InfoQ Homepage Culture & Methods Content on InfoQ
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'State of Agile' Survey Open for Participation
VersionOne, a maker of agile project management tools, has announced that the third annual 'State of Agile Development' survey is open for participation. The online survey is intended to gauge the value of agile development practices in the field. Results will be announced on August 4th, at the Agile 2008 conference in Toronto.
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The Complexity Around Simplicity
Almost all Agile techniques focus on simplicity. Understanding simplicity could itself be a complex task. Many Agile community members believe that simplicity is often misunderstood and this often results in unwanted complexity.
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TDD Opinion: Quality Is a Function of Thought and Reflection, Not Bug Prevention
In a recent post, Michael Feathers argues against the widely held idea that unit testing, by itself, improves code quality. Michael talks about unit testing, integration tests, TDD and Clean Room Software Development, concluding that code quality is a function of thought and reflection, not bug prevention.
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Voting Someone Off the Island on an Agile Team
On Agile teams there is a definite possibility of having a team member who is not a good fit. Members of the Agile community discuss the reasons and possible ways of voting someone off the island.
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My "Unit Test" Aint Your "Unit Test"
Mike Hill, well-known XP contributor, came forth to make a few interesting assertions about the misunderstanding often surrounding how a TDD "unit test" differs from the "unit test" of traditional lore, and how he uses the term 'microtesting' to clear the air for new TDD'ers.
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Opinion: When Designing Your SOA - Taste is Everything
Dan Creswell claims that "taste is everything" when it comes to putting together the pieces that make a good SOA. Dan says that picking the technology stack for distributed services, how you layer the service "units", etc, are a matter of taste as well as consideration of a number of guidelines, as opposed to just taking a cookie cutter approach to SOA as some seem to claim is possible.
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Subversion 1.5 released
Subversion, a mature open source version control system used by many open source projects, has just released version 1.5. New features include: merge tracking, sparse checkouts, and conflict resolution in the command line client.
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IcedTea: The First 100% Compliant Open-Source Java
The IcedTea project has passed the Java Test Compatibility Kit, becoming the first 100% open-source licensed Java implementation to be completely verified as Java-compliant.
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Storing Code in Queryable Data Structures?
Is today’s mainstream use of flat files the optimal way to represent code? Several discussions occurred in the blogspace in reaction to Rick Minerich’s post advocating for moving away from this paradigm towards keeping code in queryable data structures. What are the advantages of this approach and what are the trade-offs to take into consideration?
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Agile Smells: Don't Let This Happen To You!
Mark Levison wrote an interesting blog summarizing some of the work that has been done to catalog Agile smells. We summarize some of those smells and point to other intersting work that documents the Agile community's experience in adoption.
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New User Story Format Emphasizes Business Value
User stories, a common format for capturing agile requirements, could be more focused on business value. A traditional format for stating a user story is: "As a <type of user> I want <some functionality> so that <some benefit>." A value-centric replacement would be: "In order to <achieve some value>, as a <type of user>, I want <some functionality>."
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Agile Practices with the Highest Return on Investment
Return on Investment is a critical factor for decision making pertaining to following a particular software development practice. The post summarizes the ROI benefits of Agile and the inexpensive practices which lead to highest return on investment.
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The EQATEC Code Profiler v. 1.2 for the .NET Compact Framework Has New Features
InfoQ informed the community about the free EQATEC code profiler for the .NET Compact Framework a month ago. In the meantime, the profiler has been well received by the community, and EQATEC released version 1.2 with new features and bug fixes.
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Railo joins JBoss.org
Swiss software house Railo have announced that they are joining JBoss.org and will be releasing their Java based ColdFusion Markup Language engine for free under the LGPL.
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FIT/Fitnesse Fixture Gallery 2.0 Released
Gojko's Fixture Gallery is a cookbook for FIT/Fitnesse fixtures and version 2.0 has been released with Java, C# and Python code samples.