InfoQ Homepage Culture & Methods Content on InfoQ
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Holding a Program in Your Head
Your code: is it that stuff you store in version control or, as Paul Graham argues, "... your understanding of the problem you're exploring"? Graham has written an essay offering eight suggestions for developers trying to understand the code on which they're working - some of which seem to contradict the advice of the agilists.
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Martin Fowler: ALT.NET important to the viable future of the Microsoft ecosystem
ALT.NET is a new, developer-organized community started by several influencers including David Laribee, Scott Bellware, Roy Osherove and others. What differentiates this community from the many user groups already in existence is its focus on pragmatic values rather than technology. Martin Fowler commented that "this kind of community is important to the viable future of the Microsoft ecosystem."
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High abstraction level of DSLs to reduce the testing burden?
Inconsistencies between the user interface and user’s expectations can be an important source of bugs. According to Leonardo Vernazza, this is due the fact that the user and the UI do not talk the same language. Using a DSL, characterized by a high abstraction level, would be instrumental for avoiding the risk of translation errors and would therefore reduce the testing burden.
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Evaluating a Service-Oriented Architecture
The Software Engineering Institute has published a new paper "Evaluating a Service-Oriented Architecture".
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InfoQ Japan Launches
InfoQ's mission is to be the world's source for tracking change and innovation in the enterprise software development community. In April InfoQ China launched, and this October InfoQ Japan has launched and is already attracting an average of 3500 visits a day.
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QCon Panel: Modifiability - Or is there any design in Agility?
Many people assume that agile methods mean an absence of design. Design still happens in agile projects, but it shifts from an up-front phase to a continual evolution. Design decisions should be left to the last responsible moment, but some design decisions do need to be made upfront. Martin Fowler explored this topic through a panel discussion at the last QCon.
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Are Product Backlogs Wasteful?
Planning the features to be developed is an important part of software development. In Scrum, the list of features desired but not yet implemented is typically called the backlog (or product backlog). This is meant to be lightweight, but can it still be wasteful?
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Does the Agile Community Need a Maturity Model?
Periodically an Agile Maturity Model or a Framework for Agile Adoption shows up on the radar. There are also several consulting companies performing Agile 'readiness assessments' as a precursor to helping their clients 'become' Agile. Are these indications of an unfulfilled need in the community?
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Presentation: Implementing Scrum In A Distributed Software Development Organization
At Agile2007 we heard the tale of a distributed Scrum project with 50 people in 4 continents. BMC Identity Management decided to build their next generation product, including architectural changes and component integration, using Scrum to handle the uncertainty of their product's requirements. This presentation talks about how.
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What Makes a Tool Agile?
Individuals and interactions over processes and tools is the very first of the values of the Agile Manifesto. Tools, however, seem to be a big part of development on most Agile teams. When does a tool help and when does it hinder (Agile) software development?
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Religion driven industry? Buzzwords and checklists vs. thinking and inspection
James O. Coplien has recently argued that today’s industry is based on buzzwords and checklists. The use of some techniques and methodologies, TDD for instance, has become “a religious issue”. This prevents from inspecting possible tradeoffs and focusing on finding solutions that would be the most appropriate and the most cost-effective for a given project.
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Next-Generation Functional Testing
What should the next generation of functional testing tools offer? The Agile Alliance is holding a workshop to envision the next-generation of functional testing tools, from October 11th to 12th. What do you think needs the most attention?
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FxCop Rule for Multi-Targeting
Multi-targeting in Visual Studio 2008 leads to a new set of problems. With .NET 3.5 bringing new features to the core assemblies, care must be taken when targeting .NET 2.0. Otherwise, an application can be compiled successfully but fail to run due to missing methods. One way to handle this is to use Krzysztof Cwalina's Multitargeting rule for FxCop.
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Peter Hosey of Adium on Code Reviews
There is no question that formal code reviews catch bugs and can delay the inevitable "big ball of mud" that all successful projects seem to turn into. However, arranging a meeting for every check-in quickly becomes untenable on all but the most critical of projects. Peter Hosey talks about his experiences and how he conducts code reviews in Adium.
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DbFit 0.9 includes MySQL Support and Full Oracle for Java Support
DbFit has had several releases in recent months, adding better support for Oracle, support for Java and MySQL 5, and embedding DbFit tables into Java and .NET code.