InfoQ Homepage Culture & Methods Content on InfoQ
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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.
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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.