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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.
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Keeping up with AgileEvents in 2008
In September InfoQ inaugurated the AgileEvents calendar so the community could share information about events for Agile professionals, free of charge. Over a hundred events have been posted on the calendar, and now that it's taken off it's not really news any more, so check in here to see how to get regular notifications of new events via Upcoming.org, now that InfoQ won't be covering it as news.
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Charming the Army: the Power of Delivery
Here is a story about Agile's use in a governmental organisation: at the 2006 APLN Leadership Summit Mark Salamango and John Cunningham looked at the problems and opportunities of introducing Agile in Army environments. True Agile practices cannot be 'commanded' or 'directed’ but frequent delivery offers Agile leaders a "soft" kind of power that is, in fact, very effective.
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Interview: Bruce Johnson discusses Google Web Toolkit
Google Web Toolkit (GWT) tech lead Bruce Johnson discusses the design of GWT, how GWT converts Java into JavaScript, community involvement with GWT, new features in GWT 1.4, and the philosophy behind GWT.
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Book Excerpt and Review: Release It!
Release It!: Design and Deploy Production-Ready Software by Michael Nygard discusses what it takes to make production-ready software, and explains how this differs from feature-complete software. InfoQ spoke with Michael Nygard and asked him several questions related to the book and some of the issues it raises.
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RubyConf 2007 Presentations Now Online
Confreaks, who provide recording and networking services for conferences have just recently released the complete set of presentations from this year's RubyConf, the seventh international Ruby conference which took place in Charlotte, North Carolina, USA.
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I'm Not Sure What You Heard is What I Thought I Said
Are family celebrations a challenge? You get together to catch up and swap stories, and invariably something gets "taken the wrong way." It's not restricted to families is it? So it's not surprising that the Satir Communication Model jumped the fence from family therapy to team building! J.B. Rainsberger uses an amusing Christmas-at-Walmart anecdote to illustrate its use.
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The Power of Checklists
In a recent New Yorker article, Atul Gawande describes how Dr. Peter Pronovost is dramatically decreasing infection rates in hospital intensive care units with "stupid little checklists". If simple checklists can save lives, can they improve your agile development team?
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Is VSTS Meeting its Design Goals?
The goal of VSTS is to provide a tool that is not prescriptive and highly customizable for managing the software development process. Kevin Jones provides a soup to nuts framework for utilizing VSTS to support a development team and build better applications.