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Forrester Releases Free Research Report on Lean for Business
Forrester Research, in preparation for their Business Technology Forum next week, has released an analyst report for free download, entitled "Lean: The New Business Technology Imperative." Aimed at management, it discusses Lean as a whole-business imperative, and its impact on IT, cautioning: "Don’t get so caught up in eliminating waste that you forget to create value and increase flexibility."
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Wrong and Right Reasons to Apply Kanban
Kanban's aim is to minimize WIP (Work-In-Process), or inventory, between processes by making sure that the upstream process produces parts only if its downstream process needs it. Of late, Lean and Kanban are growing in popularity. More and more companies are setting up Kanban Boards, limiting WIP and eliminating Muda. Michael Dubakov investigated the wrong and right reasons for applying Kanban.
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Google Wave Backstage - Q&A with Dhanji Prasanna
With the consumer release of Google Wave scheduled for the 30th of September, InfoQ had a Q&A with Google Software Engineer Dhanji Prasanna about some of its less known internals, details about how it’s being developed by the Google engineers and best practices.
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Pomodoro - An Agile Approach to Time Management
A personal time management approach known as "The Pomodoro Technique" is becoming quite popular with agile practitioners. Pomodoro includes a number of practices similar to those used by an agile team: time-boxing, frequent opportunities to inspect-and-adapt, estimation, a preference for low-tech tools, and an emphasis on maintaining a sustainable pace.
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Agile 2009 Conference Retrospective
A month has passed since Agile 2009 and there is now a good variety of feedback on the conference, the sessions and what participants found most valuable.
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Opinion: Pair Programming Is Not For The Masses
Pair Programming continues to be one of the most debated and controversial practices of recent years. Most proponents don't falter in their praise of the benefits, but many of even these same people will admit they struggle to get pairing really going in their shops. Why? Obie Fernandez opinions 10 reasons why this might be so.
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Sprint Planning: Story Points Versus Hours
There is a constant, long drawn debate on the benefits of using either story points or hours for sprint planning. Mike Cohn is big on breaking User Stories down into tasks, which are then estimated in hours. Jeff Sutherland on the other hand suggested that some of the best teams that he has worked with burn down story points.
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Leading Lean & Agile – it’s all about people
Mary and Tom Poppendieck have published a new book titled "Leading Lean Software Development: Results Are Not the Point" in which they examine the importance of leadership in Lean/Agile transformations and provide guidance for organisations making the transformation.
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MP3 Downloads Now Available, 5 Agile 2009 Presentations Posted
A new and frequently-requested feature has been added to InfoQ - MP3 download of interviews and presentations for registered users! To start with, MP3s will be available for the Agile 2009 presentations, which are also now becoming available on InfoQ.
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Retrospective of Retrospectives
Once all your teams use Agile and are busy implementing local improvements, what happens to the larger organization formerly called "IT" or "Systems Development"? A coach with a large Agile program shared the strategy they designed to let the larger community spot trends and benefit from all this learning. Paulo Caroli calls it "Retrospective of Retrospectives".
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Functional Test Tools Workshop
A group of people interested in improving the state of the art in Automated Functional Test Tools gathered for an annual workshop the Sunday before Agile 2009. Among the topics covered: Lightening Talk demos of various tools, Porting Cucumber to .NET, Documenting existing functional test tool capabilities in a spreadsheet and the limits of Capture/Playback tools.
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PairWithUs: On-Demand Agile Software Development Video Examples
One thing well known by most programmers is that the best (only?) way to learn programming technique is by example; specifically, watching someone else doing it. Antony Marcano & Andy Palmer's 'PairWithUs' gives people a great place to do just that.
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Bill Pugh Releases FindBugs 1.3.9
Bill Pugh has released FindBugs 1.3.9, the latest update to the popular Java static analysis tool. The latest release adds 12 new bug detectors and continues to work on improving the effectiveness of FindBugs as a tool for developers working with large code bases, a trend which will continue with the 2.0 release expected later this year.
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97 Things Every Programmer Should Know
The 97 Things series continues, after the architect and the project manager, with things every programmer should know. InfoQ talked to its editor Kevlin Henney.
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Need an Answer to Context Switching? Get Disturbed
Context Switching is defined as changing focus and attention from one task to the other in relatively short periods of time. It is widely considered harmful for the team member and the project that he is working on. Charles Miller mentioned a few ways of how they handle context switching at Atlassian.