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Estimating Business Value
The traditional agile approach to prioritization is that user stories of higher business value should be implemented before ones of lower business value. The concept is simple, but implementing it well relies on having a mechanism to assess business value. Pascal Van Cauwenberghe has recently described an approach to defining business value, called "Business Value Modeling", which may help.
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Overlapped or Synchronized Sprints?
When a Scrum project grows, so do the team members. The suggested way of managing a growing team is to split the team into multiple teams keeping in line with the Agile recommended team sizes. However, there could be multiple communication and coordination problems when each team starts working in a sprint of their own.
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Reasons for Delay in an Agile Project
A delay, in general, is getting something done later than it was scheduled for thereby causing distress and inconvenience. Likewise, a delay is considered to be a waste in the Agile terminology. A delay causes discontinuity and thereby causes other wastes like relearning, task switching etc. A few Agilists discuss the common delays and ways to resolve them.
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Stabilization Sprints, A Necessary Evil or Pure Waste?
Stabilization sprints are an additional number of sprints added to the end of the normal development cycle before shipping the product. As the name suggests, they’re usually added to shake down the product one last time and drive the last of the bugs. Do they belong in Agile environment or should "Done" be enough.
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Five Benefits of Feature Teams
Mike Cohn and others present their case to why you should consider structuring your teams around software "features" rather than software "components".
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When ScrumMaster Becomes the Impediment ...
A ScrumMaster as the name suggests is the guardian of the scrum process. He is a change agent supporting his team and socializing Scrum throughout the organization. He ensures smooth functioning of the team by eradicating impediments and keeping the team shielded from distractions. However, in certain scenarios, Agile teams feel that the Scrum Master is the biggest impediment.
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QCon London March 10-12 Announced
The 4th annual QCon London (March 10-12) has been announced and registration is open! QCon London has become a mainstay conference for the UK and European software development community. This year continues in our tradition of practitioner-driven high quality content with over 15 tracks and 100 speakers including keynotes from GoF author Ralph Johnson and Smalltalk Guru Dan Ingalls and more.
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Case Study: Migrating a VB6 Large Application to .NET
An IT services provider company has migrated an ERP application totaling 950,000 lines of VB6 code to .NET in 9 months.
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Terracotta/Quartz Integration Offers an In-Memory Cluster Based Distributed Job Scheduling
Terracotta and Quartz integration offers an in-memory cluster based distributed job scheduling and workload management for enterprise Java applications. Terracotta recently announced the acquisition of the open source job-scheduling software. The new product gives a node-aware scheduling feature as an alternative to the traditional solution of using a central database for job coordination.
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Clojure Roundup: Distribution with Crane, Mathematics with Incanter, Builds with Leiningen 1.0
FlightCaster recently open sourced Crane, a tool for distributing and remotely controlling Clojure instances, currently specialized for EC2. Incanter is a Clojure library and tool that makes R-like statistical computations easy with Clojure. Also: the build and dependency management tool Leiningen 1.0 is now available.
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Intellij IDEA 9: Java EE 6, OSGi, Flex and More
JetBrains recently released their award winning IDE, Intellij IDEA 9. It includes support for a whole suite of new technologies, improved support for existing features, improved performance and a more streamlined user interface.
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Social Contracts Facilitate Team Commitment
Formalised social contracts provide a structure to help reduce the fear, uncertainty and doubt associated with organisational change, and can enable an Agile transition to go more smoothly. Israel Gat provides an example of the social contract he used at BMP Software.
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Java EE 6 Features: Dependency Injection, Bean Validation and EJB Enhancements
The latest version of Java Enterprise Edition (Java EE) offers several new features including dependency injection, bean validation and significant enhancements in EJB, Servlets, JSF, and JSP technologies. Java EE 6 version was released on Thursday. This article gives an overview of the new features in the latest release.
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Teaching Games - Fun or Serious Business?
Michael McCullough and Don McGreal, creators of the Tasty Cupcakes teaching games website, have published an article on "Fun Driven Development." The economic downturn hasn't squeezed these games out of our training programs - in fact, they've become a staple where Agilists gather to exchange ideas. Here's a little history and some starting points for using games with your teams.
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What do you do, Testing or Checking?
Software testing is an empirical investigation conducted to provide stakeholders with information about the quality of the product or service under test. However, this definition does not talk about sapience which brings about a subtle difference between testing and checking. Michael Bolton talked about this difference and the reason why there should be a difference between the two.