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Agile Development Conference Delivers the Goods
The Agile Development Practices conference was held this past June 6-11 in Las Vegas. Hosted inside the Caesar's Palace Conference Center, this event showcased excellent sessions, speakers and content. Several good sessions on testing, a keynote by Johanna Rothman on people and culture, and some fine presentations on Scrum and Kanban made for an excellent conference.
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Architexa aims to make UML quick and easy
Architexa is a new Eclipse-based UML modeling tool that allows developers to quickly gain insight into code relationships through UML diagrams, and share what they find with others.
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Naresh Jain Discusses "Simple Design & Testing" And The Conference Dedicated To It
"Simplicity" is a core agile tenet, particularly when it comes to software design and testing. Since 2006, Naresh Jain has been running a worldwide conference, the Simple Design & Testing Conference, for practitioners to collectively push the boundaries on the topic. Naresh tells InfoQ what's going on behind this small, but well-known conference and why he is so passionate about the topic.
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The Decision to Refactor
Refactoring is the process of changing a software system in such a way that is does not alter the external behavior of the code yet improves its internal structure. The idea of improving an already written code is appreciated in most Agile teams. Continuous improvement is is something that these teams strive for. However, improving the already existing code involves time and money. Is it worth it?
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Agile Teams as Cohesive Communities
Agile projects are (should be?) highly collaborative team environments built on a foundation of trust and open, honest communication. Such collaborative environments don’t just happen, and they can be easily disrupted. There are many commentators who provide advice on how to establish and maintain collaborative teams. This article summarizes the advice from a few of them.
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Differences and Learning: the PMI-Agile Project Heats Up
The PMI-Agile project's mission is to bring agile knowledge and skills to all PMI practitioners. Yet what has emerged is much more interesting than that. The project's Yahoo group has evolved into a place where worlds collide. There is some "heat" developing as a result of the differences and diversity found in this forum. InfoQ explored this in detail, and spoke with Ron Jeffries to learn more.
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Consistently Not Done, Done, Done at the End of Sprints?
Do you consistently have stories that don't meet your "definition of done" at the end of your sprints? Is the team tieing the hands of the product owner?
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Handling Team Changes
Change is constant, yet people fear change. It is mostly the fear of unknown and loss of comfort zones that makes the perception of a change painful. Though Agile teams are well prepared for change, however most of them are not comfortable when the change affects the team.
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How to Pay the Author: Flattr Micropayment Service
Earlier this year the micropayment service flattr (a wordplay of flatrate and flatter) went live. The principle is simple but could change the way in which we reward quality content on the net. Flattr was initiated by one of the founders of The Pirate Bay, Peter Sunde, who also presented it at social media conferences like re:publica.
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Book: Points of View - a Tribute to Alan Kay
Edited by Ian Piumarta, a Senior Scientist for Viewpoints Research Institute, and Kimberly Rose, co-founder of the Viewpoints Research Institute, the book “Points of View - a Tribute to Alan Kay” (PDF) is a homage paid to Dr. Alan Kay for his great contribution for the advance of computer science, celebrating his 70th birthday on May 17th.
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The "Command and Control" Military Gets Agile
Agility is a term that is gaining traction in some very unusual places. The military is suddenly taking Agility very seriously. The military defines Agility as "the ability to successfully respond to change". The term "command and control" is used so commonly in the military that is abbreviated to "C2" in common usage. There is also a C2 Journal, which has had many articles on Agility recently.
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Announcing the 4th Annual QCon San Francisco: November 1-5, 2010
QCon San Francisco 2010, taking place November 1-5 is now open for registration ($700 savings until June 11th). QCon is an enterprise software development conference for team leads, architects, and project managers covering Architecture & Design, Java, NoSQL, Concurrency, SOA, Cloud Computing, Agile methodologies and other timely topics.
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Wireframes or No Wireframes
The adage "A picture is worth a thousand words", is sometimes forgotten in the Agile world. At least, this is what many designers on Agile teams believe. In some teams, designers are required to create small increments of the design and this process does not necessarily produce the best results. For other teams wireframes are considered to be bureaucracy which gets in the way of development.
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What Should an Agile Project Charter Contain?
Agile projects have a strong emphasis on people over process and verbal rather than paper communication. Many formalised methodologies require heavyweight project initiation documents that have to be completed in order to gain funding. Given this potential conflict, what should an Agile project charter contain – how much documentation is “just enough”?
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Applying Agile to Corporate Boards
In response to a question from a New York CEO, Mark Suster, former Entrepreneur and Venture Capitalist, wrote a post about "agile" corporate boards and how they can help benefit their business.