InfoQ Homepage Culture & Methods Content on InfoQ
-
Microsoft and Agile - Divergent Agendas?
Martin Fowler has questioned Microsoft's grip on leading-edge developers. MS has threatened one developer with legal action over his TestDriven.Net extension for VisualStudio Express, and MS development of an incompatible rival to NUnit has alienated many developers. Is there a widening divide between MS and the Agile community, as each pursues different a vision? Now's the time to speak up.
-
Microsoft Releases eScrum 1.0 TFS-based Project Management Tool
Microsoft has released eSCRUM 1.0, a Web-based project management tool for Scrum built on the Visual Studio Team Foundation Server platform. Project interaction is via web-based UI, Team Explorer, Excel, or Project. It provides a single place for all Scrum artifacts such as product backlog, sprint backlog, task management, retrospective, and reports.
-
Father of the Web Tim Berners-Lee honored again
Tim Berners-Lee, the father of the World Wide Web, is appointed to Order of Merit by Queen Elizabeth II.
-
Can Agile Separate Team Concerns from Organizational Ones?
When it comes to agile methods, almost everyone agrees that agility can apply to the software development team and to the organization. This raises some questions: To what extent can the one be separated from the other? Can an agile team succeed if the organization around them doesn't wish to adapt to an agile approach?
-
Ruby x Agile: Matz explores the relationships between Ruby and Agile
Ruby creator Yukihiro Matsumoto recently starred in the first of six short videos exploring the relationship between Ruby and Agile methodologies. Matz features along with Kenji Hiranabe and Shintaro Kakutani. Kenji is a self confessed ‘Agile agitator’ and Japanese translator of multiple XP/Agile books. Shintaro is a strong Ruby proponent.
-
Does Cost Accounting Cause Crappy Code?
Cost accounting , the standard accounting approach to analyzing the monetary value of a project, treats all parts of a project independently and encourages local optimization. Local optimization of costs means that you focus on task completion time. A focus on minimizing task completion time means that you don't have time for refactoring and other niceties - they are too expensive.
-
What can Math and Psychology teach us about Agile?
With Agile, we avoid early commitments to gain flexibility later. APLN members Chris Matts and Olav Maassen have noted a connection here with the math behind financial options. Their article introduces "Real Options," applying both psychology and financial math to our thinking about Agile practices. They propose it will help us refine our agile practices and take agile in new directions.
-
Article: Unit-Testing XML
In this exclusive InfoQ article, Stefan Bodewig explains how to use the XMLUnit Java framework to write tests in the presence of XML.
-
InfoQ Turns One Year Old!
InfoQ officially launched exactly one year ago today, and what a year it has been! Our mission is to be the world's source for tracking change and innovation in the enterprise software development community; in keeping with that mission InfoQ has published a crazy amount of content, launched our QCon event in London, launched InfoQ China, and have reached over 135,000 unique visitors/month.
-
Can Virtual Teams Ever Work?
Co-location is one of the cornerstones of Scrum, so the increasing trend toward non-co-located teams raises questions on how Agile can work in such an environment. David Churchville has blogged some common distributed team scenarios, and offered solutions to common pitfalls of delivering Agile projects using different types of distributed teams.
-
A Real Product using Z-Wave and .NET Micro
Microsoft has been pushing a lot of new technology lately, but is any of it actually useful? In the case of .NET Micro, Leviton Manufacturing says it is, though the far more interesting technology is Z-Wave.
-
Article: Interview with EFx Software Factory creator Jezz Santos
In this InfoQ interview Jezz Santos talks about the Microsoft Software Factory Initiative. Jezz talks about his view of Software Factories and describes how they will change the way we develop software today. He also explains the anatomy of a Software Factory and how Software Factories relate to Domain-Specific Languages.
-
Agile2007 Conference Program Announced
The Agile2007 conference program was announced today to entice those still on the fence about attending this year's event in Washington, D.C. from August 13-17. Of note: a keynote by Erich Gamma on "Scaling-up Agility The Eclipse Way," the APLN Leadership Symposium, a new Research-in-Progress Workshop on Agile Software Engineering and the new Conference-Within-A-Conference, fondly known as CWAC.
-
Incremental Software Development without Iterations
David Anderson described how his team is using a kanban system for their sustaining engineering (maintenance and bug fixing) activities. Iterations have been dropped although software is still released every two weeks. Work is scheduled, monitored, and run via a "kanban board" and daily stand-up meetings.
-
Frequent Retrospectives Accelerate Learning and Improvement
When we seek process improvement by discarding traditional SDLC rules, how should we work? Retrospectives are a tool teams can use to reflect on their process and improve it gradually over time. In this article, Rachel Davies offers help for teams who have ideas for improvements but are not sure how to get them off the ground.