InfoQ Homepage Culture & Methods Content on InfoQ
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Empirical Studies Show Test Driven Development Improves Quality
A paper first published in the Empirical Software Engineering journal reports: "TDD seems to be applicable in various domains and can significantly reduce the defect density of developed software without significant productivity reduction of the development team." The study compared 4 projects, at Microsoft and IBM that used TDD with similar projects that did not use TDD.
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Just the Cure, More Groovy
Groovy 1.6 was released recently and provides plenty of new features and improvements, in particular speed was a major focus by the development team.
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QCon London 2 Weeks Away: Day Passes & InfoQ Discount Available
QCon London is just 2 weeks away, and we’d like to present all InfoQ members with an extension of our Feb 22nd discount, as well as announce that day passes are now available. QCon features over 80 sessions, 15 tracks and unprecedented speaker lineup including Sir Tony Hoare, Martin Fowler, Rod Johnson, and many others.
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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.