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Using BPM And SOA To Maximum Business Value
Industry analyst Neil Ward-Dutton, writes that the combination of Business Process Management (BPM) and Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) is seen as technically complementary. There are different views on how the two concepts play together, however, the author maintains that there is enough synergy between them to increase business value.
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Lessons Learned from the UK Agile Coaches Gathering
Recently, a number of European Agile Coaches gathered in the UK to discuss their craft and share ideas. Attendees included: Rachel Davies, Mike Sutton, David Peterson, Plamen Balkanski, Keith Braithwaite, Duncan Pierce, .... They covered a diverse range of subjects: Effective Coaching Styles, Why Do We Coach? Self Organizing Teams, and others.
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A Dollar Value On Pair Programming
"Why in the world would we use two people to do the job of one?" This is often the initial reaction to people when first introduced to the idea of pair programming. In essence, they perceive pair programming as doubling the cost of writing any segment of code. Dave Nicollete offers some quantitive ideas to help show how pair programming can save money, not waste it.
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Resource Management in Agile Projects
Agile projects are known to address the problems of rapid change. These may be changes in market forces, system requirements or implementation technology. One of the change, that does not gel well with Agile projects, is the frequent change of people working on the project. The idea is not to disturb the high performing teams so that they can continue to deliver high velocity.
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Goat Rodeo: A Unified Data Model for Web Applications
David Pollak, found of the Lift web framework and "Beginning Scala" author, has announced a new initiative "Goat Rodeo" that aims to bring data modeling into the 21st century.
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Software Craftsmanship North America
Software Craftsmanship North America is a one-day conference with the goal of introducing the Agile community to the Software Craftsmanship movement. Interestingly, SCNA will be at the same time as the Agile conference, in the same city, and have many speakers that will also be speaking at the Agile conference.
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Agile Project Sponsorship – A Light Hand for Effective Results
Organisations embracing Agile methods need to reassess their approach to project governance and sponsorship. Project decisions need to be made rapidly, responding to changes in the organisational ecosystem while keeping a clear eye on the project’s and organisation’s goals. Advice from commentators on project sponsorship and important metrics to keep projects on track.
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Kent Beck Suggests Skipping Testing for Very Short Term Projects
Kent Beck suggests that on very short term projects, when you're trying to figure out if there is a viable concept, you might do less (even no) automated testing to help get off the ground quickly. This goes against all of the conventional wisdom surrounding TDD.
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IBM Updates Cloud Strategy and Offerings
IBM announces three new ways for businesses to utilize cloud computing: standardized services on the IBM cloud, private cloud services behind the firewall (managed by the business or IBM) and Cloud burst a way to seamless incorporate secure public clouds to accommodate "overflow" demand for services.
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What Should Your Agile Organization Value?
Adopting agile is not easy. Many organizations often struggle trying to squeeze the practices of Scrum or XP into the way they work. Mike Cottmeyer offers a reminder to such organizations that placing too much value in the "how" of agile may be a misguided approach.
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More Clouds Gather on the Horizon
Adobe has readied Acrobat.com, IBM has presented their cloud offering, while Oracle will use Sun Cloud to join their ranks. If there was a doubt about it, now it is obvious that cloud computing is the future of enterprise IT.
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Evaluating the 'Ease of Use'
Mostly usability of a system is ascertained on gut feel rather than being based on some statistical analysis. In a recent discussion on the Agile Usability group, members discuss various ways to evaluate system usability in an objective manner.
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Opera Unite Gives the Power Back to the People
Opera Software, which promised to revolutionize the Internet, has just released the latest version of their browser, Opera 10 Beta 1, incorporating a server technology called Opera Unite allowing users to directly connect to each other to share data and communicate without an intermediary running the necessary services for them.
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Stop and Refactor?
When should you refactor? There are times when you simply need to pay down technical debt - you should stop and refactor. No, you should only refactor when one is working on a User Story. Which advice is best? Is there, perhaps, a third option?
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Agile Consultants and Trainers Help the Unemployed and Hard Up
Tobias Mayer, James Coplien, Dan Rawsthorne, Alan Cyment and David Schmaltz are all giving back to their communities in different ways. Tobias is offering free Scrum Training to those in need; James, Dan and Alan all travelled to Serbia to provide free Scrum Training and David helped a nonprofit when their budget fell apart.