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Mythical Agile Shortcuts
Going agile seems a pretty trivial task. We pair up, write unit tests, integrate regularly and support our teams with an easy to manage framework such as Scrum. In reality, however, this is not the case. All too often the benefits are not achieved and team does not function as expected. Ross Petit's recent article sheds some light on why things go wrong when the rubber hits the road.
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QCon London March 12-14 Update: Kent Beck, Martin Fowler, Google, Amazon, Yahoo!
QCon's second annual conference in London, UK is taking place in just 8 weeks, March 12-14. In the last month, a number of important additions have been made to the conf: XP founder Kent Beck, author Martin Fowler, sessions from Google, Yahoo!, Amazon, Salesforce.com, MySpace.com, eBay, Merrill, Betfair, Credit Suisse, and others. Gang of Four Patterns author Erich Gamma is also presenting.
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Oracle to Acquire BEA Systems
Oracle and BEA reach an agreement wherein Oracle buys BEA's outstanding shares for ~$19. How will they resolve their product-line redundancies? Reactions are interesting and varied, and the spectre of insider trading has already been reaised.
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Ivy 2.0: Released As An Apache Project
Ivy, a tool for managing (recording, tracking, resolving and reporting) project dependencies which provides tight integration with Apache Ant, has released its 2.0 beta version. This is the first release as an Apache project, it brings enhanced compatibility with Maven 2 repositories, improved concurrency support and a few other significant changes.
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Microsoft: MEDC Cancelled
Microsoft is closing shop on a popular conference targetted at mobile device application developers.
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Agile Kanban: Visual Tracking Beyond the Team Room
In the beginning Agile was largely a developer-driven initiative, sometimes improving development processes only to find the real bottlenecks lay outside developer control. In his latest InfoQ article, Kenji Hiranabe analyses Lean manufacturing's "Kanban" visual tracking tool, how it differs from the Agile taskboard, and how it helps identify more far-reaching improvements.
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Doer vs. Talker: Working Software over Comprehensive Documentation
In Are You a Doer or a Talker? Jeff Atwood of Coding Horror echoes the agile manifesto's 'Valuing working software over comprehensive documentation.' Noting an article by John Taber, Atwood draws parallels between transportation studies and transportation construction projects.
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Editorial: Selecting a .NET Web Framework
In the past selecting a web framework for .NET languages was a non-issue. Your choice was between pure ASP.NET or a hybrid design that mixed classic ASP with ASP.NET. And even that was seen as a temporary hack rather than a conscious choice. But with the introduction of ASP.NET MVC, .NET developers have to start making the hard decisions.
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An Agile Developer's Responsibility
What is a developer's responsibility when a customer asks for a quick and dirty solution? Should they listen to the customer and take the short cut because, after all, they are paying the bill? Should they instead always do what is technically the "best" option in their opinion? Or is there a middle road that should be taken?
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Why Crunch Mode Doesn't Work
Evan Robinson recently posted an article on why the practice of 'crunch time' doesn't work. Despite a century of studies showing that long-term output is maximized near a five-day, 40-hour work week, projects still hit the crunch usually to the detriment of the team. InfoQ looks at why crunch time is still so prevalent in the software industry and, if we know it's bad, why do we still do it?.
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Debate: Should the Java language stop adding new features?
Recently, there has been a lot of debate over the future of the Java platform, with some arguing for more features to compete with languages such as C# and Ruby, and others saying that Java should become a more stable language lest it become too complicated to use. Bruce Eckel started a new round of debates by stating that Java should stop adding new features entirely.
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Private Methods, Test Driven Development, and Good Design
The claim has been made that test driven development (TDD) encourages good design. The claim has also been made that TDD adversely affects design. Focusing on private methods and their relationships to good design and testability will give us something concrete to discuss - an instance of this apparent conflict.
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Interview: Patrick Smacchia discusses NDepend and Code Analysis
Patrick Smacchia, a Microsoft C# MVP, talks about his product NDepend and how it helps resolving issues in your code. Large code bases can be very complex to manage and the right tools make navigating so much easier.
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Creating Better Metrics
A recent article in The Economist pays tribute to three of the finest graphics from the last two centuries. What can be learned from these graphics to improve the display and the quality of agile development metrics?
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Successful Collaboration Doesn't Happen by Accident
Partnership Coach Michael Spayd tells us that both contractors and permanent employees can find themselves playing a "consultant" role, and should consider using consulting contracts or "designed partnerships" with their clients - not regarding the exchange of money, but to create a climate for stellar results for the client, while also communicating their own values and preferences.