InfoQ Homepage Culture & Methods Content on InfoQ
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Dynamic Language Projects in Google Summer of Code, Ruby Summer of Code
Summer's approaching - and with it the time for students to work on open source projects for a bounty. Old timer, Google Summer of Code, offers a few project ideas for Ruby programmers. There's also the Ruby Summer of Code, a community effort that'll sponsor 20 projects for Ruby and Ruby on Rails. We take a look at what's on offer for Ruby and other dynamic languages.
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Business Rules Management - the Missing Link?
A new discussion in the blogosphere is bringing up the question of whether business rules should be used to dynamically guide business process execution.
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RubyGems.org Replaces RubyForge as Gem Host
With a recent announcement from Nick Quaranto, RubyGems.org has become the default gem source for RubyGems. The three domains gemcutter.org, gems.rubyforge.org, and rubygems.org now all point to the same place, and gem serving and installation work for all three. RubyGems.org is the main web front end, to which the other two sites redirect. The secure site, https://rubygems.org, is also now live.
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Monetizing the Technical Debt
Most Agile teams recognize the evils associated with technical debt. Just like a financial debt, the technical debt incurs interest payments. These are paid in the form of extra effort required to maintain and enhance the software. Most Agilists recommend repaying the technical debt as early as possible. However, most Agile teams fail to monetize the technical debt.
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Scrum Gathering: Community of Practice
The Agile community is developing consensus around three important areas of practice: requirements gathering, agile coaching, and open space formats for group learning. At the recent Scrum Gathering, these topics were prominent topics of discussion on Day 1, Day 2, and Day 3 of the event. InfoQ explored each of these further to gain a better understanding of their place in Agile.
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A New Addition to the InfoQ Family: The Operations Community
A 7th community has now joined the current 6 on InfoQ. When one looks at our existing queues, one sees a definitive pattern - we currently focus upon application development and architecture (.NET, Ruby, Java, SOA, Architecture) and also Agile techniques, primarily in the context of application development. However, what happens to that software once it's been developed?
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Temporary Code, Sustainable Code and Everything in Between
There is code which is well tested, well re-factored and built to last. There is also code which is planned to be thrown away in a few days. Between these two extremes, there is a lot of gray area. The code in this gray area is written with the presumption that it would be cleaned up later but is never done.
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2010 US Scrum Gathering, The After-Shocks
The 2010 US Scrum Gathering went down 2 weeks ago in Orlando, and InfoQ has followed the buzz since. Enjoy what we've found from the vast pool of great blogs, articles, notes, videos, pictures, presentations and more that have surfaced since the event.
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Eclipse Awards winners announced
Yesterday, the Eclipse Foundation announced the Eclipse Award winners for their contributions in the community, as well as open-source and closed-source projects.
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Agile Documentation: Is There Clarity?
Agile documentation is not exactly the most clear cut subject in the community? How much documentation should we create? What works? What doesn't? How do we transform from a traditional process to an agile one with regards to documents? This is an area that lacks clarity in the agile community.
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A Manifesto of Done
Alixx Skevington posted a Manifesto of Done as the beginning of a discussion thread, talking about the commitments team members make to each other about the quality of their work and clearly expressing their commitment to delivering business value through their code. Covering areas such as coding standards, usable code, unit testing and test coverage he emphasises the importance of quality work.
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WebSockets and Bayeux/CometD
There are two technologies which bring communication into browser-based applications at the moment; Bayeux (aka CometD) and more recently, WebSockets. Will one supersede the other, or are there sufficient differences for both to thrive?
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An Alternative to Certifications
The Agile Skills project is a resource for establishing a baseline of skills that an Agile Developer needs. It provides an evolving repository and a place to start learning about these skills.
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ThoughtWorks’ Developers Favor Distributed Version Control Systems
Martin Fowler has conducted a survey on ThoughtWorks’ software development mailing list to determine how some of the version control systems (VCS) are perceived by developers. He also wrote a review of most prominent VCSes comparing centralized and distributed systems.
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Conflict is Human: Let's Use It Well
Lyssa Adkins, author of Coaching Agile Teams maintains that not only does "resolving" conflict not work - it can even be counter-productive. Can conflict actually catapult teams to higher performance? In her ADP2009 keynote, she presented a model for helping teams learn to de-escalate from destructive into constructive forms of conflict.