InfoQ Homepage Leadership Content on InfoQ
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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.
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Promising Your Way to Agility
In Harvard Business Online this week, Donald L Sull and Charles Spinosa wrote about the practice Promise Based Management - using promised commitments in the organisation to enable organisational agiity, encourage entrepreneurship and stimulate collaboration.
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Refactoring the Agile Manifesto
The Agile Manifesto is six years old. Many have become disillusioned with Agile as it has spread and (inevitably?) been diluted. Post-agilism has been discussed even before Agile has become truly mainstream. Some have suggested that we have learned much over these years and the Agile Manifesto needs to be updated.
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InfoQ Interview: David Hussman on Coaching Agile Adoption
Agile coach and practitioner David Hussman talked to InfoQ about his approach to helping teams and organizations adopting Agile, including his ideas about customizing it without compromising the common denominators required to make Agile really work. He talked about "story tests", addressing manager fears as their team self-organizes, and building a vibrant development community.
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Agile Strategies for Enterprise Architects
Scott Ambler has written some advice for Enterprise Architects looking to tailor their enterprise architecture processes to support agile software development teams, arguing that dev teams need hands-on involvement & mentoring, reference architectures, and overview diagrams; they don't need lots of documentation, authoritative governance or reviews.
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Psst ... got a SOA Reference Model? Want another one?
The Open Group starts work on another SOA Reference Model. But what is wrong with the existing OASIS model?
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Agile Tracks at Qcon in London in March
QCon, to be held in London March 12-16 2007, is a conference for the Enterprise Software Development Community. Organized jointly by InfoQ.com and JAOO, it builds on 10 years of JAOO experience running conferences in Denmark. Two Agile tracks, including a full day of Open Space, complement the 11 other tracks addressing languages, architecture, case studies and the banking business domain.
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How much and how fast should Java change?
Stephen Colebourne writes about the fear of change that many have expressed in the Java community. With significant changes being tossed around for Java 7 (e.g. closures), many developers are worried about the language changing or changing too fast. Coleburne argues that Java isn't perfect and there are good reasons to change.
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InfoQ Article: Transitioning to Agile, Attitude Counts
When transitioning to agile, success requires a true change in behavior and outlook. Daffyd Rees shares advice on "Cultivating Agile Attitudes" in this excerpt from the Agile Alliance's Agile Development Journal, including "Growing Agile Developers," "Creating Agile Coaches," and "Weeding out Hidden Problems."
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Resolutions: Integrity of Code and Conduct
At the start of each New Year, some of us stop to look backward, and actively resolve to move forward wiser than before. Scott Ambler, Liz Barnett and Kirk Knoernschild have shared with us their recommendations for working smarter in 2007, including: take a hard look at at your business objectives; equip your teams properly to maximize agility; and above all - behave yourselves!
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Gender Gap Continues to Increase in IT: Gartner
A recent Gartner report on the gender gap in IT states that although many feel that women are "innately better suited than men" to navigate the new global economy, they are not choosing to enter IT - and some are leaving. Gartner predicts that by 2012, 40% of women in the IT workforce will leave traditional IT career paths.
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Performance Goals For Agile Teams
Inspired by Jon Katzenbach and Douglas Smith's book The Wisdom of Teams, Mishkin Berteig looks at the importance of performance goals for driving a team towards self-organization and accountability.
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Noted Professor Decries "Macro Management"
Dr. Henry Mintzberg, an outspoken and controversial scholar in business school circles, recently decried the "heroic leadership" stereotype which undermines organizations, propagated by the press and by MBA programs that stress leadership at the expense of practical management skills. He sees a need for more "distributed leadership," whose effectiveness lies in a community itself.
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Responding to Urgent Requests
In his article "How Two Hours Can Waste Two Weeks," Dmitri Zimine describes the costs associated with changing development priorities after the beginning of an iteration. Joel Spolsky took issue with Dmitri's comments, which in turn were defended and elaborated on by Mishkin Berteig.
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European Leadership Summit at the Agile Business Conference 2006
"Agile Business Conference 2006," will take place next week in London, Europe's largest Agile conference. The first day is dedicated to the Agile Project Leadership Network's "European Leadership Summit." The conference is specifically created to provide practical information to managers and leaders, and it allows attendees to interact directly with industry experts.