InfoQ Homepage Culture & Methods Content on InfoQ
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Opinion: Inability to Adopt Agile May Signal Bigger Problems
Peter Coffee, IT industry veteran, blogged on the recent Digital Focus survey of the state of Agile practice, noting that obstacles to Agile adoption are also general danger signs of development dysfunction.
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Welcome to InfoQ's Agile Community Site
On InfoQ our Agile editors/practitioners scan the web to bring you news that helps you keep up with new ideas to improve your own Agile practice, as well as exclusive videos and articles on important and novel subjects. Here we bring you a tag cloud, a introduction to the site with some background on Agile and a few resources for newcomers, as well as the public AgileEvents calendar.
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Tackle Testing Debt Incrementally
Technical debt can shorten a product's life. But when technical debt mounts, it can be difficult to see how to pay it off. In her StickyMinds column, Johanna Rothman explains practices to help teams start paying off that debt - thereby easing their product's development and maintenance for a long time.
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Industry Survey Reveals The Bitter Truth About IT ROI
A Ziff-Davis CIO Insight survey on Business Value reveals little improvement in how, or how well, IT is measuring value, even though most firms now try to use metrics such as IRR, NPV, return on assets, or activity-based costing. There's no consensus or consistency on which measures to use, or when to use them. And half of respondents doubt that the measures are even accurate.
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NAG Continuous Integration Monitor Announced
Digital Focus has announced their open source "NAG" continuous integration tool, which monitors the stability of multiple application servers and notifies users of software build failures via audible and visual cues. Ready now for Apache Continuum, and already working to support Cruise Control, Lunt Build, and Ant Hill monitoring, this tool is specifically designed to support Agile teams.
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Interview: Real-World Agile for .NET Developers
Kathleen Richards interviews Robert C. Martin about his new book, co-authored with his son Micah: "Agile Principles, Patterns and Practices in C#," which puts Agile practices to work in a .NET environment,
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InfoQ Article: Why Would a .NET Programmer Learn Ruby on Rails?
.NET developer Stephen Chu gives us some insight into his transition to Ruby on Rails programming. Quote: "By being loyal to one technology stack, I am bound to unconsciously make biased decisions, which will ultimately hinder my ability to deliver business value."
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Tips for Effective Kaizen Process Improvement
Agile software development and Lean Thinking go hand-in-hand for many practitioners. Six-Sigma blackbelt Mike Wroblewski has blogged some lessons learned from a recent kaizen session. People are a key variable in both manufacturing and software environments, so his lessons learned in manufacturing are also interesting for Lean Software practitioners using kaizen events for process improvement.
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Survey: The State of Agile in Practice
In March Scott Ambler surveyed over 4,200 people to discover the actual rate of Agile process adoption and effectiveness. His conclusion: Agile is not only growing in popularity, it's working so well that adopting an Agile approach appears to be an incredibly low-risk choice. Ambler recently published not only his conclusions but also the raw data he collected.
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Opinion: Working in isolation breeds mistakes
Should the team room be a sanctuary? or a jazz improv session? On butUncleBob.com, Tim Ottinger blogs about his belief that the quiet bullpen is where mistakes are born, and allowed to breed.
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Interviewing for Agile Teams Podcast
Team dynamics can dramatically affect team performance, so staffing teams well is a critical success factor. Rob Myers, an Extreme Programming coach, has recorded a podcast "Interviewing Techniques for Staffing Lean-Agile Teams."
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The Creeping Featuritis Chart
Creeping Featuritis is an insidious sort of product rot, reducing useful software into heaps of expensive widgets and aggravating help features. Peter Abilla brings us a chart by Kathy Sierra, capturing what it looks like from the customer's point of view, and reminds us to "focus on the customer and abandon the competitor-focused strategy all-together."
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InfoQ Article: Simplifying Enterprise Apps with Spring 2 and AspectJ
Adrian Colyer, AspectJ lead and Chief Scientist at Interface21 has contributed an excellent article which shows how to use Spring 2's new AspectJ integration features followed by a roadmap for the adoption of Aspect Oriented Programming on an enterprise project, with lots of specific examples of how and where to apply Aspects.
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Measuring Performance in the Adaptive Enterprise
Traditional thinking has turned budgets into fixed performance contracts that force managers at all levels to commit to specified financial outcomes, despite the fact that many of the underlying variables are beyond their control. As Agility increases the futility of this exercise becomes apparent. Thought-leader Jim Highsmith proposes a helpful alternative more harmonious with Agile values.
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Naked Agile and Naked Skydiving
Prompted by recent discussions on the ScrumDevelopment list, Alistair Cockburn and Jeff Patton sound a call to focus on the basics: "Listening, Designing, Coding, Testing. That's all there is to software. Anyone who tells you different is selling something."