InfoQ Homepage Culture & Methods Content on InfoQ
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The Power of Done
Scott Schimanski recently added his voice to those talking about the power of a clear definition of "done." Scott points out there is both business and personal value in a well-defined meaning of "done". The business can count on shipping features that are done, without making any additional investment, while individuals really seem to enjoy the sense of accomplishment that comes with "done."
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Oracle BPM Roadmap Revealed
During Oracle’s Open World conference last month, Oracle has revealed their BPM strategy and roadmap. The centerpiece of this strategy is building a unified BPM platform based on the strength of existing Oracle’s assets and BEA acquisition.
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Interview: Dave Laribee and ALT.NET
Greg Young grabbed some of Dave Laribee's time at the last ALT.NET conference in Seattle. Dave opens up about the intent of ALT.NET and how the community can get involved.
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Federal Funding Backs Agile Training in Oregon
Agile experts James Shore and Diana Larsen will benefit from federal funding to teach two courses in Oregon this month, from Employer Workforce Training Funds and the Oregon Department of Community Colleges and Workforce Development.
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Presentation: Prioritizing Your Product Backlog
Choosing the right features can make the difference between the success and failure of a software product. Mike Cohn presented 'Prioritizing your Project Backlog' at Agile 2008 on how a project backlog should be organized and prioritized and non-financial techniques for prioritization such as kano analysis, theme screening/scoring, relative weighting and analytic hierarchy process.
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ThoughtWorks Announces Twist, Automated Functional Testing Platform
ThoughtWorks Studios has created Twist, an integrated development environment for functional testing of web and Java applications. The tool provides a single platform for documenting user stories, capturing executable requirements, developing, maintaining, running and reporting on functional tests. A free trial version of Twist is currently available for download and evaluation.
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What are the Qualities of a Good Test?
What is a good test? How do we know if we're writing good tests? Kent Beck, Roy Osherove, Mike Hill and others provide some insight.
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JBoss Introduces Feature Packs
JBoss has introduced the concept of feature packs: a new release format that supports existing clients optionally getting new and upgraded functionality sooner.
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Agile and Offshore: Asking for Trouble?
Kevin Coleman told his story working with an offshore team that claimed to be 'Agile' and the woes and worries that came with that experience in last month's issue of the Agile Journal. Several readers validated his experience with their own. In practice, can Agile methods be used successfully with offshore teams given today's business reality?
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Venture Capital Group Acknowledges Overtime Detrimental to Scrum
Sustainable pace is known to help teams with improved velocity. Jeff Sutherland and Clinton Keith quote studies to prove that it works. However, there is an underlying word of caution which suggests that teams should take their sprint goals seriously and a couple of crunch sprints might not hurt after all.
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Story-Focused Standups
A widely accepted agile practice is the daily standup meeting, in which each team member shares: what they have done since the previous standup, what they expect to achieve by the next, and anything that is getting in their way. Mike Cohn recently examined variations that shed additional light on the progress being made toward completing each user story.
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Book Spotlight: Visual Studio 2008 Unleashed
Mike Snell and Lars Powers tackle developer productivity with their recent book "Visual Studio 2008 Unleashed" by Sams Publishing. Included is a sample chapter for download, Chapter 10 on Debugging.
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What is Sprint Zero? Why was it Introduced?
Some teams use a Sprint 0 to prepare their product backlog, the infrastructure (development environment, CI server), ... .Is this part of Scrum? Is it useful?
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Presentation: Extremely Short Iterations as a Catalyst for Effective Prioritization of Work
Mishkin Berteig presents a situation where he proposed to a software development team, which just started to experiment with Scrum, to accept 2-days iterations. The approach was trying to tackle their organizational lack of prioritization resulting in constant crisis. Their decision led to a bigger crisis which exposed the need for task prioritization.
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Making Retrospective Changes Stick
Agile teams may find it easy to talk about change during their retrospectives, but not so easy to make that change actually happen. Esther Derby, well-known thought-leader on the human aspects of software development, recounts an experience from her personal improvement efforts to illustrate this and offer a few suggestions on how to succeed with making change actually happen.