InfoQ Homepage Culture & Methods Content on InfoQ
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Article: InfoQ Editors' Recommended Reading List
Members of the InfoQ editorial team discuss a number of books which have influenced how we think about software development, architecture and managing projects.
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Backlog Lacks the Backbone
Backlogs have been under criticism for some time now. Mary Poppendieck goes to the extent of suggesting that product backlog should be eliminated if it is not satisfying the desired purpose. On similar lines Jeff Patton suggested using story maps instead of flat backlogs which help focus on the system being developed.
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Eclipse Banking Day London
Last week's Eclipse Banking Day in London saw 80+ attendees discuss the use of Eclipse in banking. Sponsored by the Eclipse foundation, in conjunction with Sybase, Cloudsmith, Actuate, Itemis and WeigleWilczek, there were eleven presentations and four short talks by members of the banking and Eclipse communities.
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Spolsky vs Uncle Bob
The last few weeks, a public dispute has been going on between Joel Spolsky and Robert C Martin (Uncle Bob) about Test-Driven Development and about the SOLID principles of OO design. Here is a summary and review of the match.
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Use Cases Considered Valuable (but Optional) For Lean/Agile Requirements Capture
Dean Leffingwell, author of Scaling Software Agility and Chief Product Methodologist at Rally, has concluded that Use Cases can be a valuable tool to model requirements for a large-scale Lean/Agile Project. Use cases are not commonly encountered in Lean/Agile (especially XP and Scrum), where stories are the requirements gathering tool of choice.
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Scrum Club: Agile Philanthropy With an Edge
The first rule of Scrum Club is... At work they are product managers, CTOs, entrepreneurs, designers, and coders. At Scrum Club they are helping each other learn about agile development, by doing agile development, while benefiting non-profit organizations. It helps that they have a Fight Club inspired video. ...and if this is your first time at Scrum Club, you have to Scrum!
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Article: Lean and Agile, Marriage Made in Heaven or Oxymoron?
Dave West takes a look at the world views of the Agile and Lean communities and finds them in conflict. If true, then many of us in the community blending Lean and Agile and unaware of the inherent clash in ideals could be making some big mistakes. As an example of a manifestation of this conflict Dave takes the backlog.
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Presentation: Craftsmanship and Ethics
In this talk Robert C. Martin outlines the practices used by software craftsmen to maintain their professional ethics. He resolves the dilemma of speed vs. quality, and mess vs schedule. He provides a set of principles and simple Dos and Don'ts for teams who want to be counted as professional craftsmen.
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Article: What Would Alan Cooper Do?
In this article, Naysawn Naderi makes a summary of About Face 3, Alan Cooper’s book, noting some key takeaway points. The User Interface plays an important role in an application, be it a desktop one, a web application or a mobile one, and the guidelines contained by the article help creating better interfaces.
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Should the Product Owner Be One Person Only?
Is the role of product owner a role that should be satisfied by only one person? There are those who say that there must be one person accountable - a single wringable neck. There are those that say that the expertise needed for a product owner cannot be satisfied by one person. There are many ideas in between about what and who a product owner should be.
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A Quick Look at Architectural Styles and Patterns
App Arch Guide 2.0 (Microsoft patterns&practices), Chapter 6, talks about architectural styles like Message-Bus, Layered Architecture, SOA. Beside those styles there are numerous architectural patterns like Plug-in, Peer-to-Peer, Publish-Subscribe. Some authors make a difference between architectural styles, patterns and metaphors.
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Refactoring Not a Substitute for Design
A member of the stack overflow community asked "Is design now a subset of refactoring?" The question highlights a common misunderstanding about the agile approach to emergent design. A common agile mantra is: "Test. Code. Refactor. Repeat!" This approach doesn't replace design; it simply spreads the work out over the life of the project.
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Apache Ivy 2.0 Final Released
Apache Ivy 2.0, a project dependency manager, has been released. 2.0 is the first release of Ivy as an official Apache project.
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Presentation: How (7 years of) Eclipse Changed my Views on Software Development
Erich Gamma shares the lessons learnt being deeply involved in the development of the Eclipse platform over the years. From being a platform in closed development, Eclipse turned into an open source one supported by a large and growing community. Erich also talks about Jazz, IBM’s software development platform which incorporates the lessons learnt from Eclipse.
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Applying SOA Lessons to Web 2.0 Implementations
In their new article, two experienced SOA architects present five SOA best practices that can help to achieve success in adopting Ajax, REST, and other Web 2.0 technologies.