InfoQ Homepage Culture & Methods Content on InfoQ
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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.
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Analyzing Experimental Data Concerning Agile Practices
Agile literature is sprinkled with experiments on the effectiveness of one or more practices. Not all experiments come to the same conclusion. Some experiments come to conclusions that may not coincide with your team’s experience. To understand experimental results, and the level of confidence that you should have in their outcomes, an understanding of a few simple evaluation criteria is helpful.
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Intalio|BPMS 5.0 released - A full fledged open source BPM system
Intalio last week released their open source based BPM System - Intalio|BPMS 5.0, including amongst other things a BPMN Editor and a BPEL server engine. The release is a milestone for Intalio in their effort to realise a complete solution for their BPM 2.0 vision. InfoQ took the opportunity to interview Ismael Ghalimi, Intalio CEO, and Arnaud Blandin, EMEA Director, about the new release.
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AgileEvents Calendar Update
AgileEvents is one month old, and two dozen commercial and non-profit events have been announced there by members of the Agile community around the world. Here is your monthly roundup of upcoming events, with "coding dojos", classes, and conferences and XPdays worldwide.
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JRuby compiler finished
As Charles Nutter reports, JRuby's Ruby to Bytecode compiler is finished. This is used for AOT and JIT compilation, and will go into JRuby 1.1. Future plans include a compiler that could help with Java integration by turning Ruby classes into Java types.
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Is Pipelined Continous Integration a Good Idea?
Sometimes, when the team and/or code-base get large, the CI server starts to slow down. The cycle between builds grows and the feedback degrades – a build may take an hour or more to respond with a pass/fail, and by that time several people may have checked in their code into an already broken build. To address this issue, many teams “pipeline” their CI - but is this a good strategy?