InfoQ Homepage Culture & Methods Content on InfoQ
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A Journeyman's Pair Programming Tour
Corey Haines has embarked on a unique personal "Pair Programming Tour". Now three weeks into this innovative journey, Haines has posted video interviews revealing many of the unique insights he's gained about pairing, automated testing, and the evolution of a software craftsman while sharing the keyboard at the home-bases of Dave Chelimsky, Brian Marick, Uncle Bob Martin, and others.
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Tips to Improve Retrospectives
Advice from Esther Derby, George Dinwiddie, Jo Geske, Mike Sutton and Ilja Preuss on how to make retrospectives better. The ideas include tips for the facilitator/Scrum Master and new ways to use the burndown chart.
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TeamCity 4.0: Distributed Builds and Continuous Integration
JetBrains, the company behind Intellij IDEA, have released TeamCity 4.0: distributed build management and continuous integration server. The new version has improved support for alternate platforms (such as .NET and Ruby), supports more parallel build options, and has several new management features.
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Challenges in Adopting Scrum
Adopting a new methodology at the organization level is prone to multiple level of challenges. In a series of articles on Agile Journal, Cesário Ramos and Eelco Gravendeel share their experiences and the challenges that they encountered with Scrum adoption.
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Can Product Owner and Scrum Master be Combined?
Many short staffed teams or small organizations consider combining the role of Scrum Master (SM) and Product Owner (PO) into one person. Is it advisable? Have other people done it? What are the options? Matt Gelbwaks, Dan Rawsthorne and Tom Mellor, among others, share their experiences.
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IronPython 2.0 Has Been Released
Microsoft has released IronPython 2.0 on CodePlex, the .NET implementation of the Python language. The most important improvement is running on top of the Dynamic Language Runtime (DLR).
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Presentation: Ruby.rewrite(Ruby)
In this RubyFringe talk, Reginald Braithwaite shows how to write Ruby that reads, writes, and rewrites Ruby. The demos include extending the Ruby language with conditional expressions, new forms of evaluation such as call-by-name and call-by-need, and more.
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Interview: Yehuda Katz Explains Merb
In this interview from RubyFringe, Yehuda Katz talks about the design principles behind Merb and its focus on a stable API. Yehuda also mentions Yard, an RDoc replacement, which provides a simple way to define contracts for Ruby methods.
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Using a "Snake On The Wall" To Quantify Impediments
Kevin Schlabach discusses using a "Snake On The Wall", a lightweight approach targeted at helping your team get a better handle on the things that are slowing the development process.
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Scaling Scrum Without the Scrum of Scrums
Scrum has proven effective at promoting communication between members of a development team. The question of how to scale this high-bandwidth communication across teams, especially in large organizations, remains an area of active exploration and debate. Will Read has proposed a mesh-network inspired alternative to the popular Scrum-of-Scrums meeting for achieving this goal.
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Agile 2009 Conference: Call for Proposals
Building on the success of last year’s metaphor of festival with multiple stages, the Agile Alliance has gone with the same approach this year. The idea behind the stages is to make what has become a large conference a smaller place so that sessions with similar themes will end up on the same stage. As a result, attendees who're focused on a few themes will see the same people again and again.
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Managing Change Requests in Scrum
Tracking change requests in Agile is often associated with being at odds with the Agile principle of "Responding to change over following a plan". However, in certain situations it might be necessary to track change requests. An interesting discussion on the Lean Agile Scrum group tries to look deeper into the 'Why' and 'How' of tracking change requests.
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Windows Server 2008 SP2 & Vista SP2 Beta Getting Ready
Microsoft has announced the public availability of Windows Server 2008 SP2 and Vista SP2 Customer Preview Program (CPP) starting Thursday December 4th on TechNet which is already loaded with information about the CPP. Besides fixes, Vista SP2 includes better searching, Bluetooth 2.1 and Blu-Ray support, an extension to the FAT file system to support UTC time stamps.
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Interview: Scott Ambler On Agile’s Present and Future
In this interview, InfoQ’s Chief Editor, Floyd Marinescu, interviewed Scott Ambler, Practice Lead for Agile Development at IBM, on the current status of the Agile community and practices having a look at the perspective of the Agile’s future.
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How Agile Benefits the Individual
A recent discussion on the ScrumDevelopment list shed light on the ways in which agile development practices directly benefit the individuals involved. The consensus was that an environment ideal for individual growth can be created by the implementation of agile practices such as inspect-and-adapt, pair programming, test driven development, and constant collaboration and communication.