InfoQ Homepage Culture & Methods Content on InfoQ
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Is Estimating A Wasteful Practice?
The age old problem of software "estimation" has generated some interesting discussion lately in the agile community. J.B. Rainsberger, Arlo Belshee, Josh Kerievsky, David Anderson, and others ask the question "Are estimates really needed at all?"
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Presentation: Martin Fowler and Dan North Talk Over the Yawning Crevasse of Doom
In this presentation filmed during QCon London 2007, Martin Fowler and Dan North talk about the communication gap existing between the developers and the customers or users. Closing this gap is extremely important in order to create successful software.
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Oracle Unveils ts SOA Product Strategy
After the Oracle acquisition of BEA it was not clear how Oracle was going to integrate often competing SOA products in its and BEA’s portfolio. In his presentation last month David Shaffer, VP Product Managemen for, Oracle Integration, described the Oracle-BEA product Strategy and Roadmap for SOA, BPM, Governance and Events.
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Interview: Linda Rising on "Fearless Change" Patterns
In this interview by Floyd Marinescu, co-founder of InfoQ, Linda Rising talks about the book "Fearless Change: Patterns for Introducing New Ideas" and offers examples of how the patterns presented in the book can ease Agile adoption.
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Card Game Teaches Distributed Project Communication Lessons
Charles Suscheck presented how he uses a variation of the card game Rummy to teach the importance of communication, planning, and collaboration on projects at Agile2008. The game explores the effects of various levels of distribution on a team, as well as the impact of adding or removing experts on the team during a project.
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Presentation: Mock Roles Not Object States
In this presentation filmed during QCon London 2007, Nat Pryce and Steve Freeman talk about TDD using Mock Objects. In their opinion, Mock Objects improves the software design and makes the code more easier to maintain and adapt to changing requirements.
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Prioritizing (the Backlog) For Profit
Having difficulty prioritizing the backlog? Luke Hohmann has described a method to make quantitative decisions about which backlog items should be considered first. In addition to the usual attributes such as implementation effort, Luke suggested adding attributes to measure stakeholders needs, strategic alignment and to ask whether the item is driving profit.
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Touchy Feely Impediments to Agile Adoption
Struggling with Agile Adoption? Amr Elssamadisy ran a session on what makes adopting Agile processes difficult. He provided the audience with three models for understanding the problems seen during adoption.
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Ruby PDF Generation Made Easier and Cleaner with Prawn.
There are several existing ways to generate PDF with Ruby. Unsatisfied with existing solutions, Gregory Brown decided to design his own faster library, which uses a DSL approach to generate PDF. InfoQ caught up with Gregory, who also founded a community funded development venture: Ruby Mendicant.
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Presentation: Succeeding With Agile: A Guide To Transitioning
In this presentation filmed during Agile 2007, Mike Cohn talks about the transitioning process towards an agile organization, why the process is inherently difficult, and what it takes to see self-organization emerging in a previously tightly controlled environment.
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Coaching Self Organizing Teams
Joseph Pelrine promised to teach us “how to be a manipulative bastard” with respect to coaching teams. Joseph feels that coaching as a discipline lacks the scientific background and rigor that it needs: "Air guitar and attitude" won't do - Allan Kay. His goal to is to supply that rigor.
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Presentation: Secure Programming with Static Analysis
Creating secure code requires more than just good intentions. Programmers need to know how to make their code safe in an almost infinite number of scenarios and configurations. Static source code analysis can uncover the kinds of errors that lead directly to vulnerabilities and in this talk, Brian Chess frames the software security problem and shows how static analysis is part of the solution.
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Agile 2008: The Wisdom of Crowds and Agile Teams
James Surowiecki, author of the Wisdom of Crowds, gave the keynote speech that opened Agile 2008 on Tuesday, August 5. The thesis behind the wisdom of crowds is simple: given the right circumstances, a group of people can make a decision that is better than the best answer of most (if not all) of the group's members.
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Jason Van Zyl Discusses Sonatype, The Eclipse Foundation and Maven
Sonatype, the main company which drives Maven development, recently announced that they are joining the Eclipse Foundation as a Strategic Developer. InfoQ spoke with Sonatype CTO and Maven founder Jazon Van Zyl to learn more about this partnership and what it means for the future of Maven.
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Second Functional Test Workshop Results
The second Agile Alliance Functional Test Workshop was held as a pre-conference session before Agile 2008. It was run as a series of open space sessions facilitated by Jeff Paton. The primary purpose of this workshop was to discuss cutting-edge advancements in and envision possibilities for the future of automated functional testing tools.