InfoQ Homepage Culture & Methods Content on InfoQ
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Designing Agile Spaces
Agile has always stressed the need for an appropriate physical space to support the team and team practices. Ryan Martens recently wrote about the intersection of design, design thinking, and the agile environment - suggesting that open space and wall-to-wall whiteboards are just the beginning of what is needed to create an ideal agile team-space.
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Agile Certification Arrives
The Agile community has an all-new set of certification credentials, made credible by the involvement of Alistair Cockburn, a signatory of the Agile Manifesto
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Ehcache 2.2 Supports Terabyte Cache and LDAP Authentication
The latest version of open source caching framework Ehcache supports terabyte cache and JAAS authentication with LDAP integration. Terracotta announced last week the general availability of Ehcache 2.2 version as part of Terracotta 3.3 release. The new version also includes a management console that provides visibility and control of run-time caching environment, for developers and operators.
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Studies that Validate Agile and Lean Methodologies
Ralph Jocham asked: "I am searching for some references that show that Agile projects have a higher chance of success than other approaches, the references should be quotable in a government document ie. come from a trustworthy source." Luckily, there are some studies out there, summarized in this article.
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Microsoft Ribbon for WPF
Microsoft has released a new preview of their WPF-based Ribbon control. Though not the final version, it includes a go live license and a copy of the source code. The quality is quite high and it appears that all of the bugs and API design flaws from last year’s preview have been corrected. While the source code is available, the license only permits read-only access for debugging purposes.
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Crowdsourced Testing, Changing the Game
Crowdsourcing is the process of requesting a large group of community, a crowd, to perform a task which is traditionally done by a select set of people in an organization, most likely employees or contractors. Crowdsourced testing is the powerful combination of combining web and cloud economics with the effectiveness and efficiency of crowdsourcing. Could this be a game changer?
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Software Programming as Craft
The Cutter IT Journal recently published a special issue on software craftsmanship that included articles on what it means to be a software craftsman, software engineering vs. software craft, the relationship between Agile and craftsmanship, and crafting the user experience.
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Agile Project Leaders Network Reorganizes
The APLN is an organization that supports and helps to organize Agile user groups and an Agile-related conference called the Leadership Summit. The non-profit group has recently elected new board members, realigned its focus, and announced new initiatives and plans.
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Leverage Points: places to intervene in a system
A key decision for software architects involves where and how to introduce change into a system in order to effect a desired change. Leverage points are those places where micro changes can result in macro results. Twelve categories of leverage point are identified along with concerns about the changes.
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Cost of Cross Functional Teams
Cross functional teams are the teams in which all members work on delivery of the same business value. It could potentially be the same feature or the same product. Though, Agile recommends cross functional teams due to a lot of inherent advantages, there are some caveats that organizations need to be aware of.
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W3C Releases Unicorn Web Validation Tool
W3C has released Unicorn, a one-stop tool to help people improve the quality of their Web pages. Unicorn combines four popular tools, including the Markup validator, CSS validator, mobileOk checker, and Feed validator, with a single interface.
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Explaining Refactoring to Management
How can one explain the importance and value of refactoring to people in management who have never coded? How can one justify the expense of slowing down code delivery?
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MoDisco: A Model-Driven Software Modernization Framework
Software Modernization is an acute problem for most IT organizations. MoDisco is a joint project between MIA Software and the AtlanMod Research Team which is offering a model driven solution. Jordi Cabot and his colleagues wrote a two page introduction on this Eclipse project.
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WebSphere 7 Feature Pack Supports OSGi-based Application Deployment and SCA Integration
WebSphere Application Server V7 Feature Pack for OSGi Applications and Java Persistence API 2.0 offers a standards-based implementation of OSGi Blueprint Container specification and JPA 2.0. It also provides an optional feature to deploy and manage applications as versioned OSGi bundles. IBM recently announced the GA release of the feature pack which is based on Apache projects Aries and OpenJPA.
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The Value of Diversity
This is the second in a series of discussions looking at factors that enable Agile teams to be successful. Diversity of gender, culture, opinion, perspective, skills and background is considered to be an important factor in forming and persisting high-performance teams. This news item examines the perspectives from variety of commentators.