InfoQ Homepage Culture & Methods Content on InfoQ
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Defining Design Quality
A good design is elegant and simple - but elegance is in the eye of the beholder. James Shore, in his book 'The Art of Agile Development', disagreed with this abstract concept. In fact, he provided a very concrete definition of design quality: "A good software design minimizes the time required to create, modify, and maintain the software while achieving run-time performance."
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The ABCs of Agile for Managers
A new article in CIO magazine spells out the ABCs of agile software development for managers.
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Father of the Unified Process says "Enough of Processes"
When someone as well-versed with the processes people use to develop software as Ivar Jacobson says "Enough of Processes", one is bound to wonder why. Ivar Jacobson argues that the way we develop and share processes has to change.
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Enunciate: Java code-first, compiled-contract WS deployment framework
enunciate 1.0, a J2EE web service deployment framework that provides a complete development-to-deployment system for creating SOAP, REST, and JSON endpoints, was released last week. enunciate is not a web service stack like Axis2 or XFire. Rather, it uses XFire and Spring to provide a code-first development model (not in itself novel) that enforces compatibility contracts at compile time.
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March Issue of the Agile Journal Examines Top-Down Agile Adoption
The Agile Journal's March issue examined how organizations can and do adopt Agile practices in a top-down fashion. Liz Barnett wrote that top-down support within an organization is essential for any wide-spread adoption and gave six areas that we should focus on for success.
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InfoQ China Unlaunches
InfoQ's mission is to be the world's source for tracking change and innovation in the enterprise software development community. To maximize InfoQ's positive impact, InfoQ is extending to serve communities where English is a strong barrier, starting with China, and in a few months Japan, and hopefully Brasil by the end of the year.
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Understanding Legacy Code with Characterization Testing
Alberto Savoia has written a series of four articles describing "characterization testing" - the process of writing unit tests to understand and work with legacy code.
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Avid Agile Adoption Engenders an "Equal and Opposite" Reaction
An old post on "The Physics of Passion" resonates today, as the methodology argument continues: is Agile an approach worth embracing? Or just the latest flavour of corporate Kool-Aid? Kathy Sierra wrote that being accused of "drinking the Kool-Aid" can be a good thing: a sign that we're developing passionate proponents - and opponents.
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The Agile Alliance Takes an Official Position on Certification
The discussions that have been happening in distributed pockets of the community regarding certification of Agile processes has prompted the Agile Alliance to take a stance. Their position is employers should have confidence only in certifications that are skill-based and difficult to achieve. That means that certifications such as Certified Scrum Master and DSDM Foundation do not pass muster.
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Target Process Agile PM Tools v2.3 Released
The TargetProcess planning and tracking toolset is evolving quickly. Since release 2.0, they have added Test Cases bound to User Stories and Test Plans, Subversion Integration for requirement-to-source code and defect-to-source code visibility, People Allocation Management and a public Web Services API, making v2.3 a more attractive solution for large Agile shops.
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ThoughtWorks Releases CruiseControl.rb
ThoughtWorks announced release of CruiseControl.rb 1.0, a new open-source continuous integration tool for Ruby / Rails projects.
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InfoQ Book: Patterns of Agile Practice Adoption: The Technical Cluster
In this book Amr Elssamadisy guides the reader on crafting their own agile adoption strategy focused on their business' values and environment. This strategy is then directly tied to patterns of agile practice adoption that describe how many teams have successfully (and unsuccessfully) adopted them.
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Key Takeaway Points and Lessons Learned from QCon
In this article we present the main takeway points and further reading as seen by the many attendees who blogged about QCon. It's a long article, but a superb way to learn all the main lessons that bloggers felt worth talking about. QCon London was InfoQ's first conference and has been quite a success.
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Agile Presentations Prevalent at SDWest 2007
Dr. Dobb's SDWest is a well known developers' conference taking place this week. Although this is not an 'Agile' conference, numerous presentations and the first two keynotes are from the Agile world. The SDWest Show Daily, an online news source for the conference, has reported on topics of interest to Agile practitioners, from TDD to SOA.
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Fun: Planning your Life with Index Cards
We've all heard the apocryphal stories: "I planned my reno, move, wedding..." using Scrum. Mike Mason of Thoughtworks admitted on his blog: "this whole Agile thing has messed me right up", and shared a picture of his own personal taskboard.