InfoQ Homepage Culture & Methods Content on InfoQ
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A Fresh Wave Of Agile Certification Criticism
The topic of agile certification has been a common kernel of much recurring debate within the community for a long time. Is it desirable? Is it possible? Is it a farce, a scam? There has been recent wave of discussion arguing against certification, largely in reaction to a new company claiming to provide such "agile certification".
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Critical Security Vulnerability Found in Quicksort
In what is sure to become one of the most wide-reaching security vulnerabilities yet known, a researcher with L0pht Heavy Industries has uncovered a flaw in the standard implementation of the Quicksort algorithm. InfoQ spoke with Dildog of L0pht to learn more about this vulnerability and it's ramifications.
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Top Scripting Languages: PHP, Ruby, Python
Evans Data's published the result of its scripting language survey. PHP, Ruby and Python are the favorite choices of more than 500 developers and IT Professionals. Scripting languages usage in the enterprise has changed with time, the survey outlines the drawbacks and merits of each language.
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Ideal Iteration Length
One of the frequent questions in Agile adoption is related to the ideal iteration length. Teams usually gravitate between iteration lengths ranging from a week to two months. Choosing the right iteration length is an important decision and the success of Agile adoption depends a lot on the right iteration size.
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Focus Improvement on Bottleneck Constraints
In My Framework is More Productive than Your Framework, Ken DeLong examines approaches to making software projects more productive. He finds that despite the hype about frameworks, languages, and project management tools, these tend not to be the bottlenecks. Ken believes that the largest productivity gains are likely to come from improved communication, code readability, and debugability.
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Presentation: A Kanban System for Software Engineering
David Anderson presents a brief history of the kanban system through case study reports from teams at Microsoft and Corbis. Kanban acts to limit work-in-progress and focus the team on achieving a continuous flow of value to the customer and innovates on accepted agile management practices by providing an iteration-less process with a regular release cadence.
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Models of Apprenticeship
Uncle Bob Martin recently wrote about his experience with apprentices and what he considers key to progressing from apprentice to journeyman. He describes two hypothetical apprentices: Sam, a developer who has apprenticed with the same master and had the same year fifteen years in a row. Jasmine has changed jobs (and therefore masters) a number of times - growing her skills along the way.
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What’s Planned for Visual Studio Team System 2010
Bill Maurer, Developer Technology Specialist at Microsoft, held a conference presenting what new features Visual Studio Team System 2010 (VSTS) will have in the following key domains: Team Foundation Server, Source Control, Project Management, Testing, Development and Architecture.
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Bamboo Continuous Integration Server Adds Amazon EC2 Build Agents
Continuous Integration (CI),test first development and daily builds are fundamental agile practices. Together they support high performance teams, but also generate a significant, often variable demand for resources. Atlassian's Bamboo CI Server 2.2 includes a feature to Run Builds Remotely in Amazon EC2.
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Performance Engineering in an Agile Project
Performance Engineering is an important software development discipline that ensures that applications are architect-ed, designed, built and tested for performance. However, mostly in traditional projects the scope of performance engineering is limited to performance testing. This is a sure cause for concern.
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Inducting Newbies On Large Agile Projects
Anand Vishwanath suggests for large agile projects that using a small scale "simulation project" might be the best approach to getting the newbies into the groove, and provides a recipe for how to go about doing this.
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Book Excerpt: Agile Testing
InfoQ brings you an excerpt from Agile Testing, a book is for testers on an agile team, test and quality assurance managers transitioning to agile development, and agile teams learning how to approach testing.
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MSBuild Extension Pack
MSBuild Extension Pack is a collection of MSBuild tasks providing reusable components to perform common build tasks. The recently released version 3.5.2.0 has over 240 tasks including WMI interaction, tokenizing files, and interaction with BizTalk.
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More on Scrum Certification Test
Mishkin Berteig, a Certified Scrum Trainer, took the Beta CSM Exam on Orlando Scrum Gathering this March, and posted his feedback on Agile Advice.
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Story Mapping Gives Context to User Stories
The Scrum notion of 'backlog' is a single, prioritized list of user stories for the team to implement. This works well for organizing what the team should work on in the near term, e.g. during sprint planning. At the Orlando Scrum Gathering, Jeff Patton described story mapping. This is a way of organizing stories that provides richer context and can help with release planning.