InfoQ Homepage Culture & Methods Content on InfoQ
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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.
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IASA to Announce New Board-Certified Architect Program at ITARC Architecture Conference in New York
International Association of Software Architects (IASA) will bring together thought leaders including Grady Booch, Eric Evans, and Bill Inmon at the IT Architecture Regional Conference (ITARC) in New York next week. The non-profit IASA is launching two new Certified IT Architect (CITA) programs at the conference, including CITA-Professional a board reviewed program.
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Cisco Has Announced the Winners of a Year Long Contest
Cisco has announced the winners of the “Think Inside the Box” Developer Contest. The challenge was to create an AXP application for Cisco’s ISR.
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When to Extend an Iteration/Sprint
The sprint is about to finish and you discover that you can't deliver an important story. What do you do? Extend the sprint? Put the story back in the backlog? The team consistently overestimates how much work they can get done in a sprint? What to do?
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Empirical Studies on Software Quality Mythology
Microsoft has released a summary of research findings that challenge traditional software-engineering mythology. Can code coverage really improve product quality? Does TDD take more time? What impact does a distributed team have on quality? Are assertions useful?