InfoQ Homepage Culture & Methods Content on InfoQ
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Agile Is a Culture Not a Process
Jeff Patton explains why thinking of agile as culture and not just process explains resistance and difficulty in teaching and learning the approach. Furthermore he suggests that culture generates process, and therefore we should focus on culture first before process and techniques
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Keep Focus By Tuning Out Your Computer
Agile practitioners have come to understand the negative effect “context-switching” has on productivity when it comes to your projects and teams. To what degree do the same ideas apply at the daily task and personal interaction level, and what can people do to avoid micro-level multi-tasking problems? Phil Gerbyshak offers some advice.
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Presentation: Joshua Kerievsky Presents 10 Important Points for Agile Transitions
Joshua Kerievsky has distilled his company's years of experience helping their clients transition to Agile software development into 10 points. This presentation puts this advice in context with war stories and a Q&A session.
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Article: Staying Safe and Sound Thanks to MDSD
In this article, Andreas Kaltenbach explains how Model-Driven Software Development (MSDS) can help solving backward compatibility problems when creating a newer version of a software which can mean a new API or a new database schema that old clients cannot use. MSDS is used to negotiate the differences between versions to ease the upgrading process.
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SOA & The Tarpit of Irrelevancy
A new three-part post by Neil Ford discusses both the rationale behind SOA implementations and the role large vendors play in distracting them.
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How to Ensure Early Death of a Distributed Agile Project?
Challenges of Agile adoption and execution get amplified when working in a distributed mode. Distributed Agile brings its own share of challenges in terms of geographical separation, varied timezone, cultural differences etc. Killing a distributed Agile project is not very difficult.
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Opinion: It is Time for a New Paradigm Shift in Business-IT Alignment
Fred Cummins, an EDS fellow, offers his vision on how SOA is changing business-IT alignment. He dismisses some proposal which recommend fusing and diffusing IT with and within the business and explains how Services boundaries offer a natural boundary to foster collaboration between the business and IT.
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Skyway Builder Community Edition Supports Code Generation For Spring Applications
The latest version of Skyway Builder Community Edition (CE) offers an open-source code generation framework for Spring based web applications. The community edition can be used to generate the code required in data, service and web layers of a Spring application. Skyway Software recently announced the general availability (GA) of Skyway Builder 6.1 version.
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Information Radiators: Is low tech really better?
The Extreme Programming Yahoo Group has been discussing the pros and cons of low tech information radiators, such as task boards, compared to high tech tools. The original poster preferred a physical task board to a spreadsheet, but found himself unable to explain why to his boss. The ensuing discussion uncovered a variety of reasons to choose simple physical means of reporting information.
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Interview with Brian Marick at Agile 2008
Brian Marick discusses what he means by micro-scale-retro-futurist-anachro-syndicalism and why we should go back to the roots of Agile. He talks about what he thinks were the mistakes in the Agile Manifesto, how it has lead to the state of the Agile community today, and how we can build better systems by making them so that they are much more easily tested.
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Requirements Come Second - What Comes First?
Allan Kelly sites an article from MIT's Sloan Management Review about why it is important to get a team's technical competence and ability improved before focusing on business-IT alignment. This, he claims, is one of the reasons Agile software development has been so successful. Allan's point indirectly touches on a recent community debate about successful, valuable, Agile adoption.
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Engine Yard to Take Over Ruby 1.8.6 Maintenance?
Ruby 1.8.6 is still in heavy use, although its replacement 1.8.7 has been around for over half a year now. Now Engine Yard plans, in accordance with the 1.8.6 maintainer, to take over the maintenance of Ruby 1.8.6 and sponsor some long needed performance fixes.
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Assess Your Agility With 'ABetterTeam.org'
Sebastian Hermida has put together a free online tool to help teams get a better understanding of how well they're doing adopting agility. The site, abetterteam.org, is based on the "Assess Your Agility" quiz Jim Shore and Shane Warden include in their book, The Art Of Agile Development.
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Interview: Ian Robinson discusses REST, WS-* and Implementing an SOA
In this interview from QCon San Francisco 2008, Ian Robinson discusses REST vs. WS-*, REST contracts, WADL, how to approach company-wide SOA initiatives, how an SOA changes a company, SOA and Agile, tool support for REST, reuse and foreseeing client needs, versioning and the future of REST-based services in enterprise SOA development.
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Interview: Luke Francl Explains Why Testing Is Overrated
In this interview filmed during RubyFringe 2008, Luke Francl explains his position towards testing. While supporting unit testing, he thinks testing is not going to reveal all application defects. Development teams should practice code reviews and usability tests which are likely to discover bugs not visible though other methods.