from organizations with less that 25 people."
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Has OpenSolaris Reached the End of the Road?
An internal unofficial Oracle memo has outlined a new policy regarding the OpenSolaris operating system. Some consider this as the death of OpenSolaris, but others point to the opportunity for the project to be carried on by Illumos, an open source organization that wants a completely open OpenSolaris, providing the code that is currently closed and not depending on Oracle.
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The 2010 State of Agile Development Survey
For the last 4 years VersionOne has surveyed the agile community to provide insight into the “State of Agile Development”. At the Agile 2010 conference this year the 5th annual survey was kicked off. The survey attempts to "gauge the value of Agile Development practices", such as the methodology adoption. You can participate in the survey at AgileDevSurvey.com.