InfoQ Homepage Culture & Methods Content on InfoQ
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Article: QCon London 2008 Key Takeaways and Lessons Learned
QCon London took place March 12-14th and attendees have blogged summaries and take aways for 62 of the 96 sessions. There were 600 registrations for this second annual QCon in London, 70% of the attendees self-declaring as being team lead, architect and above. Over 100 speakers presented at QCon London including Kent Beck, Martin Fowler, and Erich Gamma.
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What is the Role of a Manager in an Agile Organization?
Your organization is adopting Agile Development and your Managers are trying to find their new role. Prior to the adoption Agile perhaps management was involved in the production specifications and assigned the tasks. Now that teams are self organizing and the stories (instead of specs) come from the product owner, what does management do?
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IBM's Smart SOA Vision Explained at Impact
At IBM's Impact event this week, IBM execs re-affirmed the view that the main innovation presented by SOA is business/IT alignment. They presented a business-process centric view of how SOA is an enabler for enterprises to change (agility), as well as their view of Smart SOA, a set of principles / maturity model for SOA based on numerous customer SOA deployments.
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First (Forgotten?) Rule Of The Retrospective: Follow Through
Even the very greenest of agile teams clearly recognize the word 'Retrospective'. But, alas, it is often overlooked that a retrospective may be a wasted effort if not used to initiate an actual improvement that the team follows through on. Jim Shore gives advice on how to make the most of your retrospective and reminds us of the activity's ultimate place in the agile heartbeat.
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Rally's Agile Project Lifecycle Management Tool 2008.1 Released
InfoQ got together with Zach Nies, Product Development Manager for Rally software for a product walk through of Rally's latest offering of their Agile Lifecycle Management product, and to talk about where Rally's product in this space is going in the future.
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Debate: Agile Transition Success Rates, Help or Harm?
Many of the Agile community have chimed in on a recent popular discussion regarding success rates of Agile transitions. Responding to Niraj Khanna's question on the subject, Kent Beck, Ron Jeffries, Alistair Cockburn, Chet Hendrickson, and many more debate the value and risk of establishing such statistics.
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Do Extreme Programming Folks Care about Scrum?
Scrum and XP are considered to be natural allies and both are widely adopted in the industry. However, there seem to be some dark secrets behind the happy facade of using them together. A massive discussion on the Extreme Programming group tries to answer if Scrum is alienating extreme programming folks and whether Scrum would be as effective without XP.
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Cyclomatic Complexity Revisited
Enerjy studied tens of thousands of source code files and found the optimum Cyclomatic Complexity number is 11, with a 28% defect probability. In fact, you are more likely to encounter a defect if you have lower complexity - is it time to make your methods are more complicated?
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Managers: Help your Teams Learn Communication Skills
The Agile “self organising team” paradigm requires that team members develop strong interpersonal skills. Now management gains an important role in helping teams learn new ways to communicate and collaborate. This article proposes some strategies for imparting new skills without crushing a team’s growing self-organization, and suggests some sources of helpful material for developing new skills.
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InfoQ Video: Practices of an Agile Developer
At NFJS Venkat Subramaniam, co-author with Andy Hunt of "Practices of an Agile Developer," shared his pragmatic approach to some of the important technical and non-technical factors contributing to project success, including: coding, developer attitude, debugging, mentoring and feedback.
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Agile Project Management ScrumWorks Pro 3.0 released
Danube Technologies has just released the 3.0 Release of ScrumWorks Pro, last mentioned in August 07. ScrumWorks Pro is an Agile Project Management tool that help track team(s) progress through individual iterations and whole releases. In this release changes focused on two areas: usability improvements and the use of MySQL as the backend database.
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Fixture Gallery, a New Quick Reference For FitNesse How-To
Fixture Gallery is a new open doc cookbook by Gojko Adzic for FIT/FitNesse tests. It provides developers with a quick overview of the most important fixture types and concepts for agile acceptance testing using the FIT framework.
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OpenXava 3.0 Released
OpenXava provides a framework that allows developers to quickly and productively create web applications and portlets. Version 3.0 allows users to take full advantage of JPA, creating complex user interfaces and applications easily.
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Well Formed Teams: Helping Teams Thrive, not just Survive
What does it take to create a high-performing team? According to Doug Shimp and Samall Hazziez, a "Well Formed Team" exhibits the following characteristics: follow Agile and Lean principles, use an adaptive system with a feedback loop, are focused on the business vision, are passionate and hyper-productive.
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Distributing Bonus to Agile Teams is Like Playing with Dynamite
Everyone is excited when bonus is declared. However, for Agile teams it could eventually become a make-or-break situation. The general consensus is that distributing bonus should be a 'well thought-out' strategy there is no 'one size fits all' here. In an interesting discussion on the Lean Development group, people share their thoughts to find the best way.