InfoQ Homepage Culture & Methods Content on InfoQ
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Wolfram|Alpha, the Details Behind the Rhombic Hexecontahedron
Wolfram|Alpha uses symbolic computation in an attempt to make the world’s systematic knowledge computable. It does that by accepting a linguistic input not a custom set of formulas. The main components of the system are a data curation pipeline, an algorithmic computation system, a linguistic processing system, and an automated presentation system.
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Recommended TDD Tutorials
Recently, Dave Nicolette consolidated a list of recommended TDD tutorials from a discussion on the Extreme Programming group. Here is a sneak peak at the consolidated list with categorization for quickly getting started with Test Driven Development.
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Article: The Economics of Service Orientation
This article explores the structural economic changes brought about by service orientation and how the concept of services and reuse at the service level promises to relieve the enormous pressure arising from increasing costs and flat budgets. Service orientation is compared to other strategies for keeping costs in check.
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Flex: Engine Yard's New Cloud Offering
Engine Yard announced Flex at this year's Rails Conf. Flex runs on Amazon's EC2, but unlike its smaller brother Solo, Flex scales over more than one instance. We talked to Michael Mullany, VP of Marketing at Engine Yard to get more information.
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Presentation: Transforming Software Architecture with Web as Platform
This session takes a comprehensive look the "Web as Platform," including implications for software architecture design and innovations and ideas that are just now being fully appreciated. Hinchcliffe offers a far ranging, but focuses discussion of system design and the discipline and practice of software architecture; information, that architects and technical leads must know.
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A Good Velocity
Buddha Buck recently asked the Extreme Programming list if there were a velocity range that could be considered 'good' for a team of about seven people doing two-week iterations. He felt that a velocity of eight or below indicated that the team's stories might be too big. The resulting discussion provided some answers to the question, and the questions behind the question.
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Presentation: Meeting the Challenge of Simplicity
This session addresses the abstract notion of simplicity, looks at why it is critical in modern UI design and answers questions: Why does simplicity matter? Is there a meaningful definition of simplicity? Why do design processes and good intentions undermine simplicity? What processes and techniques can software developers use to achieve simplicity?
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Feature Injection Comics
Chris Matts, well known in the Agile community for his work in bringing option theory to software development, has been writing about feature injection in a comic-book format on the Agile Journal. He explains how, by changing the way information flows through your software development process, you can significantly improve performance.
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Article: Where To Now With Build Automation
Most developers nowadays are familiar with the basic tenets of Continuous Integration, but arguably only a small proportion of these are fully benefiting from an optimized CI set up. This article, by John Smart of Atlassian, discusses Continuous Integration practices that can take CI beyond merely being a glorified cron job and make it an effective, productivity-enhancing hub for development.
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Agile 2009 Program Announced
The Agile Alliance's Agile2009 conference program has been announced, again organized by theme, not job description. It will be held this year in Chicago from Aug. 24-28. New: Coaching, Manifesting Agility. Back again: Open Jam, Programming w. the Stars, Live Aid, Muzic Masti, AAFTT (Testing) Workshop. Immediately followed this year the PLoP conference, also in Chicago.
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MindTouch 2009 Includes Publishing from MS Desktop Applications
MindTouch announces the ability to publish content from any Microsoft Desktop application to its collaborative industrial wiki. New user functionality includes: one-click publishing from any MS application and in-place editing of Microsoft Office. The new functionality is delivered as, Aurelia Reporter, Desktop Connector, and MS Word and MS Outlook connectors.
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Interview: Jeff Patton on Embracing Uncertainty
In this interview with Jeff Patton at Agile 2008, he talks about three strategies that can help product owners do their job more effectively by embracing the inherent uncertainty in all software development. Namely they are understanding the ultimate goals of the project, delaying decisions until the last responsible moment, and scaling up by building quality.
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Comparing Kanban To Scrum
Kanban has been gaining serious interest as a valid approach to implementing agile for your development organization. As such, many people are asking the question "how does Kanban compare to Scrum?". Henrik Kniberg has taken a stab at answering this question
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An Agile Blue Angels Team
Promoting, sustaining, and evolving agile practices in an organization requires expertise and experience. Initially, many companies bring in outside experts to help get things started. Laura Moore has described a model, based on the Blue Angels, which companies can use to develop and deploy internal experts.
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Presentation: Born to Cycle
Agile development is not about doing a set of practices, it's about a way of "being," it's about learning. How is this learning accomplished? By taking brief pauses after small experiments, even large problems can be solved. In a recent Harvard Business Review interview of Toyota's president, he observed, "...when 70 years of very small improvements accumulate, they become a revolution."