InfoQ Homepage Culture & Methods Content on InfoQ
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To Comment or Not to Comment
Any developer has written at least one line of comment throughout his code. Some have written many comments in an attempt their code to be more explanatory. This article gathers some of the practices used in writing code comments.
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Uncovering Serious Flaws of Agile and Scrum
Software development is known to be a creative process. The failure of traditional methods, where the dynamic environment of software development was ignored, made Agile methods fairly popular. There has been a growing adoption of Agile methodologies, particularly Scrum. However, is everything all right with Agile? Kai Gilb does not think so. He suggested that there are serious flaws with Agile.
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Rules for Better Retrospectives
James Carr recently published a list of five rules to help improve the effectiveness of retrospectives. The rules are based on his experiences in hundreds of retrospectives, both successful and not.
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Experiment Driven Development - The Post-Agile Way
TDD and BDD are now widely-used software development techniques. However, solely following TDD & BDD may still lead to missed business opportunities, or worse, a negative impact to the business. Two questions which TDD & BDD are unable to answer are: How do you measure the usage of your application? How do you get feedback from your customers? Is Experiment-Driven Development (EDD) the answer?
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Agile Team Spaces: Do's and Don'ts
Many of us, who are new to Agile, would believe that putting an Agile team together in a room gets the job done. A few of us would actually pay attention to what makes a room a team room which can enhance productivity and motivation. Many Agile teams have already shared their perspective on what would make an ideal team room. Here are a few recent ones.
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A Critique of the Pomodoro Technique
Is the pomodoro technique really all it's cracked up to be? Are we over-analyzing the issue and creating complexity where none is needed? Mario Fusco shared his critique of the pomodoro technique with InfoQ and we are sharing it with our readers along with many others.
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The Various Flavors of Unified Process
The Rational Unified Process(RUP) was developed through the 1990's as a framework for software engineering best practices. Features such as iterations, simplicity, focus on value and regular feedback were identified as being important for Asuccessful software engineering. A number of authors have built methodologies that adapt UP to different project domains. This article examines some of them.
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Deciphering Burndown Charts
Burndown charts are considered to be one of the most useful information radiators on an Agile team. It is a graphical representation of amount of work left to do (y-axis) versus time (x-axis). The interesting part is that the analysis of the burndown chart can reveal multiple pointers on how the team is doing and what can they do to improve further.
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Oracle Calls for JavaOne Papers
Oracle has announced the call for JavaOne papers for the re-scheduled conference, which will now run alongside Oracle OpenWorld from September 19-23 2010. The closing date for submissions is March 14, 2010.
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QCon London in One Month: 103 Speakers, 107 Sessions, 500+ Attendees
QCon London is in 1 month! The final schedule is now online and features 103 speakers and 107 sessions on key topics designed for senior developers, team leads, architects in enterprise software development shops. The last chance to save £196 expires in 2 weeks.
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Scrum/Agile Failings or the Theses of Uncle Bob Martin
In response to a question about the Inherit Shortcomings of Scrum/Agile - Uncle Bob Martin penned (in the spirit of Martin Luther), 7 theses: No Technical Practices, 30 Day Sprints are too long, Scrum Master sometimes turns into Project Manager, Scrum carries an anti-management undercurrent, and others.
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Is Scrum Certification Having Another Makeover?
Scrum Certification is one debate that refuses to die down. First, it was about the hollow nature of certification for which there was a comment “Pay the tuition, sit through a couple days of class, and you're in”. Subsequently a new format was devised, which too failed to enthuse the Agilists who were against this certification philosophy. Is there another makeover on the anvil?
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Ruby in Steel 1.5 Released, Drops IronRuby Support
SapphireSteel Software, the developers of the Visual Studio based Ruby in Steel IDE have just released version 1.5. Among many improvements, they also dropped support for IronRuby.
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What Really Motivates Workers
In a recent Harvard Business Review article Teresa M. Amabile and Steven J Kramer challenged the commonly held mnagement belief that Recognition is the most motivating and positive factor in the workplace. Their multi-year study tracked the motivation and emotions of hundreds of knowledge workers and identified POGRESS as the single most important factor for individual motivation in the workplace
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Maven to be Built on Guice
Sonatype, the professional services company that sponsors the development of many key Maven committers, has announced that they will build Maven 3 atop the Guice Dependency Injection (DI) container instead of the Plexus DI container employed for Maven 1 and 2. Backwards compatability will be ensured using a shim to support Plexus.