InfoQ Homepage Culture & Methods Content on InfoQ
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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.
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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?
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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.
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Article: Process Component Models: The Next Generation In Workflow?
Tom Baeyens wrote a summary of the state of Workflow & BPM standards and tools. After a detailed look at BPEL, BPMN, and other technologies such as choreography, XPDL, BPDM, jPDL, Tom takes the stance that it is time to abandon the idea that non-technical business analysts can draw production-ready software in diagrams and separate the analysis process models and executable process models.
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Opinion: Programming Languages Shouldn't Enforce Style, Teams Should
Some believe that, if you write a large enough cookbook, there will always be a simple recipe to solve our programming problems. Taking it to an extreme, some want programming languages to limit developers to safe constructs and clean style. Reg Braithwaite skewers this idea, and challenges teams not to give up accountability for style, asking "Whatever happened to code reviews?"
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Does Continuous Production Lead To Extreme Agility?
The idea of continuous production has been around for some time, with Cal Henderson revealing in 2005 that Flickr releases code to production about every 30 minutes. InfoQ investigates continuous production and explores the effects it has on the product lifecycle, and in turn the host organisation.
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Sun SPOTs: Programmable Devices for Java Developers
Sun Microsystems has released the Sun SPOT platform under the GPL license. Sun SPOTs are programmable battery-powered devices controllable with Java technology.
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Agile2008 Reminder: Registration Discounts, Submission Deadline
Agile2008 is scheduled for August 4th-8th 2008, in Toronto, Ontario, Canada at the Sheraton Centre Hotel. The Agile Alliance issued a call for participation in December and reminds us to submit by February 25th. Another way to attend for less is to nab one of the limited number of discounted super-early-bird registrations.
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Right-Size Your User Stories
For those using User Stories, getting them right is one of the difficult aspects of an Agile process - they can drive or bog down your work. Pat Kua recently addressed a key question: How much detail should you put in your story? The answer, of course, is "it depends" on where you are in the process.
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Kent Beck on Implementation Patterns
What does good code look like? In this interview, Kent Beck talks about his new book, Implementation Patterns, that deals with this question. Kent explains why Compose Method is so important, but also talks about the relationship between implementation patterns and XP, the history of software patterns and why he believes that Cockburn's Shu-Ha-Ri description of learning is naïve and simplistic.
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Unconsciously Agile? (Rhythms of Agile Development)
Damon Poole wrote recently that many of us maybe practicing Agile development without even realizing it. It turns out that many of us maybe showing signs of the Agile disease without knowing it.
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Discussion: Measuring Success of an Agile Project from the Customer’s Perspective
A recent discussion on the Scrum Development list looked at: “How does a customer measure the success of an Agile project?” Emphasis on: “measure”. The discussion seemed to agree that clients do need a way to track success in their terms, and various metrics were suggested, though it was agreed: it depends on the situation and the customer.
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VersionOne Announces New UI and Embedded Forecasting in Release 8
VersionOne recently announced Release 8 of their agile project management and team organization tool suite. This new release features an all-new user interface, introduction of a release forecasting toolset, and additional plug-n-play integrations for some popular open source tools.
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Are You An Agile Architect?
Vikas Hazrati recently posted an article on Agile Journal, defining his ideal characteristics of an Architect working in an Agile team, reflecting how the role of Architect has changed in light of Agile practices.
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Measure Teams, Not Individuals
Michael Dubakov recently expressed warning against the measurement of individual velocity and individual estimate accuracy. His view: measurement of these metrics not only provides no more useful information than is already available with their team-level equivalents, but may also have a tendency to encourage teams into behaviors that reduce effectiveness.