InfoQ Homepage Culture & Methods Content on InfoQ
-
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
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
Article: Why BPEL is not the Holy Grail for BPM
In this article, Pierre Vigneras of open source workflow engine Bonita fame, discusses the pitfalls of using the BPEL for designing workflows.
-
Iterating To Acquire Knowledge, Not Just 'Business Value'
At first glance, most agile methodologies define simply that stories be developed in order by business value. In many cases though, it is prudent to blend increasing business value with deliberate steps in "knowledge acquisition". Alistair Cockburn describes how to do this blending effectively, and how to leverage it to deliver the right feature set at the right time.
-
Article: No Silver Bullet Reloaded Retrospective OOPSLA Panel Summary
It has been more than 20 years since Mythical Man-Month, author Fred Brooks, published the article No Silver Bullet: Essence and Accidents of Software Engineering. At OOPSLA 2007, a retrospective discussion panel was held on Fred Brooks' article which included Martin Fowler, Fred Brookes, and others. The panel was perhaps one of the most notable events in our industry in years.
-
Presentation: Planning with a Large Distributed Team
In this presentation filmed during Agile 2008, Wes Williams and Mike Stout share their recent experience with a large distributed team, the planning hurdles they encountered and how they passed them, and their recommendation: avoid large distributed teams.
-
A Speedier Groovy Coming Soon
The Groovy development team and G2One have been working to improve the performance and features of Groovy, while maintaining a stable release. The steady work on Groovy 1.6 has led to significant performance improvements available in beta form right now.
-
Presentation: Measuring Agile in the Enterprise: 5 Success Factors for Large-Scale Agile Adoption
In this presentation filmed during Agile 2008, Michael Mah analyzes the development process in 5 companies: 2 Agile (one of them BMC) and 3 classic. He measures the development progress and effectiveness and compares the results with industry averages. He also presents the factors which contributed to the success of BMC's Agile adoption.