InfoQ Homepage Culture & Methods Content on InfoQ
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"Sprint": a Misnomer?
One of agile development's most fundamental concepts is working "iteratively" - running a project by delivering progressively better versions of the product at recurring interim milestones. Each methodology has its metaphoric label for this; the two most prevalent are XP's "iteration" and Scrum's "sprint". Kevin Schlabach talks about how the word "sprint" may be a bad metaphor.
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InfoQ Brazil Launches
InfoQ Brazil (http://www.infoq.com/br) is now officially launched! All InfoQ daily news & articles will be translated henceforth, with additional local news, articles, and videos produced by the Brazilian community on an ongoing basis. InfoQ Brazil launched officially this weekend, and has already gotten over 6700 pageviews in the last couple of days.
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QCon San Francisco a Few Weeks Way: 100 Speakers in 17 Tracks!
The second annual QCon San Francisco conference is coming up in just a few weeks; this year we've got over 100 speakers in 17 tracks covering the key topics of importance in enterprise software development. With speakers such as Martin Fowler, Kent Beck, Rod Johnson, Bob Martin, this is the biggest QCon yet.
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MS Experience Yields Distributed Agile "Dos and Don'ts"
Ade Miller has published a paper on distributed agile development, highlighting the challenges of trying to do distributed agile development, along with recommendations for addressing these challenges based primarily on the experiences of teams within the Patterns and Practices group at Microsoft.
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Interview: John Lam on IronRuby, Microsoft and Open Source
In this interview from RubyFringe, John Lam talks about his work on IronRuby and how Microsoft is approaching Open Source software development.
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Presentation: Technical Lessons Learned Turning the Agile Dials to Eleven
In this presentation filmed during Agile 2008, Craig Smith and Paul King present what happens when one tries to be super Agile. Practically, they employed most currently used Agile practices on several projects, then they experimented with new ideas leading them to better results, increased productivity and quality.
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Performance Reviews Banished
In the Wall Street Journal, Sam Culbert argues that annual performance and pay reviews are at best dysfunctional. He sees their primary purpose as "intimidation aimed at preserving the boss's authority and power advantage". Jeff Sutherland, Mary Poppendieck, ... offer alterantives
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Testing: What Developers Are Expected To Do Versus What They Actually Do
The recent PDC underscored a major disconnect in the testing community. There is a fundamental misconception that developers only need to write "unit testers" and all other forms of testing are someone else's problem.
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Working Group Formed to Produce Reusable Agile Contracts
Traditional software contracts have often pitted the customer and vendor against each other. Several Agilists in the past have taken a stab at defining an Agile contract which improves the relationship between the customer and the vendor. A working group is collaborating on OpenPlans taking a step further in this direction and coming up with a reusable Agile contract.
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What is the value of the Nokia Test?
A recent discussion thread on the Scrum Development Yahoo Group examined the value of process checklist tests such as the Nokia Test or the Joel Test. Some see these tests as the starting point for a rich agile maturity model, others worry that this could lead to prescriptive approaches to agile, which would miss the whole point of inspect-and-adapt entirely.
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Interview: Linda Rising: Prejudices Can Alter Team Work
In this interview filmed during Agile 2008, following the presentation "Who Do You Trust?", Linda Rising shows how prejudices can affect the relationships between team members. According to Linda, we all have a tendency to categorize others based on characteristics like race, religion, sex, but also based on more trivial characteristics, and many times we are not even aware we are doing it.
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Presentation: Jim McCarthy and 11 Commitments For a Shared Vision
In this presentation filmed during Agile 2008, Jim McCarthy talks about 11 commitments team members should adhere to if they want to achieve a state of shared vision. Such a state empowers a team to reach their full potential and ultimately attain greatness.
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ParseTree 3.0 Released, Many Related Libraries Updated
Ryan Davis announced the release of ParseTree 3.0, as well as an update to related libraries: Ruby2Ruby and Flog. Sexp_processor, the library to write visitors for analyzing parse tree s-exprs was split out as a gem. Also: ruby_parser 2.0, a Ruby parser written in Ruby, was released with many improvements.
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Kanban as Alternative Agile Implementation
Kanban systems for software, derived from the Toyota Production System, are an iterationless approach for scheduling work. Instead of using a time boxed iteration and planning meeting, the pulls stories from the backlog only when it has completed its previous work. Dave Nicolette thinks that its important to expand our repertoire beyond the basics become familiar with other tools like Kanban.