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A Quick Look At The 7 Wastes of Software Development
Fundamental to Lean Software Development is the pursuit of minimizing waste. The TPS publicized 7 primary wastes of manufacturing, and the Poppendiecks have since translated these wastes to our world of software development. Jack Mulinsky has recently been posting an introductory series on these wastes at agilesoftwaredevelopment.
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Software Debt Adds Up to Substantive Costs
In a recent article entitled “Continued Delivery of High Values as Systems Age”, Chris Sterling discusses the concept of Software Debt – “Software debt accumulates when focus remains on immediate completion while neglecting changeability of the system over time.” Software Debt goes beyond technical debt an encompases a variety of aspects that impact on the ability to deliver value.
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Agile Addresses "The Five Dysfunctions of a Team"
Tathagat Varma, general manager with a large provider of IT management solutions, wondered whether Agile's productivity improvements could be linked to how it improves teamwork. His article analyses Agile values and practices by mapping them against Patrick Lencioni's business fable "The Five Dysfunctions of a Team."
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Spec# and Boogie Released on CodePlex
The source code for Spec# is now available on CodePlex under the Microsoft Research Shared Source License Agreement (non-commercial use only). It’s code verification tools, named Boogie, has been released under the Microsoft Public License, which conforms to Free/Open Source standards.
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Comparing Value, Velocity and Value Velocity
An implicit assumption made by most Agile teams is that 'value' is directly proportional to the 'velocity' of the team. While this may be true in some cases, however mostly, the team velocity gives little indication on the true value delivered.
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'State of Agile' Survey Open
The fourth annual 'State of Agile' survey is open for public participation. The 6-page survey takes 5 to 10 minutes to complete and participants remain anonymous. Over the past 3 years the survey, sponsored by VersionOne, has gauged how widely agile practices have been adopted, as well as the results obtained.
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JBoss Netty 3.1 Released
Netty 3.1.0 was recently released by the JBoss Community and is another option when writing client/server network applications.
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Interview on Wolfram|Alpha, a Computational Knowledge Engine
Wolfram|Alpha was launched two months ago. It is time to review a few frequently asked questions: What is the relationship between Wolfram|Alpha and Google? How would Wolfram|Alpha position itself in the market? To what extent is Wolfram|Alpha a Semantic Web search engine? And how could Wolfram| Alpha make profit in the market? An interview with Xiang Wang, Wolfram Research, China.
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EU Software Libability lawsuit: half say unit testing is the answer
52% of the .NET developers surveyed by Typemock think that unit testing can help companies avoid law suits associated with the proposed EU software liability bill. What does this say?
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Partition Your Backlog for Maximum Mileage
Backlogs have been under constant criticism for quite some time now. Mary Poppendieck suggested that the product backlog should be eliminated if it is not satisfying the desired purpose. Serge Beaumont suggested an interesting way of partitioning the backlog such that it maps to a flow and makes the backlog worthy for existence.
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Gordon Pask Award Nominations for 2009
The Gordon Pask Award recognizes two people whose recent contributions to Agile Practice make them, in the opinion of the award committee, people others in the field should emulate. The Agile Alliance funds each recipient's travel to two different suitable conferences on two different continents. This year's committee needs your help to identify the next two Gordon Pask Award winners.
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Guidelines for Better Unit Tests
Jimmy Bogard, Charlie Poole, Lior Friedman, Charlie Poole and others give their guidelines for more readable and useful unit tests.
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Using the RFP Process to Hire Agile
In large organizations and projects, it's not unusual for an Agile team to find itself shackled to a non-Agile partner/vendor/supplier. Friction ensues, energy is wasted. While the solution might appear to be: "hire better teams", Scott Ambler goes to the root of the problem, providing a strategy for creating better RFPs: ones that attract Agile teams.
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Commercial Java Compiler Protects Eclipse RCP Applications
Excelsior LLC recently released the latest version of Excelsior JET which now prevents the decompilation and unauthorized alteration of Eclipse RCP applications.
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Slow Down to Speed Up Profits
General understanding suggests that, if everyone on the team works at top capacity then the team would be most productive. Contrary to this, Steve Bockman discussed that this assumption might not always be true. In some cases, it may be necessary to slow down and work at less than top capacity in order to boost productivity.