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Agile's "One Essential Ingredient"
There has been plenty of debate on what skills a developer needs, or what practices an organization must adopt for agile to be successful. But while undeniably important, is this really what's at the heart of agile success? Mark Schumann suggests that agile's "one essential ingredient" is not ground-level agile technique, but rather is the agile mindset within management ranks.
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26 Hints for Successful Agile Development
Keith Swenson, recently compiled a list of 26 hints for Agile software development. Keith suggested that he frequently collects nuggets of wisdom on various topics and the list is a distilled set of hints which really matter for Agile software development.
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XP or Scrum, Either, Both, or Neither?
Which is better? Scrum or XP? Is there one that is more applicable than the other or is there another alternative?
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SOA Manifesto Released
After several days of intense effort, the SOA Manifesto has been released. As could be expected, the feedback so far is mixed, but is that because the Manifesto is flawed or because the message has not been understood (or communicated) correctly?
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Where has the innovation gone?
Some commentators are questioning the level of innovation happening in the Agile space. Does iterative and incremental development lead us away from innovation towards reusing old solutions, building on what we already know rather than creating truly "out of the box" solutions. Adding an R&D stream is suggested as a way to bring innovation into Agile projects.
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Dissecting Technical Debt
The term "technical debt" was coined by Ward Cunningham. It describes the obligation that a development team incurs when it chooses a design or construction approach that is easy to implement in the short run but has a larger negative impact in the long run. Agilists provide their view point on what should be considered a technical debt and how it could be classified.
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Agile Testing Requires Cross-Functional Teams and More
The first things many think about when considering Agile Testing are tools, automation, when and how to test, and the role of testers on a team. These are all very worthy topics. But which of these things are needed for success and which are nice-to-have?
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Ladies: Please, Would You Submit a Proposal?
Although it's widely accepted that diversity leads to innovation and performance, visible leadership in the IT community often doesn't represent the diversity of the community itself. What can be done to increase diversity in the leadership of our high-tech communities? One suggestion is to actively help a more diverse group to get their talks accepted at conferences.
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Simple Build Automation with psake
psake is a build automation tool integrated with PowerShell (PS). Version 2.01 works with PowerShell 2.0. Ayende Rahien is using it to build Rhino Tools.
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The 'Agile Developer Skills Workshop' Is Underway
Having a means to fairly and reliable assess the skills of agile developers has been a hot topic for quite some time. The 'Agile Developer Skills Workshop', led by Ron Jeffries and Chet Hendrickson, is now entering its 2nd day of trying to produce a real solution to the problem.
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Git# Offers Git Access for .NET and Mono Projects
Git# is a .NET and Mono version of the popular source code management system, Git, obtained by porting JGit to C#. Other related projects are: msysgit and gitextensions.
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Testing Heuristics - Thinking like a tester
James Bach and Elisabeth Hendrickson are two of the context driven testing community. James recently spoke at the STANZ conference and provided a guideline for approaching testing, and Elisabeth provides a heuristic checklist to help identify valuable testing activities.
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Development of a SOA Manifesto
In parallel with the 2nd SOA Symposium, Thomas Erl and representatives from companies such as IBM, Red Hat, Oracle and Cognizant are meeting to define a new SOA Manifesto. Steve Ross-Talbot, one of the working group members, writes on some key areas he would like the group to consider.
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New Ruby Enterprise Edition Release Switches to Ruby 1.8.7
A new release of the Ruby Enterprise Edition switches from Ruby 1.8.6 to Ruby 1.8.7 and includes patches that significantly improve performance, as Evan Weaver from Twitter confirms.
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Agile Australia 2009 Conference
The Agile Australia 2009 conference is running in Sydney on 15 & 16 October. Over 25 sessions with local and international speakers.