InfoQ Homepage Culture & Methods Content on InfoQ
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Announcement: Agile 2009 and XP 2009 Conference Submissions Ending Soon
The two flagship conferences for the Agile community occur each summer. This year Agile 2009 will be held Chicago during the week of August 24th while XP 2009 will be held in Sardinia (Italy) the week of May 26th. Submissions are still being accepted for both conferences for two more weeks.
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BPEL: Who Needs It Anyway?
A new article by Keith Swenson follows InfoQ’s article “Why BPEL is not the holy grail for BPM” to show BPEL’s limitations and the ways they can be overcome by direct BPMN execution.
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"Good Design" Means ...?
It's not news that at the heart of successful software systems (and, frankly, fulfilling software careers) is good design. Also not news is that defining what "good design" really means has been at the heart of many debates, papers, talks, books, discussions, and more for ages. To help, J.B. Rainsberger and Scott Bellware offer some advice to follow until that one true definition comes along.
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Interview: Similarities Between Interaction Designers and Agile Programmers
In this interview taken during Agile 2008, Alan Cooper, the father of Visual Basic and supporter of interaction design, talks about his contact with the Agile movement and the similarities discovered between Agile programmers and interaction designers.
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Presentation: Conceptual Algorithms
In this talk from RubyFringe, Tom Preston-Werner talks about how he uses the scientific method for tracking down software problems. He demonstrates how he used this approach to track down a particularly sneaky memory leak in a Ruby app, and more.
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Agile Risk Management
Risk management is an activity directed towards the assessing, mitigating and monitoring of risks. Agilists suggest ways to effectively manage risk and use it to make better commitments to the stakeholders.
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Track Velocity, Not Time Spent on Tasks
A member of a new agile team asked the Scrum Development list how to keep track of the actual time engineers spend on tasks, and how this relates to the agile concept of velocity. Velocity is the agile metric for tracking how fast the team is completing features, and thus how long it will take to complete a project. The group's opinion was that tracking time spent isn't necessary or useful.
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Measure Agile Productivity in $
Earlier Scott Ambler posted an article of how to measure productivity on agile teams by utilizing acceleration. Recently he followed up with another post where he answers some frequently asked questions related to agile productivity and acceleration. Specifically one question answers how to measure the amount of $ saved by an accelerating team.
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"Classic" versus "Mockist" TDD, Distinction Real?
Hot in the TDD Yahoo group is a discussion concerning the perceived continuum between the "Classic" and "Mockist" TDD. Steve Freeman, Nat Pryce, Michael Feathers, Dale Emery, and many more discuss terminology and describe their approaches. The discussion also debates whether there even really exists such a continuum, and if so, what distinguishes the approaches that represent it's extremes?
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Engine Yard Releases Cloud Management Framework Vertebra
Vertebra, announced at RailsConf 2008, has finally been released. Vertebra is a platform to develop and manage cloud applications. We talked to Engine Yard founder and architect Jayson Vantuyl about what Vertebra and its use of XMPP bring to the table.
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Example Driven Acceptance Testing
Unit and Integration testing often get more importance in Agile teams as compared to acceptance testing. Gojko Adzic and Lisa Crispin suggest approaches to efficiently include acceptance tests as a part of development.
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Eclipse PHP Development Toolset 2.0 released
The Eclipse Foundation has announced the immediate availability of PDT 2.0, a major upgrade to the popular Eclipse PHP Development Tools project. PDT is an open source development tool that provides all the basic code editing capabilities developers need to get started developing PHP applications.
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The Qualities of a Software Architect
The software/enterprise architect job is an important one. The duties of an architect are numerous and require specific leadership, communication and technical skills to be fulfilled.
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JavaPassion Speaker Offers Free JavaFX Programming Online Training
The popular online Java training website Java Passion host Sang Shin has a new free online training course on JavaFX technology. The first session of this course will start on January 30. The presentation slides of first session are already available on the website.
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Sandcastle’s Team Manager Dismisses Rumors About Project Termination
To dismiss any rumors about the termination of the Sandcastle project, Anand Raman, Group Manager within the Microsoft Developer Division, has posted an update on the current status of the project. Sandcastle is a tool used for generating MSDN-like documentation by reflecting over the source code of a .NET project.