InfoQ Homepage Culture & Methods Content on InfoQ
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Agile, Orthodoxy and a Message From God
A long and complex thread on the ScrumDevelopment list, set off by the phrase "Agile 2.0," has been exploring the past and future of Agile methodologies (for good or ill) including so-called "next generations" approaches like AUP, MSF Agile, and AMDD. Ron Jeffries, Ken Schwaber and Scott Ambler are just a few of the serious agilists who participated in this lively conversation.
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Does Agile Dispense with Project Managers?
Agile does away with many of the tasks by which Project Managers formerly measured their own performance. The Product Owner and Dev Team take on these activities, leaving PMs confused and wondering: "Am I redundant?" Agile coach Michele Sliger offers some reassurance, mapping PMI PMBOK practice areas to new Agile practices in her whitepaper "A Project Manager's Survival Guide to Going Agile".
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Hanselminutes Podcast on Scrum Project Management
Scott Hanselman, a Certified Scrum Master at Corillian, has posted a podcast on the Scrum project management methodology. He uses Scrum in his own projects and feels that Scrum makes Agile approachable and easy to grasp. He goes over just-in-time task-level estimation, velocity, how burndown charts help forecast delivery dates, and the concept of when a feature can be considered really "done".
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InfoQ Article: Using Logging Seams for Legacy Code Unit Testing
Ian Roughley shows how to use logging seams to easily create unobtrusive unit tests around legacy classes, without needing to edit class logic as well as avoiding behavior changes.
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Opinion: Every Project should have an Upgrade Framework
HostedQA, JIRA, Confluence, and Jive Forums all have implemented frameworks to manage changes to db schema's and data migrations between subsequent versions of their products. Pat Lightbody proposes that all enterprise apps should include an upgrade framework and provides some best practices.
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Mary and Tom Poppendieck Discuss Their Next Book
Bob Payne interviewed Mary and Tom Poppendieck at Agile2006 about their next Lean book, which focuses even more on software than the last. Mary summarizes it as "So you think Agile is a good idea: now what?" saying it will help people get started with Lean, going beyond the recipes of the first book to provide practical information and case studies to help teams do their own process experiments.
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Leveraging the Wisdom of Project Newcomers
Experienced newcomers can't be onboarded like programmers just out of school. The experienced professional will have specific but difficult-to-anticipate gaps that will impede their performance. In addition, this provides a great opportunity to get a fresh but experienced feedback on your processes. Gannthead.com offers some pointers wrapped in three fictional Dr. Phil episodes... (really?)
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O'Reilly: Ruby Book Sales Surpass Perl
Tim O'Reilly reports that Ruby book sales have surpassed those of Perl for the first time this quarter.
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Microsoft Counting On Scrum and XP
When Microsoft launched SQL Server 2005 last fall, ending a five-year wait for major revisions, Steve Ballmer acknowledged "It's been a bit long in the making, we're committed to a much closer cycle time."eWeek reports that they will do this using agile development methodologies, such as XP and Scrum. Yet they won't mandate methodology, stressing product quality instead to encourage improvement
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SOA Helps Secure Your Retirement
Pension Benefit Guarany Corporation, a federal corporation insuring pensions of 44.1 million American workers has entered into a 6$ Million dollar contract to develop an SOA.
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Reviews Mixed on Google's New Project Hosting Service
Last week Google announced a new hosting service for open-source projects. Developer comments around the web have been mixed. Some developers have been impressed with the service while others feel underwhelmed.
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InfoQ Article: Agile - The SOA Hangover Cure
Carl Ververs, an expert on SOA Integration writes about the application of "Agile" development philosophies and methodologies in order to build a sustainable and valuable SOA system.
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Agile Alliance Announces Leadership Changes for 2007
On Friday, following the close of the Agile2006 conference, the Agile Alliance announced their new leaders for the 2006-2007 program year. At the annual conference, Agile Alliance members voted seven new members to its board from the slate of candidates mailed out earlier this year, increasing board membership by two members to its maximum of 12.
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Changing of the Guard at the APLN
The Agile Project Leadership Network (APLN) held their first Leadership Summit in parallel to this week's Agile2006 conference. The day ended with Jim Highsmith receiving the "Superhero of Agile Process" award, as a thank-you for two years of leadership in creating and developing the APLN. Agile2006 chairperson Todd Little steps up to the challenge. Update: view the list of 2007 board members.
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Jim Highsmith Proposes An Adaptive Performance Management System
Jim Highsmith, Director of Cutter Consortium's Agile Project Management Practice told the APLN Leadership Summit audience yesterday: "...to achieve truly agile, innovative organizations, a change in our approach to performance management systems is necessary... 'Conforming to plan' while delivering scant business value will seriously impede agility, whether in projects or the entire enterprise.