InfoQ Homepage Culture & Methods Content on InfoQ
-
50 Developers Answer: What Do You Want Your CIO to Know About Agile?
Trying to explain the benefits of Agile Software Development to your CIO? Does your boss want some outside validation? Esther Schindler asked more than 50 developers and Agile practitioners one question: "If you could get the boss to understand one thing, just one thing, related to agile development...what would it be? Why that?".
-
Opinion: Agile Adoption is Distinct from Agile Practices
Using Agile practices effectively is not as easy as knowing what Agile practices are. To use test driven development effectively is different than knowing that you should follow the red-green-refactor loop. How does one get from 'Agile seems like a good idea' to 'We have used Agile practices to significantly improve the value we deliver to our organization'?
-
Continuous Integration And Version Control for Databases
After asserting that one must, as a rule, always version their database work, Scott Allen detailed an approach to making the best of versioning databases. Allen presented a comprehensive, practical approach to creating a baseline, using change scripts to manage schematic revisions, controlling programmatic database objects, and handling branching and merging.
-
How to Develop New Activities for the One Laptop Per Child Project?
The One Laptop Per Child project has starting shipping its first generation of XO laptops. OLPC "is not a laptop project, it is an education project", explains Nicholas Negroponte, director of the project. A full Sugar based development environment is available for developers to contribute new activities to the project. Sugar supports collaborative activities when XOs are meshed together.
-
Questioning the Retrospective Prime Directive
The 'Retrospective Prime Directive' is commonly used in retrospectives to encourage deep learning without recriminations. But what do you do when you *can't* agree that you "understand and truly believe" that everyone did their best? In this InfoQ article, a group of senior practitioners discusses the benefits and difficulties of using this practice.
-
Communicating Intent through Idiom and Paradigm Selection
What about using idioms and programming conventions as signals to achieve more readability and expressiveness? This is what Reg Braithwaite advocates for, suggesting that syntax or even paradigm choices can be a means to communicate the intent.
-
Apache Wicket 1.3.1 Release Supports Transparent Clustering
The Wicket team has announced Wicket 1.3.1, the first maintenance release of Wicket 1.3. 1.3.1 adds transparent clustering support out-of-the-box.
-
Using ParseTree for LINQ-style queries and extracting metadata
Whether it's LISP macros or LINQ's expression trees - access to the AST of code is a powerful tool. We look at how ParseTree allows this in Ruby - and how it's being used in libraries like Ambition, Sequel and the web framework Merb.
-
Interview: Charles Nutter discusses JRuby
JRuby project lead Charles Nutter discusses how he got involved with JRuby, Sun's involvement with JRuby, how JRuby fits into enterprise-level web applications, the possibility of a friendly fork of the OpenJDK source code, reasons for switching to JRuby, the future of JRuby, Spring and JRuby, and the Ruby community as a whole.
-
Does "Done" Mean "Shippable"?
There has been a lot of discussion on various agile forums and blogs about the difference between 'Done' and 'Shippable'. It might sound like both mean the same, however discussions on the lists and various blogs suggest that these are still widely misunderstood, mis-used terms. Here's a roundup of recommendations about how to handle "Done."
-
TDD/BDD Leading To Incomplete Unit Tests?
Peter Ritchie raised concern about TDD and BDD keeping practitioners from writing good unit tests. He cites an over-reliance on “interaction testing", a core mantra and essence of TDD and BDD, as a driver with tendency to result in incomplete unit testing.
-
Review Board - Online Code Review Tool
Recently there has been a resurgence in interest in code reviews. InfoQ looks at Review Board, an open source application that helps facilitate the code review process, that has been gathering momentum in the open source community.
-
IntelliJ IDEA's Dependency Structure Matrix Tool Visualizes Architecture
JetBrains includes a Dependency Structure Matrix (DSM) tool in its recently released version 7. DSM tools generate a representation of a codebase's dependencies in an appealing martix visualization. This article looks at how DSM can improve project structure and how IDEA's DSM tool compares with alternatives.
-
Responsibility, Personal Agility, and Other Touchy-Feely Ideas
Successful Agile teams are predominantly characterized by their culture and not their practices. This sentiment rings true to many (if not most) in the Agile field. Christopher Avery, who has made his name in the world of organizational transformations, has taken his work on Responsibility and focused it directly on Agile practices. Is Personal Agility the key to successful Agile adoption?
-
InfoQ Presentation: Selecting the Right Methodology and Steering it to Success
It's easy to agree with "anything more than 'barely sufficient' in is waste," but it's more complicated when we actually need to customize a process for a particular project. At Agile2006 Todd Little shared a model to help leaders choose the right flavour of Agile based on project and team attributes, and he emphasised the need to actively steer projects as development progresses.