InfoQ Homepage Culture & Methods Content on InfoQ
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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.
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Ágiles 2009: Breaking Down Regional Frontiers in Latin America
After a great success in Argentina, the major Latin America's community congress arrives in Brazil, integrating cultures and enhancing the discussion about the adoption and Agile methods implementation.
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.NET RIA Services, the Roadmap
The .NET RIA Services team has published their release plan starting with a CTP in July and ending with RTW during the first part of 2010. These dates are not set in concrete since changes may appear due to user feedback.
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A Comprehensive Collection Of Agile Mailing Lists
As a participant of the Agile community here on InfoQ, you've already shown you are interested in learning more about agile, and likely have ideas of your own that you're interested in contributing back. This is what you can experience in the various mailing lists that exist related to agile development. But what lists are available? Mark Levison helps to answer that question.
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Google Wants to Replace Microsoft Exchange with an Outlook Plug-in
The new Google plug-in for Microsoft Outlook allows businesses to replace the Exchange server with Google Apps, giving the users the familiar Outlook experience, but having significant cost savings by running the back end in Google’s cloud.
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How to Tide Over Organizational Politics?
Politics is an integral part of all organizations.Generally, technical people have a distaste for politics because technical matters are mostly precise and can be stated in black and white where as political matters generally involve shades of gray, which are not always easy to decipher. Recently, members on the Scrum Development group discussed ways to deal with politics.
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Presentation: Gluing together the Web via the Facebook Platform
Facebook offers an open standards platform for creating social network applications. Josh Elman discusses the concept of social networking and how the Facebook platform addresses issues of identity, of social graphing, and sharing (via its Open Stream API). His presentation explored the nature of a social graph and the "virtuous cylcle of sharing."
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Automated Acceptance Tests - Theoretical or Practical
There have been sporadic reports of successes in writing requirements as acceptance tests and automating them. This practice is only used by a small minority of the community. Are automated acceptance tests written at the beginning of each iteration just a theoretical assertion that have been proven ineffective by the lack of adoption?