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A Discussion With Neal Gafter on the Future of Java

Microsoft's Neal Gafter, who was primary designer and implementer of the Java SE 4 and 5 language enhancements and now works for Microsoft on .NET platform languages, discusses the impact of Oracle's acquisition of Sun on Java,makes the case for adding segmented stacks and a meta-object protocol to Java,, and offers some insights into how Java and C#/.NET compare.

Charles Humble
on Sep 14, 2011
Book Review: The Leader's Guide to Radical Management

Steve Denning's latest book – The Leader's Guide to Radical Management: Reinventing the Workplace for the 21st Century. He contends that management today is in need of a radical makeover – existing practices are not adequate to meet the needs of the modern high-speed world. He shows how Agile methods are being introduced beyond the software world to deliver benefits to people and organisations.

Shane Hastie
on Nov 11, 2010
Book Review: Making it Big in Software

The focus of this book by Sam Lightstone is helping you become a great software development professional. Career advancement is important, but secondary. Using a mix of interviews, commentary, and advice, this book exposes and explores the principles and values that support professionalism and even craftsmanship.

Dave West
on Oct 28, 2010
Architecture & Design

Are You a Software Architect?

The line between development and architecture is tricky. Some say it's fake, that architecture is an extension of the design process undertaken by developers; others say it's a chasm that can only be crossed by lofty developers who believe you must abstract your abstractions and not worry about implementation details. There's a balance in the middle, but how do you move from one to the other?

Simon Brown
on Feb 09, 2010
The Elephant in the Room: Using Brain Science to Enhance Working Relationships

The new brain science (social neuroscience, positive psychology, and imaging techniques) give us tools for understanding and enhancing the ability of men and women to work together. Companies like Deloitte & Touche and IBM have seen financial results including increased retention of women by training their managers to use gender intelligence.

Sharon Buckmaster Diana Larsen
on Oct 29, 2009
Collaborative Leadership and Collaborative Management

What is the role of a leader in today’s dynamic environments? Does traditional management provide value in a market that requires agility and adaptability? In this article, we propose a leadership and management framework that fits well with the current need for innovation and distributed decision-making.

Chris Matts Niel Nickolaisen Pollyanna Pixton
on Aug 05, 2009
Tips from a Top Sports Team Coach

In team sport, as in software development, the team factor is crucial for success. In fact, team sport shows many inspiring parallels to software development. This article outlines 9 essential principles top-coach Marc Lammers discovered while building the world’s best field hockey team, and maps them to software development practices

Urs Peter
on Aug 20, 2008
Using Numbers to Communicate - in the Spirit of Agile

It's an old story. Techies cave in to the business guys because they don't know how to push back. The problem? Developers use numbers primarily for computation, but the business uses numbers to make decisions. In this story the "Spirit of Agile" encourages a developer to turn non-computational problems and issues into number language.

Barbara Chauvin Linda Rising
on Jun 13, 2008
The Agile Coach, from A to Z

Agile approaches introduce a new leadership role, the "Agile Coach," which is not familiar from traditional methodologies. What's so important about this role? Is it just a new name for an old role? Why does Monster.com list 54 positions with this title? Patrick Kua of ThoughtWorks lists 26 useful answers to this question, in the form of an A-to-Z primer.

Patrick Kua
on May 22, 2008
Software Development Lessons Learned from Poker

There is no silver bullet. We know it, but don't act like it. Your language, tool or process is better, right? Jay Fields says: "It depends". The right choices varies with context, people, and more. This article touches upon how a lot of things must impact a choice; learning culture, skill levels, teamwork, incomplete information, metrics - and context.

Jay Fields
on Apr 26, 2008
Help Your Teams Trade Cubicles for Communication Skills

The Agile “self organising team” paradigm demands new skills of team members – including the people skills for which they may once have depended upon their Project Managers. Far from being redundant, management can now play an important role in helping teams learn new ways to communicate and collaborate. This article proposes some strategies for imparting new skills and suggests some resources.

Deborah Hartmann Preuss
on Mar 24, 2008
Questioning the Retrospective Prime Directive

The 'Retrospective Prime Directive' is a practice used by many teams as part of their continuous improvement cycle. As outlined in Norm Kerth's book, it is intended to foster the deep learning that is the heart of a retrospective. This article is an enlightening conversation, captured by Linda Rising, between senior practitioners on the benefits and the challenges of using this practice.

Linda Rising
on Feb 14, 2008

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