InfoQ Homepage Culture & Methods Content on InfoQ
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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.
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Article: "Who Do You Trust?" by Linda Rising
During Agile 2008, Dr. Linda Rising held a presentation centered on experiments conducted many years ago, presenting how deep, powerfully affecting, and difficult to avoid are human “prejudices” and “stereotypes” as seen from the perspective of psychology and cognitive science. The article, written by Tsutomu Yasui, is a summary of that presentation.
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Interview: Erich Gamma Discusses Jazz, Eclipse, JUnit and Design Patterns
In this interview from QCon London 2008, Erich Gamma discusses the Jazz project, why Eclipse has been successful, the strict Eclipse release schedule, JUnit, Design Patterns, how to identify a design pattern, design patterns and the 'Don't Repeat Yourself' principle, the design pattern community, and whether dependency injection is a design pattern.
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How to Handle Unfinished Stories?
It is not uncommon for a scrum team to get to the end of the sprint and find that they have a story that has been worked on, but is not yet done. Perhaps the story appears to be about 80% done. What should become of such stories and how should the progress made on them be tracked? These are questions that every agile team will face. In a recent blog post, David Starr shares his approach.
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Presentation: When Working Software Is Not Enough: A Story of Project Failure
In this presentation filmed during Agile 2008, Mitch Lacey talks about a real life project that was on the verge of being successful, but was deemed as unsuccessful by the customer. Considering that "the true measure of project progress is working software", Mitch and his team delivered the software, but the client was not satisfied.
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Behavior-Driven Development for Everyone
Behavior-Driven Development is nothing new but has steadily risen to the forefront as an excellent technique for technical and non-technical participants to collaborate on a software project. Several frameworks exist to aid the development of software in the BDD (Behavior-Driven Development) mindset, with one particular framework trying to make it as <i>easy</i> as possible for everyone.
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Martin Fowler: Can SOA Be Done With an Agile Approach?
Agile development challenges many of the common software development assumptions. One of the most significant is the evolutionary approach to software design. Another is up-front design which is promoted by top-down SOA. In his latest article, Martin Fowler examines whether the two can coexist.
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When is Ok to Break the Rules
In “Just Ship Baby” Kent Beck, author of the JUnit Framework, reminds us that the point of all the Agile processes and practices is to produce shipping software. If they’re getting in the way of shipping software – then perhaps you need to break the rules.
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Announcement: Agile Journal Making Big Changes
Going into it's third year of operations, the Agile Journal is making some note-worthy changes to how it brings "need-to-know information and resources" to the agile community. Among these changes are a new Editor in Chief, Amr Elssamadisy, as well a fresh new content format and publishing approach.
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New Programming Q&A Web Site Goes Public
Stack Overflow, a web site for programming questions&answers, has been made public while still in beta. The site offers programmers the opportunity to ask questions and receive answers from fellow coders for free, and intends to become the right source of answers for any programming question.