InfoQ Homepage Culture & Methods Content on InfoQ
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Iteration Types
What is an iteration in the Agile world? How is it different than previous ways the software community has performed iterations? Are there different types of iterations, and does it matter? The ScrumDevelopment list has been recently discussing type A, B, and C sprints (sprint = iteration in Scrum terminology) as defined by Jeff Sutherland and the ideas are relevant the the wider Agile community.
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Book Excerpt: How to Improve your Continuous Testing
Continuous Integration has become a standard development best practice - but it's not always done well. Tests take up much of an application's build time, and poorly constructed test suites can cause long builds, whereupon teams start to circumvent agreed-upon CI practices just get the time to code. InfoQ presents advice and examples in Chapter 6: Continuous Testing from a new CI book.
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InfoQ Interview: Experiences with Planning Poker
In this fourteen-minute interview, Nils Haugen described "Planning Poker," a simple mechanism for arriving at estimates collaboratively, which has additional team building benefits and improves team estimates over time. Haugen shared his views on why this technique is an important tool for Agile teams in this InfoQ interview.
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Does software design really pay off?
Many developers have encountered a situation where they’ve been asked to cut down on design and "just get the job done". Martin Fowler presented his doubts about this strategy and explained trading design quality for speed is illusory for projects longer than just a few weeks.
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Has Agile Crossed the Chasm?
Carrying on from last year's survey, Scott Ambler published the 2007 Agile Adoption survey this month. InfoQ provides some analysis of his findings and asks readers how they would approach getting a single view of Agile trends from across the community.
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Article: Implementing Automated Governance for Coding Standards
Most development organizations of a significant size have some form of coding standards and best practices. Simply documenting these standards and keeping them up to date can be a significant challenge and enforcing them even harder. Our organization has found that enforcing coding standards and best practices in an automated fashion through our build process has been highly effective.
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Testing and Quality Control the only Certification Needed?
A new certification for software developers that is neither about in depth knowledge of programming languages, nor any modelling and design techniques, was suggested by Reginald Braithwaite. Only one subject would be on the examination list - "Testing and quality control". Safety has to be the prerequisite to any software development job. For the rest marketplace will decide.
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Kaizen in Lean Software Development
Lean methods employ Kaizen, or continuous improvement, to reduce waste and improve results on a regular, even daily, basis. On the leanagilescrum group, Alan asked, "Are there known techniques for facilitating kaizen activities within Lean/Agile software development?"
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InfoQ Launches Architecture Community
InfoQ has launched a 6th community on 'Architecture', the intention of which is to serve as a source for tracking change and innovation of interest to those with an architecting/design role but not specific to any of our other communities on InfoQ which currently include Java, .NET, Ruby, SOA, and Agile.
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Code reuse highly overrated?
Dennis Forbes bucks the conventional wisdom that has caused the industry to trend toward architectures focused on asset reuse, asserting that code reuse is highly overrated and rarely pans out as advertised.
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Agile Team Size
Using Agile methods with large teams is a reality - the old Agile = Small Team equation is no longer valid. Nonetheless, team size is still an issue. How important is team size and what, if anything, should we do about it?
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InfoQ Article: Creating a Collaborative Workspace
We may imagine an extremely Agile team as working in a minimalist teamroom, surrounded by whiteboards. But that isn't enough - some of the comforts left behind in our traditional spaces were there for good reasons. In this InfoQ article several experienced coaches offer advice from experience, on creating collaborative team spaces that work.
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PMD: Automated source code analysis and bug detection
PMD, an open-source automated Java source code analysis and bug detection tool, recently reached version 4.0. InfoQ spoke with Tom Copeland, PMD project lead, to learn more about PMD and what capabilities it provides.
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JUnit 4.4 Released
The release of JUnit 4.4 sees the inclusion of the assertThat method, offering easier reading and new flexibility to the JUnit library.
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Do Agile Methods Require Documentation?
Some believe that agile methods do not require (or cannot support) documentation of any kind. Ian Cooper examines this belief against the Agile manifesto and against specific agile methods.